AI, while having potential, “must be handled responsibly and with a firm focus on user control,” and third-party developers may not take “such a deliberate approach,” Strava wrote. And the firm expects the API changes will “affect only a small fraction (less than 0.1 percent) of the applications on the Strava platform” and that “the overwhelming majority of existing use cases are still allowed,” including coaching platforms “focused on providing feedback to users.”
Ars has contacted Strava and will update this post if we receive a response.
DC Rainmaker’s post about Strava’s changes points out that while the simplest workaround for apps would be to take fitness data directly from users, that’s not how fitness devices work. Other than “a Garmin or other big-name device with a proper and well-documented” API, most devices default to Strava as a way to get training data to other apps, wrote Ray Maker, the blogger behind the DC Rainmaker alias.
Beyond day-to-day fitness data, Strava’s API agreement now states more precisely that an app cannot process a user’s Strava data “in an aggregated or de-identified manner” for the purposes of “analytics, analyses, customer insights generation,” or similar uses. Maker writes that the training apps he contacted had been “completely broadsided” by the API shift, having been given 30 days’ notice to change their apps.
Strava notes in a post on its forum in the Developers & API section that, per its guidelines, “posts requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted.”
Speaking of Opus, Claude 3.5 Opus is nowhere to be seen, as AI researcher Simon Willison noted to Ars Technica in an interview. “All references to 3.5 Opus have vanished without a trace, and the price of 3.5 Haiku was increased the day it was released,” he said. “Claude 3.5 Haiku is significantly more expensive than both Gemini 1.5 Flash and GPT-4o mini—the excellent low-cost models from Anthropic’s competitors.”
Cheaper over time?
So far in the AI industry, newer versions of AI language models typically maintain similar or cheaper pricing to their predecessors. The company had initially indicated Claude 3.5 Haiku would cost the same as the previous version before announcing the higher rates.
“I was expecting this to be a complete replacement for their existing Claude 3 Haiku model, in the same way that Claude 3.5 Sonnet eclipsed the existing Claude 3 Sonnet while maintaining the same pricing,” Willison wrote on his blog. “Given that Anthropic claim that their new Haiku out-performs their older Claude 3 Opus, this price isn’t disappointing, but it’s a small surprise nonetheless.”
Claude 3.5 Haiku arrives with some trade-offs. While the model produces longer text outputs and contains more recent training data, it cannot analyze images like its predecessor. Alex Albert, who leads developer relations at Anthropic, wrote on X that the earlier version, Claude 3 Haiku, will remain available for users who need image processing capabilities and lower costs.
The new model is not yet available in the Claude.ai web interface or app. Instead, it runs on Anthropic’s API and third-party platforms, including AWS Bedrock. Anthropic markets the model for tasks like coding suggestions, data extraction and labeling, and content moderation, though, like any LLM, it can easily make stuff up confidently.
“Is it good enough to justify the extra spend? It’s going to be difficult to figure that out,” Willison told Ars. “Teams with robust automated evals against their use-cases will be in a good place to answer that question, but those remain rare.”
On Monday, OpenAI kicked off its annual DevDay event in San Francisco, unveiling four major API updates for developers that integrate the company’s AI models into their products. Unlike last year’s single-location event featuring a keynote by CEO Sam Altman, DevDay 2024 is more than just one day, adopting a global approach with additional events planned for London on October 30 and Singapore on November 21.
The San Francisco event, which was invitation-only and closed to press, featured on-stage speakers going through technical presentations. Perhaps the most notable new API feature is the Realtime API, now in public beta, which supports speech-to-speech conversations using six preset voices and enables developers to build features very similar to ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) into their applications.
OpenAI says that the Realtime API streamlines the process of creating voice assistants. Previously, developers had to use multiple models for speech recognition, text processing, and text-to-speech conversion. Now, they can handle the entire process with a single API call.
The company plans to add audio input and output capabilities to its Chat Completions API in the next few weeks, allowing developers to input text or audio and receive responses in either format.
