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Tag: Sam Altman

  • Salesforce Announces Einstein GPT, a ChatGPT-Powered Einstein AI

    Salesforce Announces Einstein GPT, a ChatGPT-Powered Einstein AI

    Salesforce has announced Einstein GPT a major upgrade to its Einstein AI that uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to improve its abilities.

    On the heels of an announcement by Microsoft that it was releasing Dynamics 365, the world’s first ERP/CRM copilot, Salesforce has fired back with Einstein GPT. The company describes it as “the world’s first generative AI CRM technology, which delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale.”

    Salesforce says Einstein GPT will help transform the entire customer experience, thanks to generative AI.

    Einstein GPT will infuse Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company’s customer data. With Einstein GPT, customers can then connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models out of the box, or choose their own external model and use natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real time.

    “The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated, and personalized ways,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. “Einstein GPT, in combination with our Data Cloud and integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at launch.”

    Sales personnel will be able to use Einstein GPT to generate personalized emails to customers, while service personnel will be able to use the tech to generate articles based on case notes, as well as auto-generate personalized interaction with customers.

    Slack will also see Einstein GTP integration, giving users the ability to see in-depth insights.

    Marketing personnel will be able to use Einstein GPT to generate personalized content and engage with customers across mobile, email, web, and advertising.

    Even developers can get in on the action, using the technology to help generate code.

    “We’re excited to apply the power of OpenAI’s technology to CRM,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “This will allow more people to benefit from this technology, and it allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of AI — a belief that Salesforce shares with us.”

    https://youtu.be/YAsKRxXdyj0
  • Microsoft Officially Extends Its Partnership With OpenAI

    Microsoft Officially Extends Its Partnership With OpenAI

    Microsoft has announced “a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, extending its existing partnership with ChatGPT creator.

    Microsoft has been an investor in OpenAI for several years and has exclusive access to some of the AI firm’s technology. Rumors surfaced two weeks ago that the Redmond-based company was looking to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI.

    In a press release today, the two companies confirmed an extension of their ongoing partnership, although they did not disclose the exact amount.

    “We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”

    “The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”

    The partnership will involve three primary areas:

    • Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in OpenAI’s research and development of artificial intelligence.
    • Microsoft will continue to deploy OpenAI’s AI tech across its platforms and products.
    • OpenAI will exclusively use Microsoft’s Azure as its cloud provider.

    Microsoft is believed to be working to integrate ChatGPT with a version of its Bing search engine in an effort to more effectively compete with Google. This extended partnership will no doubt open up additional opportunities for the company at a time when Google is trying to catch up.

  • Google Moving Slowly on AI Chatbots Over ‘Reputational Risk’

    Google Moving Slowly on AI Chatbots Over ‘Reputational Risk’

    Amid the ruckus over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google execs have made it clear they are in no hurry to jump on the chatbot bandwagon.

    ChatGPT is one of OpenAI’s most well-known innovations and has gained widespread recognition. According to CNBC, Google employees expressed concerns about ChatGPT, especially given Microsoft’s backing of OpenAI. Given Google’s background in AI, employees were concerned the company could be falling behind.

    “Is this a missed opportunity for Google, considering we’ve had Lamda for a while?” read one top-rated question at a company all-hands meeting.

    In response to, CEO Sundar Pichai and Google AI head Jeff Dean emphasized that Google already has similar capabilities as OpenAI and ChatGPT, but that the company needed to be extra careful since so many people rely on Google for quality answers.

    “This really strikes a need that people seem to have but it’s also important to realize these models have certain type of issues,” Dean said

    Interestingly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed to endorse Google’s caution, admitting ChatGPT was not production-ready.

  • OpenAI Launches the OpenAI Startup Fund

    OpenAI Launches the OpenAI Startup Fund

    OpenAI, one of the leading AI companies, has established a fund to invest in AI startups, in partnership with Microsoft.

