Salesforce, too, is on the A.I. game – according to the vendor, a new A.I. cloud starter pack launched this week for $360,000 a year with some generally available A.I. Cloud features (G.A.). One key focus in the bundle is a series of capabilities that seeks to close a “trust gap” co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said he sees in current generative A.I. offerings. The idea is to use multiple large language models and mediate it through a trust layer component of Einstein, the company’s AI-powered CRM tool.
Amazon is testing a feature in its shopping application to use A.I. to summarize customer reviews on products. No details about the model or the potential release date were revealed, although the company confirmed the tests.
Developers are all in. A survey of developers by coding Q&A site Stack Overflow found that 77 percent of respondents felt favorable about using A.I. in their workflow and that 70 percent are already using or plan to use A.I. coding tools this year. Respondents cited benefits like increased productivity (33 percent) and faster learning (25 percent) but said they were wary about the accuracy of these systems.
Another area – is investors. Clarify Capital did a series of tests pitting A.I. generated pitch decks against previously successful human creates ones. According to the survey, the investors and business owners were three times more likely to invest after reading the GPT-4 deck than the human one, and they found the AI-generated decks twice as convincing.
On the regulation front.
European lawmakers adopted its position on legislation known as the E.U. A.I. Act, which would ban systems that present an “unacceptable level of risk,” such as predictive policing tools or social scoring systems, like those used in China to classify people based on their behavior and socioeconomic status. The legislation also limits “high-risk A.I.,” such as systems that could influence voters in elections or harm people’s health.
The legislation would set new guardrails on generative A.I., requiring content created by systems such as ChatGPT to be labeled. The bill also requires companies to publish summaries of copyrighted data used for training the technology, a potential impediment for systems that generate humanlike speech by scraping text from the internet, often from sources that include a copyright symbol.
Google filed a brief with the Biden administration urging the federal government to divvy up oversight of artificial intelligence tools across agencies rather than setting up a single regulator dedicated to the issue. The company on Monday called for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to take the lead in issuing technical guidance to agencies on how to tackle A.I. risks.
And to add some sprinkle of hype here, Paul McCartney has said A.I. has been used in the production of a “last Beatles record” to be released later this year. According to McCartney, technology developed for the recent Beatles documentary Get Back was able to extract former bandmate John Lennon’s vocals from a low-quality cassette recording to create the foundation for the track.
Why do we care?
Leave it to the Europeans to move first on legislation. They’re not messing around.
I’m particularly interested in industries that are seeing substantial adoption numbers. I have a series of open tabs of articles for the show of healthcare and education examples and cross-sections of use across demographics, but I pulled developers and investors today. Developers are a crucial demographic due to their fundamental needs in the tech industry and the increasing number of developers within highly successful solution providers.
Investors are intrigued because if AI becomes a controlling factor for the money spigots, that’s critically important. This is the “pitch deck” portion of the investor cycle, but it won’t take too long until we know about the back-end results using AI. All bets are off, then.
And that’s why we care. Sectors are finding ways to accelerate their businesses goals with the technology. Sure, could be hype, but there seems like enough meat here to matter.
Finally, that Beatles song. Take a moment and consider the ramifications. Consider your line. Is AI enhanced Lennon ok? What about singing songs he didn’t write? Wrestle with your own ethics – its why I mentioned it.