Hello and welcome! My name is Sam Razi. It’s August 29th, 2023, and this is my AI and tech report number two. Let’s get started. Google has made some interesting and relatively big announcements today. They’ve announced significant enhancements to their Vertex AI platform aimed at providing businesses and developers with a more robust suite of AI tools. Vertex has been out for several months now but it is now generally available. The platform has seen a 15x growth in customer accounts just in the last quarter, signaling strong demand.
The new features include the addition of various models to their model garden, such as Llama 2 from Meta and Falcon LLM from the Technology Innovation Institute. Google announced that they have over 100 large models in their model garden now. Google is also announcing the inclusion of Anthropics Claw 2 to be added as updates to the existing first-party models like Palm, Cody Imagine, and others. These updates bring in Google’s DeepMind expertise to improve performance, quality, and capabilities. For instance, Palm now supports 38 languages and has a 32,000 token context window for larger document analysis.
This is getting even more interesting as it seems to be a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, which was announced yesterday. ChatGPT Enterprise also has a 32,000 token context window. Essentially, what Google is doing here is providing a kind of orchestration suite that merges the power of LLMs with existing data and retrieval systems. This is not an entirely new thing, as you can think of ChatGPT plugins as being similar in that it integrates the language model with tools like Wolfram diagramming tools and other tools that you can interact with conversationally and have it take various actions using these tools. So let the battle of enterprise multimodal AI models begin!
Next up, let’s talk about Yahoo Mail. Some people see email addresses with the domain of yahoo.com as giveaways or telltales of a person’s age. Yahoo Mail is getting a little long in the tooth there, buddy. But don’t count out Yahoo just yet. Apparently, in the US alone, consumers have $23 billion in unused gift card credits. Yahoo Mail is adding a feature using generative AI to help find those forgotten gift cards. It can get in touch with retail vendors and ask them to apply those savings after you’ve made a purchase. Pretty cool, right?
Moving on, let’s talk about Google Mail. Google Mail will use AI to give improved search writing assistance and message summaries. This is a great addition to the already powerful email platform. Now, let’s shift our focus to DoorDash. DoorDash has introduced an AI and agent-powered voice ordering solution. This is not the first company to go down this path, as McDonald’s and Wendy’s have also given it a shot. These automated agents have had their fair share of bumps, but with more training and model fine-tuning, it’s bound to improve.
Now, let’s dive into the realm of ethics and morals. There is backlash to AI art, and it’s understandable. AI makes it easy for people to generate all sorts of content, including visual arts. However, this glut of content may not always be of great quality. Authentic human-created content and artistic works hold a unique value that AI-generated content may not be able to replicate. A recent study from the University of British Columbia revealed that people’s aversion to AI-generated art stems from a challenge to their interpretation of human uniqueness. This bias against AI art represents a deeper philosophical question about human identity and uniqueness. It calls for greater awareness of this bias and advocates for embracing AI-generated art to potentially enhance human creativity.
Lastly, let’s talk about Chirp, a text-to-music model. Chirp allows you to give it lyrics and it spits out a snippet of a song using those lyrics. It’s a fun and creative way to explore different genres of music. Give it a try and see what kind of song it generates!
That’s all for tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow. No shame.
