More than 50 companies — including IBM, Facebook’s parent company Meta and Oracle — have formed a coalition against ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI.

Dubbed ‘The AI Alliance,’ the group — which also includes academic institutions — was formed to promote an open, voluntary sharing of AI research in an effort to move the tech forward in a cooperative way.

This approach differs markedly from generative AI market leader OpenAI — and similar competitors Anthropic and Cohere — which consider their research proprietary.

Observes writer Belle Lin: “The AI Alliance — whose members include Intel, Oracle, Cornell University and the National Science Foundation — said it is pooling resources to stand behind ‘open innovation and open science’ in AI.

“Its members largely support open source, an approach in which technology is shared free and draws on a history of collaboration among Big Tech, academics — and a fervent movement of independent programmers.

In other AI-generated writing news:

*In-Depth Guide: CopyAI: Reviewer Bryan Wolfe has come out with an updated, in-depth look at one of the pioneers in automated writing: CopyAI.

Wolfe’s verdict: The solution gets four-out-of-five stars.

Observes Wolfe: “For most users, the CopyAI Pro plan is the best option.

“This plan costs $36 per month when purchased annually or $49 per month when purchased monthly.

“It can be used by a team of up to five people and includes unlimited brand voices and pre-built prompt templates.”

*New Dog, New Tricks: How to Make ChatGPT Even More Powerful: Microsoft researchers have developed a new way to prompt the AI software undergirding ChatGPT — GPT-4 — that enhances its responses.

Coming up with just the right prompts for ChatGPT — or the words you use to tell ChatGPT what you’d like it to do for you — is now considered an art form.

Observes writer Roger Montti: “The results of this research confirms insights that advanced users of generative AI have discovered and are using to generate astonishing images or text output.”

*Great With ChatGPT?: You Could Land a $200K Job: If you’re one of the blessed who has found a gifted way to talk with — also known as prompting — ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots, there’s a $200K job waiting for you.

Says writer Joanna Stern: “Prompt engineering is a totally new job that would have sounded crazy even a year ago.

“But it can pay six-figure salaries to people who extract the best results from the mysterious artificial-intelligence black boxes that are now part of daily life.”

*ChatGPT Competitor — Google Bard — Gets a Brain Boost: Google has a new AI engine it says will be running its answer to ChatGPT — Google Bard — beginning Dec. 13.

Dubbed ‘Gemini,’ no one is quite sure if the upgraded AI engine will enable Bard to outperform ChatGPT — at least for now.

The reason: The new AI software will actually be available in a number of versions: Gemini Ultra, Gemini Pro and Gemini Nano.

And Gemini Ultra — the engine’s most powerful version — will not be available until next year.

With the upgrade, Google Bard will instead run on Gemini Pro — at least until sometime next year.

And the jury’s still out on if Bard — using Gemini Pro as its AI engine – is strong enough to beat ChatGPT-4.

*More Eye Rolls for ‘Effective Altruism:’ Add the CEO of Cohere — maker of a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT — to the list of AI insiders who are skeptical about effective altruism.

Some adherents to the school of thought — who generally believe that we need to slow the development of AI, perhaps indefinitely — until we can firmly establish safety guardrails for the technology were board members of OpenAI who tried to fire its CEO for refusing to adhere to effective altruism.

Observes writers Ellen Huet and Rachel Mertz: “The chief executive officer of artificial-intelligence startup Cohere criticized the ‘self righteousness’ of the effective altruism movement and those overly concerned with the threat of an AI doomsday.”

*New AI Customer Bot Released: Because Screaming “Need Human!” Is So Last Year: Businesses fed-up with traditional customer service that trigger more than a few users to scream “Need human!” into their phones or chatboxes may want to check a new customer service bot from Sprinklr.

The customer relations management platform has released a new bot — powered by AI — that promises to charm the most bitter loathers of customer service chatbots.

Says Ragy Thomas, CEO, Sprinkler: “Our 18.11 release includes AI-powered capabilities across every product suite, including tools empowering brands to create and deploy virtual assistants that truly understand and engage with customers.”

*Long Docs: Still Kryptonite for ChatGPT and Others: Some AI writing companies racing to enable users to work with ever-longer text documents are having a problem: Their AI software is not processing those docs correctly.

That’s a major setback, given that the ability for a chatbot to work with an extremely long document enables a user to do more in-depth analysis, offer the chatbot more material to mimic a writing style — and generally expect a more detailed response from the AI no matter what task is requested.

Matthias Bastian, a writer for The Decoder, reports that the ‘long documents processing problem’ has cropped-up with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo AI engine and Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 AI engine.

Observes Bastian: “Both models suffer from the ‘lost in the middle’ phenomenon: Information in the middle — and near the top and bottom of a document — is often ignored.

*Need a Contract Summarized? Let AI Do It – It’s Not Like It Has Plans!: SutiCLM, a contract lifecycle management solution, has rolled out an AI upgrade.

Users can now look forward to ‘Contract Summary Using AI.’

The new feature offers an overview of a contract contract managed by the solution, which uses generative AI to summarize essential contract clauses and sections — while excluding generic information and conditions.

*AI Big Picture: Corporate Takeover: Two Thirds of Companies Now Using ‘Generative AI:’ Given that generative AI like ChatGPT was little more than a novel curiosity this time last year, it’s a bit of a head-turner to learn the tech is now used by two-thirds of all companies.

According to a new study released by O’Reilly, two-thirds (67%) of 2,800 tech pros surveyed reported their companies were already using generative AI.

The survey also found that 54% of all companies that use AI believe the tech will lead to greater overall productivity.

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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.