OpenAI, whose generative AI products initially raised fears of widespread cheating on homework, is now exploring how it can get its popular ChatGPT chatbot into classrooms, according to a senior executive.

OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, said at a conference in San Francisco that the company will form a team to explore educational applications of a technology that has threatened to upend industries, stoked new legislation and become a popular learning tool.

“Most teachers are trying to figure out ways to incorporate (ChatGPT) into the curriculum and into the way they teach,” Lightcap said at the INSEAD Americas Conference last week. “We at OpenAI are trying to help them think through the problem and we probably next year will establish a team with the sole intent of doing that.”

Lightcap’s comments were previously unreported. INSEAD is a global business school.

Backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft, OpenAI kicked off the generative AI craze last November by releasing its ChatGPT chatbot, which became one of the world’s fastest-growing applications. Trained on reams of data, generative AI can create brand-new humanlike content, helping users spin up term papers, complete science homework and even write entire novels. After ChatGPT’s launch, regulators scrambled to catch up: the European Union revised its AI Act and the US kicked off AI regulation efforts.

The launch – in the middle of the school year – also caught teachers off-guard when they realized it could be used as a cheating and plagiarism tool, which then sparked a backlash and school bans.

“Teachers thought it was the worst thing that had ever happened,” Lightcap said.

But within a few months, teachers started seeing how ChatGPT could be beneficial, he said.

A new team at OpenAI would be an extension of the work the company has already done to integrate its technology into the classroom. ““We see AI as an impactful tool that can assist with learning and education, and we’re encouraged by the ways educators have been ideating on how tools like ChatGPT can be useful,” a spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “We are engaging with educators across the country to inform them of ChatGPT’s capabilities and our ongoing work to improve it

“This is an important conversation to have so that they are aware of the potential benefits and misuse of AI, and so they understand how they might apply it to their classrooms.”

OpenAI has established partnerships with education groups such as Khan Academy to create an AI-powered tutor and with Schmidt Futures to give grants to education groups in underserved communities.

The market is large: global education and training expenditures will reach $10 trillion by 2030, estimates Sydney-based research firm HolonIQ.

Meta Platforms on Thursday launched two new AI-based features for video editing that could be used for posting to Instagram or Facebook.

The first is called Emu Video and it generates four-second long videos with a prompt of a caption, photo or an image, paired with a description. The other is known as Emu Edit that allows users to more easily alter or edit videos with text prompts.

The new tools are an advancement of the parent model Emu that generates images in response to text prompts.

Emu underpins a generative AI technology and some AI image editing tools for Instagram that lets one take a photo and change its visual style or background.

Businesses and enterprises in the last one year have flocked to the nascent generative AI market for newer capabilities and refining business processes since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT late last year.

The social media giant has been making rapid strides in the AI universe and has become one of its most significant focus point as it looks to compete with other giants such as Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.

TikTok will prohibit content that promotes Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter detailing the former al Qaeda leader’s justifications for attacks against Americans, the short-form video app said on Thursday.

Discussions of the 20-year-old letter have spread on the platform this week in the context of debate over the Israel-Hamas war, with some users in the West praising its contents.

The letter, which was written after al Qaeda’s attack on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people, criticized US support for Israel, accused Americans of financing “oppression” of Palestinians, and contained antisemitic comments.

Bin Laden was killed in 2011 in Pakistan by a US military special operations unit.

“Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” TikTok said in a statement, adding that reports that it was “trending” on the platform were inaccurate.

A search for “Letter to America” on TikTok surfaced no results on Thursday, with a notice that said the phrase may be associated with “content that violates our guidelines.”

Some US lawmakers have called for a ban of the Chinese-owned app and had renewed their criticisms before Thursday’s announcement.

Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer said on Wednesday on X, formerly Twitter, that TikTok was “pushing pro-terrorist propaganda to influence Americans.”

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement on Thursday: “There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.”

On Wednesday, The Guardian removed the full text of bin Laden’s letter, which it had published in 2002. The news outlet said on its website that the letter was being shared on social media without full context, and that it would instead direct readers to the news article that originally reported on the letter.

TikTok said previously its recommendation algorithm does not push certain content to users, and that the company has removed hundreds of thousands of videos since Oct. 7 for violating policies against misinformation and promotion of violence.

It is difficult to gain a full understanding of how prevalent certain content is on TikTok, partly because external researchers have limited access to its data, said Renee DiResta, a research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.

The percentage of TikTok users who regularly access news via the app rose to 43% in 2023 from 22% a year earlier, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center, which found half of US adults get at least some news from social media.

News organizations are competing with TikTok and other social media platforms for consumers’ attention and advertisers’ budgets, with many seeking ways to engage TikTok’s large and coveted Gen Z audience.

Pew’s analysis of news consumption by Americans, based on a survey of 8,842 US adults conducted from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1, 2023, found news websites or apps were used by 67% of those surveyed.

Meta-owned Facebook is the most popular social media platform for news, with 30% of Americans saying they regularly access news there, followed by YouTube with 26%, Instagram with 16% and TikTok with 14%, Pew found.

News consumption on Facebook persists despite Meta’s efforts to reduce the prevalence of news and other civic content on its platforms in recent years as it faces regulatory pressure in key markets around the world.

Regular news consumers on Nextdoor, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are more likely to be women, Pew found, while regular news consumers on Reddit, X, LinkedIn and Alphabet-owned YouTube are more likely to be men.

Under owner Elon Musk, regular news consumers on X, the platform formerly named Twitter, are roughly split politically, with 46% Republican or Republican-leaning, and 49% Democrat or Democratic-leaning, according to Pew.

