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Before the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT was unleashed into the world, the novelist Robin Sloan was testing a similar AI writing assistant built by researchers at Google.

It didn't take long for Sloan, author of the bestseller "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore," to realize that the technology was of little use to him.

"A lot of the state-of-the-art AI right now is impressive enough to really raise your expectations and make you think, 'Wow, I'm dealing with something really, really capable,'" Sloan said. "But then in a thousand little ways, a million little ways, it ends up kind of disappointing you and betraying the fact that it really has no idea what's going on."

Another company might have released the experiment into the wild anyway, as the startup OpenAI did with its ChatGPT tool late last year. But Google has been more cautious about who gets to play with its AI advancements despite growing pressure for the internet giant to compete more aggressively with rival Microsoft, which is pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI and fusing its technology into Microsoft products.

That pressure is starting to take a toll, as Google has asked one of its AI teams to "prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT," according to an internal memo reported this week by CNBC. Google declined to confirm if there was a public chatbot in the works but spokesperson Lily Lin said it continues "to test our AI technology internally to make sure it's helpful and safe, and we look forward to sharing more experiences externally soon."

Some of the technological breakthroughs driving the red-hot field of generative AI — which can churn out paragraphs of readable text and new images as well as music and video — have been pioneered in Google's vast research arm.

"So we have an important stake in this area, but we also have an important stake in not just leading in being able to generate things, but also in dealing with information quality," said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of research at Google, in a November interview with The Associated Press.

Ghahramani said the company wants to also be measured about what it releases, and how: "Do we want to make it accessible in a way that people can produce stuff en masse without any controls? The answer to that is no, not at this stage. I don't think it would be responsible for us to be the people driving that."

And they weren't. Four weeks after the AP interview, OpenAI released its ChatGPT for free to anyone with an internet connection. Millions of people around the world have now tried it, sparking searing discussions at schools and corporate offices about the future of education and work.

OpenAI declined to comment on comparisons with Google. But in announcing their extended partnership in January, Microsoft and OpenAI said they are committed to building "AI systems and products that are trustworthy and safe."

As a literary assistant, neither ChatGPT nor Google's creative writing version comes close to what a human can do, Sloan said.

A fictionalized Google was central to the plot of Sloan's popular 2012 novel about a mysterious San Francisco bookstore. That's likely one reason the company invited him along with several other authors to test its experimental Wordcraft Writers Workshop, derived from a powerful AI system known as LaMDA.

Like other language-learning models, including the GPT line built by OpenAI, Google's LaMDA can generate convincing passages of text and converse with humans based on what it's processed from a trove of online writings and digitized books. Facebook parent Meta and Amazon have also built their own big models, which can improve voice assistants like Alexa, predict the next sentence of an email or translate languages in real time.

When it first announced its LaMDA model in 2021, Google emphasized its versatility but also raised the risks of harmful misuse and the possibility it could mimic and amplify biased, hateful or misleading information.

Some of the Wordcraft writers found it useful as a research tool — like a faster and more decisive version of a Google search — as they asked for a list of "rabbit breeds and their magical qualities" or "a verb for the thing fireflies do" or to "Tell me about Venice in 1700," according to Google's paper on the project. But it was less effective as a writer or rewriter, turning out boring sentences riddled with clichés and showing some gender bias.

"I believe them — that they're being thoughtful and cautious," Sloan said of Google. "It's just not the model of a reckless technologist who is in a hurry to get this out into the world no matter what."

Google's development of these models hasn't been without internal acrimony. First, it ousted some prominent researchers who were examining the risks of the technology. And last year, it fired an engineer who publicly posted a conversation with LaMDA in which the model falsely claimed it had human-like consciousness, with a "range of both feelings and emotions."

While ChatGPT and its competitors might never produce acclaimed works of literature, the expectation is they will soon begin to transform other professional tasks — from helping to debug computer code to composing marketing pitches and speeding up the production of a slide presentation.

That's key to why Microsoft, as a seller of workplace software, is eager to enhance its suite of products with the latest OpenAI tools. The benefits are less clear to Google, which largely depends on the advertising dollars it gets when people search for information online.

"If you ask the question and get the wrong answer, it's not great for a search engine," said Dexter Thillien, a technology analyst for the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit.

Microsoft also has a search engine — Bing — but ChatGPT's answers are too inaccurate and outdated, and the cost to run its queries too expensive, for the technology to pose a serious risk to Google's dominant search business, Thillien said.

Google has said that its earlier large language model, named BERT, is already playing a role in answering online searches. Such models can help generate the fact boxes that increasingly appear next to Google's ranked list of web links.

Asked in November about the hype around AI applications such as OpenAI's image-generator DALL-E, Ghahramani acknowledged, in a playful tone, that "it's a little bit annoying sometimes because we know that we have developed a lot of these technologies."

"We're not in this to get the 'likes' and the clicks, right?" he said, noting that Google has been a leader in publishing AI research that others can build upon.

CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider built for large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads, has acquired Conductor Technologies, developer of the Conductor cloud-based task management service that simplifies access to cloud resources at scale. 

The Conductor service will enable CoreWeave to expand its offering to deliver burst rendering solutions to visual effects studios while removing friction in the setup process. Bolstering existing functionality, Conductor customers will additionally be able to leverage CoreWeave’s solutions, including access to the broadest range of NVIDIA GPUs available on the market, as well as unmatched access to scale, the ability to burst on-demand, and responsive autoscaling out-of-the-box. 