Two new options for cheaper inference
OpenAI also announced two features that may help developers balance performance and cost when making AI applications. “Model distillation” offers a way for developers to fine-tune (customize) smaller, cheaper models like GPT-4o mini using outputs from more advanced models such as GPT-4o and o1-preview. This potentially allows developers to get more relevant and accurate outputs while running the cheaper model.
Also, OpenAI announced “prompt caching,” a feature similar to one introduced by Anthropic for its Claude API in August. It speeds up inference (the AI model generating outputs) by remembering frequently used prompts (input tokens). Along the way, the feature provides a 50 percent discount on input tokens and faster processing times by reusing recently seen input tokens.
And last but not least, the company expanded its fine-tuning capabilities to include images (what it calls “vision fine-tuning”), allowing developers to customize GPT-4o by feeding it both custom images and text. Basically, developers can teach the multimodal version of GPT-4o to visually recognize certain things. OpenAI says the new feature opens up possibilities for improved visual search functionality, more accurate object detection for autonomous vehicles, and possibly enhanced medical image analysis.
Where’s the Sam Altman keynote?
Enlarge/ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the OpenAI DevDay event on November 6, 2023, in San Francisco.
Getty Images
Unlike last year, DevDay isn’t being streamed live, though OpenAI plans to post content later on its YouTube channel. The event’s programming includes breakout sessions, community spotlights, and demos. But the biggest change since last year is the lack of a keynote appearance from the company’s CEO. This year, the keynote was handled by the OpenAI product team.
On last year’s inaugural DevDay, November 6, 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman delivered a Steve Jobs-style live keynote to assembled developers, OpenAI employees, and the press. During his presentation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a surprise appearance, talking up the partnership between the companies.
Eleven days later, the OpenAI board fired Altman, triggering a week of turmoil that resulted in Altman’s return as CEO and a new board of directors. Just after the firing, Kara Swisher relayed insider sources that said Altman’s DevDay keynote and the introduction of the GPT store had been a precipitating factor in the firing (though not the key factor) due to some internal disagreements over the company’s more consumer-like direction since the launch of ChatGPT.
With that history in mind—and the focus on developers above all else for this event—perhaps the company decided it was best to let Altman step away from the keynote and let OpenAI’s technology become the key focus of the event instead of him. We are purely speculating on that point, but OpenAI has certainly experienced its share of drama over the past month, so it may have been a prudent decision.
Despite the lack of a keynote, Altman is present at Dev Day San Francisco today and is scheduled to do a closing “fireside chat” at the end (which has not yet happened as of this writing). Also, Altman made a statement about DevDay on X, noting that since last year’s DevDay, OpenAI had seen some dramatic changes (literally):
From last devday to this one:
*98% decrease in cost per token from GPT-4 to 4o mini *50x increase in token volume across our systems *excellent model intelligence progress *(and a little bit of drama along the way)
In a follow-up tweet delivered in his trademark lowercase, Altman shared a forward-looking message that referenced the company’s quest for human-level AI, often called AGI: “excited to make even more progress from this devday to the next one,” he wrote. “the path to agi has never felt more clear.”
Voice synthesis has come a long way since 1978’s Speak & Spell toy, which once wowed people with its state-of-the-art ability to read words aloud using an electronic voice. Now, using deep-learning AI models, software can create not only realistic-sounding voices, but also convincingly imitate existing voices using small samples of audio.
Along those lines, OpenAI just announced Voice Engine, a text-to-speech AI model for creating synthetic voices based on a 15-second segment of recorded audio. It has provided audio samples of the Voice Engine in action on its website.
Once a voice is cloned, a user can input text into the Voice Engine and get an AI-generated voice result. But OpenAI is not ready to widely release its technology yet. The company initially planned to launch a pilot program for developers to sign up for the Voice Engine API earlier this month. But after more consideration about ethical implications, the company decided to scale back its ambitions for now.
“In line with our approach to AI safety and our voluntary commitments, we are choosing to preview but not widely release this technology at this time,” the company writes. “We hope this preview of Voice Engine both underscores its potential and also motivates the need to bolster societal resilience against the challenges brought by ever more convincing generative models.”