TikTok on Thursday joined Meta in appealing against the “gatekeeper” status under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), an EU law that brings in tougher rules for tech companies and makes it easier for users to move between competing services.

Meta on Wednesday challenged the “gatekeeper” designations for its Messenger and Marketplace platforms but did not appeal against the status for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

The European Union in September picked 22 “gatekeeper” services, run by six tech companies – Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Meta and ByteDance’s TikTok.

While Microsoft, Google and Amazon did not challenge their designations, Apple is yet to comment on its plan. Nov. 16 is the last date to appeal.

“Our appeal is based on the belief that our designation risks undermining the DMA’s own stated goal by protecting actual gatekeepers from newer competitors like TikTok,” it said.

“Far from being a gatekeeper, our platform, which has been operating in Europe for just over five years, is arguably the most capable challenger to more entrenched platform businesses.”

The video-sharing app said it does not meet the law’s threshold for revenues generated in the European Economic Area of 7.5 billion euros ($8.13 billion) per annum.

Under the DMA, companies with more than 45 million monthly active users and a market capitalisation of 75 billion euros are considered gatekeepers providing a core platform service.

The company said it was designated a gatekeeper based on its parent company, ByteDance’s, global market capitalisation that is based primarily on the performance of business lines that do not even operate in Europe.

Last month, China’s ByteDance bought back shares from US employees in a deal that valued the company at $223.5 billion.

TikTok, which has over 134 million monthly users, said it is a challenger, not an incumbent, in digital advertising and no market investigation was conducted in relation to its designation by the European Commission.

Electric air taxis could be transporting passengers from JFK Airport to downtown Manhattan by 2025 – on quiet, emissions-free journeys that take around seven minutes.

Manufacturer Joby Aviation carried out an exhibition flight at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in New York on Sunday, the city’s first-ever electric air taxi flight and the first time Joby has flown in an urban setting.

The craft can recharge in about five minutes, while passengers are unloading and boarding, said CEO JoeBen Bevirt. The idea is that travellers will book their trip, similar to a rideshare app.

The company aims to begin commercial passenger service in 2025 and is in the third of five stages of certification with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The cost of booking a trip has yet to be confirmed but the company has previously said it will likely be comparable to a rideshare in a car.

Amazon.com will allow Snapchat users in the US to buy some products listed on the e-commerce company directly from the social media app, a spokesperson said on Monday, making it a deal similar to one recently inked with Facebook-owner Meta Platforms.

Customers will be able to shop directly from Amazon’s Snapchat ads and check out without leaving the social media app, the Seattle-based company said in an emailed statement.

Potential buyers would also be able to see real-time pricing, Prime eligibility, delivery estimates, and product details on select Amazon product ads in Snapchat as part of the new experience, it added.

The Information first reported the news on the Amazon-Snap ad deal on Monday.

The deals with Meta and Snap come as the e-commerce giant looks to boost its product offerings through social media applications.

The deal would also be a boost for Snap, which posted better-than-expected revenue and user growth for the latest three months, with the results also signalling that advertisers were returning to smaller platforms such as Snapchat.

TikTok is shutting down its $1 billion creator fund on December 16 of this year, according to the company announcement. Creators in the US, UK, Germany, and France, except Italy and Spain, will no longer be able to monetize their content through the fund.

Originally introduced in 2020, the TikTok fund promised creators to pay out $1 billion over the course of three years. Creators later noted, the low payout they received for content with millions of views, making it impossible for them to earn a sufficiently adequate amount.

The company hasn’t responded whether it paid out the $1 billion as vowed to creators. Just this year, the platform introduced a new monetisation method that would have resulted in higher payouts, called the Creativity Program. The new fund enabled creators to make videos longer than a minute and earn payouts according to viewer and engagement metrics. TikTok spokesperson, Maria Jung, said creators earned 20 times more in the new program than in the original one.

With the close of the original Creator Program, creators can now switch to the Creativity Program and earn a more decent earning.

YouTube has announced two new experimental generative AI features for premium subscribers.

The two new features include AI-generated comment summaries and a chatbot that answers questions about what a user is watching.

The AI-powered summaries will organize comments into “easily digestible themes” and will be available for videos with large comment sections.

The AI chatbot gives all the answers related to the video by drawing information from YouTube and the web, providing answers without interrupting the playback video.

The users can opt for both features if they want to. These features will be available for testing for the premium subscribers.The chatbot will be available in the next few weeks while the summarization tool will begin testing only with a small group of users who sign up for the experiment through the website.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI will release its first AI model to a select group on Saturday, the billionaire and Tesla CEO said on Friday.

This comes nearly a year after OpenAI’s ChatGPT caught the imagination of businesses and users around the world, spurring a surge in adoption of generative AI technology.

Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2015 but stepped down from the company’s board in 2018.

“In some important respects, it (xAI’s new model) is the best that currently exists,” he posted on his X social media platform.

“As soon as it’s out of early beta, xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers,” Musk posted.

X, formerly known as Twitter, rolled out two new subscription plans last week, a $16 per month Premium+ tier for users willing to pay for an ad-free experience and a basic tier priced at $3 per month.

The billionaire, who has been critical of Big Tech’s AI efforts and what he calls censorship, said earlier this year he would launch a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe to rival Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI.

The team behind xAI, which launched in July, comes from Google’s DeepMind, the Windows parent, and other top AI research firms.

Although X and xAI are separate, the companies work closely together. xAI also works with Tesla and other companies.

Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle and a self-described close friend of Musk, said in September that xAI had signed a contract to train its AI model on Oracle’s cloud.