“Demand for cloud-based GPU resources to render VFX and animation projects has skyrocketed, while persistent supply chain challenges have hampered access to compute. CoreWeave offers the specialized resources that our customers rely on at scale, expanding options for studios and artists to render work quickly and efficiently,” said Conductor CEO Mac Moore. “Until now, we’ve focused our development on easing pain points specifically in content production with the artist in mind and are excited to extend Conductor’s functionality to also benefit CoreWeave customers across high performance compute workloads, including AI and ML.” 

Effective January 1, all Conductor Technologies employees have been integrated into the CoreWeave ecosystem, bringing CoreWeave’s total headcount to 95. Moore is now head of the Media and Entertainment division at CoreWeave under the purview of CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator.

CoreWeave already helps modernize VFX and rendering workflows as one of its core offerings--providing flexible on-demand artist workstations, virtually unlimited rendering capacity, and network-attached storage. Customers can tap into NVIDIA GPUs and CPUs that are highly optimized for rendering, on-demand and at scale. Modular solutions across the VFX pipeline provide flexibility, scalability and an intuitive path to migrating to the cloud. 

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a more effective path to accessing cloud-based resources than Conductor. With intuitive orchestration across diverse compute options and application license management, it removes the headaches associated with spinning up cloud resources. We’re thrilled to bring the Conductor team and development resources under the CoreWeave banner as we collaborate with the shared goal to help shape the future of cloud-based technology,” noted Intrator.  

Foundry, a software developer for media and entertainment, has released Mari 6.0. Mari is Foundry’s cutting-edge 3D painting and texturing tool that combines power and performance to handle the most complex assets. This release focuses on enhancements to improve artists’ workflows and efficiency, with two new USD Exports, a new Roller Brush paint mode, Python snippets as Shelf items and a teleport node.

The two new USD improvements are designed to ensure that texturing pipelines are USD-ready. With the USD Look Exporter, artists can export a single USD Look file that contains all of the relevant shader information, reducing duplication of work in setting up USD Looks for use in Katana or other DCCs and bringing Look Development and Lighting together earlier on in the pipeline. Artists will also now have the ability to use Mari’s selection tools to assign materials to the correct USD face set-based location. 

Building on the already extensive painting toolset in Mari, the Roller Brush is a new painting mode that enables artists to paint a tileable image whilst following the curves and directions of a brush stroke. This allows artists to perfect the finer details without having to manually paint each individual stitch by hand, saving valuable time without losing creative control. This makes repetitive painting tasks such as creating seams and decals on characters’ clothing easier than ever.

Mari 6.0 also introduces a simpler way to execute Python Script actions using Python Snippets as Shelf items, so artists aren’t required to install Python Scripts into the Scripts path before launching Mari. This encourages collaboration between artists as they can more easily share scripts amongst themselves and across studios, meaning tasks can be completed more efficiently. 

Finally, the teleport node: a node of two parts—Broadcaster and Receiver—that creates hidden connections in the nodegraph lands in this release. Allowing artists to easily organize the nodegraph, clean up networks and reduce excess clicks, the teleport workflow saves valuable time and reduces the risk of strain from manual navigation. Artists can jump quickly between Broadcast and Receiver to quickly navigate the nodegraph without needing to manually find nodes.

Federal regulators opened their campaign to block Facebook parent Meta's acquisition of a virtual-reality company Thursday in a San Jose, California, courtroom.

In a landmark legal challenge to a Big Tech merger, the Federal Trade Commission has sued to prevent Meta's acquisition of Within Unlimited and its fitness app Supernatural, asserting it would hurt competition and violate antitrust laws.

The FTC is arguing that, were it not for the Within acquisition, Meta would have developed its own dedicated VR fitness up, entering this nascent market with its own product as a new competitor — and Within would have remained in independent player in the market.

Regulators cite a 2015 email from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook executives saying that his vision for "the next wave of computing" — namely virtual and augmented reality — was control of apps as well as the platform on which those apps are distributed. The email said that a key part of this strategy is for the company to be "completely ubiquitous in killer apps," which are apps that prove the value of the technology.

"Meta could have used "all its vast resources and capabilities" to build its own VR fitness app, said FTC lawyer Abby Dennis. Instead, she added, when Meta heard a rumor that Within was being pursued by Apple, it decided instead "to just acquire the market leader" in the space.

Meta lawyer Mark Hansen, disputed the FTC's claim that the company was going to build its own app.

"There will be no evidence that Meta was ready" do do anything, he said.

Meta Platforms Inc. has been unsuccessful in its bid to have the case dismissed after arguing that the U.S. failed to prove that the virtual reality market is concentrated with high barriers to entry.

After Meta argued that the lawsuit contained "nothing more than the FTC's speculation about what Meta might have done," the FTC revised its complaint in October to narrow the focus of its allegations.

Over the summer, FTC Chair Lina Khan and the other two Democratic commissioners voted to block the deal, with two Republicans going the other way.

The Within case is part of a more aggressive stance by the FTC following its 2020 antitrust lawsuit against Facebook seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp, or a restructuring of the company.

Zuckerberg was dropped as a defendant in the case in August, but he is expected to testify next week.

Under Zuckerberg's leadership, Meta began a campaign to conquer virtual reality in 2014 with its acquisition of headset maker Oculus VR. Since then, Meta's VR headsets have become the cornerstone of its growth in the virtual reality space, the FTC noted in its suit. Fueled by the popularity of its top-selling Quest headsets, Meta's Quest Store has become a leading U.S. platform with more than 400 apps available to download, according to the agency.

Hansen said more than 99% of the apps available to Quest users were made by independent developers, not Meta.

Meta's strategy for growth, he added, "depends on getting third-party developers to build apps for Quest."

"Meta needs those third-party apps as much, if not more, than apps need Meta — there is no gatekeeping going on."

Barbara Ortutay is an AP technology writer