Voice cloning tech in general is not particularly new—we’ve coveredseveral AI voice synthesis models since 2022, and the tech is active in the open source community with packages like OpenVoice and XTTSv2. But the idea that OpenAI is inching toward letting anyone use their particular brand of voice tech is notable. And in some ways, the company’s reticence to release it fully might be the bigger story.
OpenAI says that benefits of its voice technology include providing reading assistance through natural-sounding voices, enabling global reach for creators by translating content while preserving native accents, supporting non-verbal individuals with personalized speech options, and assisting patients in recovering their own voice after speech-impairing conditions.
But it also means that anyone with 15 seconds of someone’s recorded voice could effectively clone it, and that has obvious implications for potential misuse. Even if OpenAI never widely releases its Voice Engine, the ability to clone voices has already caused trouble in society through phone scams where someone imitates a loved one’s voice and election campaign robocalls featuring cloned voices from politicians like Joe Biden.
Also, researchers and reporters have shown that voice-cloning technology can be used to break into bank accounts that use voice authentication (such as Chase’s Voice ID), which prompted Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, to send a letter to the CEOs of several major banks in May 2023 to inquire about the security measures banks are taking to counteract AI-powered risks.
Reddit filed to go public on Thursday (PDF), revealing various details of the social media company’s inner workings. Among the revelations, Reddit acknowledged the threat of future user protests and the value of third-party Reddit apps.
On July 1, Reddit enacted API rule changes—including new, expensive pricing —that resulted in many third-party Reddit apps closing. Disturbed by the changes, the timeline of the changes, and concerns that Reddit wasn’t properly appreciating third-party app developers and moderators, thousands of Reddit users protested by making the subreddits they moderate private, read-only, and/or engaging in other forms of protest, such as only discussing John Oliver or porn.
In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), though, Reddit acknowledged that another such protest could hurt its pockets:
While these activities have not historically had a material impact on our business or results of operations, similar actions by moderators and/or their communities in the future could adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects.
The company also said that bad publicity and media coverage, such as the kind that stemmed from the API protests, could be a risk to Reddit’s success. The Form S-1 said bad PR around Reddit, including its practices, prices, and mods, “could adversely affect the size, demographics, engagement, and loyalty of our user base,” adding:
For instance, in May and June 2023, we experienced negative publicity as a result of our API policy changes.
Reddit’s filing also said that negative publicity and moderators disrupting the normal operation of subreddits could hurt user growth and engagement goals. The company highlighted financial incentives associated with having good relationships with volunteer moderators, noting that if enough mods decided to disrupt Reddit (like they did when they led protests last year), “results of operations, financial condition, and prospects could be adversely affected.” Reddit infamously forcibly removed moderators from their posts during the protests, saying they broke Reddit rules by refusing to reopen the subreddits they moderated.
“As communities grow, it can become more and more challenging for communities to find qualified people willing to act as moderators,” the filing says.
Losing third-party tools could hurt Reddit’s business
Much of the momentum for last year’s protests came from users, including long-time Redditors, mods, and people with accessibility needs, feeling that third-party apps were necessary to enjoyably and properly access and/or moderate Reddit. Reddit’s own technology has disappointed users in the past (leading some to cling to Old Reddit, which uses an older interface, for example). In its SEC filing, Reddit pointed to the value of third-party “tools” despite its API pricing killing off many of the most popular examples.
Reddit’s filing discusses losing moderators as a business risk and notes how important third-party tools are in maintaining mods:
While we provide tools to our communities to manage their subreddits, our moderators also rely on their own and third-party tools. Any disruption to, or lack of availability of, these third-party tools could harm our moderators’ ability to review content and enforce community rules. Further, if we are unable to provide effective support for third-party moderation tools, or develop our own such tools, our moderators could decide to leave our platform and may encourage their communities to follow them to a new platform, which would adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects.
Since Reddit’s API policy changes, a small number of third-party Reddit apps remain available. But some of the remaining third-party Reddit app developers have previously told Ars Technica that they’re unsure of their app’s tenability under Reddit’s terms. Nondisclosure agreement requirements and the lack of a finalized developer platform also drive uncertainty around the longevity of the third-party Reddit app ecosystem, according to devs Ars spoke with this year.