    OpenAI was co-founded by Elon Musk. Musk has long been a critic of AI, believing it represents one of the biggest existential threats humanity faces. OpenAI was founded with the goal of developing AI in a safe, responsible way.

    The OpenAI Startup Fund is a $100 million fund to help AI startups that can have a profoundly positive impact on the world. The fund was announced by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman at Microsoft Build 2021.

    “This is not a typical corporate venture fund,” said Altman. “We plan to make big, early bets on a relatively small number of companies, probably not more than 10. And we’re looking for startups in fields where AI can have the most profound, positive impact, like healthcare, climate change and education. We’re also excited about markets where AI can drive big leaps in productivity, like personal assistants and semantic search.

    “We think that helping people be more productive with new tools is a big deal, and we can imagine brand-new interfaces that weren’t possible a year ago. These aren’t the only applications we’ll consider, but they’re at the top of our target list.”

  • OpenAI Releases Jukebox AI, A Music Generating Neural Net

    OpenAI Releases Jukebox AI, A Music Generating Neural Net

    And the award goes to…Rock and Roll Bot 101111. While that may not be something we are accustomed to hearing, it may be soon thanks to OpenAI.

    OpenAI is a research organization focused on artificial Intelligence (AI). It was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Musk, in particular, has long been critical of AI, warning that it could bring about the downfall of the human race. OpenAI was founded to promote safe, responsible AI research and development.

    OpenAI’s latest announcement is “Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles.” Providing Jukebox with an artist, style and lyrics gives the AI the raw material it needs to produce a unique music sample from scratch.

    “We chose to work on music because we want to continue to push the boundaries of generative models,” reads OpenAI’s announcement. “Our previous work on MuseNet explored synthesizing music based on large amounts of MIDI data. Now in raw audio, our models must learn to tackle high diversity as well as very long range structure, and the raw audio domain is particularly unforgiving of errors in short, medium, or long term timing.”

    The accompanying paper goes further, saying “we show that our models can produce songs from highly diverse genres of music like rock, hip-hop, and jazz. They can capture melody, rhythm, long-range composition, and timbres for a wide variety of instruments, as well as the styles and voices of singers to be produced with the mu- sic. We can also generate novel completions of existing songs. Our approach allows the option to influence the generation process: by swapping the top prior with a conditional prior, we can condition on lyrics to tell the singer what to sing, or on midi to control the composition. We release our model weights and training and sampling code at https://github.com/openai/jukebox.”

    OpenAI is hiring and invites any interested in contributing to apply. In the meantime, Jukebox is another significant step forward for AI.

  • German Commission Recommends Tighter Regulation of AI Development

    German Commission Recommends Tighter Regulation of AI Development

    Few technologies have sparked as much debate, held more promise or terrified more people than artificial intelligence (AI). Depending on who is talking, AI promises to usher in a new technological era or precipitate the demise of humanity.

    Notable individuals such as Mark Zuckerberg, Ray Kurzweil and Sam Altman have been strong proponents of AI development, even going so far as to believe the potential benefits create a moral imperative to pursue AI research. Others, such as Elon Musk, Clive Sinclair and the late Stephen Hawking, believe true AI may represent the greatest existential danger to the human race.

    With so much controversy, governments are getting drug into the middle of the debate, trying to navigate what role they should play in regulating AI, with Germany the latest to wade in on the topic. In 2018, the German government formed the Data Ethics Commission to “develop ethical benchmarks and guidelines as well as specific recommendations for action, aiming at protecting the individual, preserving social cohesion, and safeguarding and promoting prosperity in the information age.”

    Last week the commission released an opinion on AI development, recommending more regulation and government involvement.

    “The Data Ethics Commission holds the view that regulation is necessary, and cannot be replaced by ethical principles. This is particularly true for issues with heightened implications for fundamental rights that require the central decisions to be made by the democratically elected legislator. Regulation is also an essential basis for building a system where citizens, companies and institutions can trust that the transformation of society will be guided by ethical principles.”

    AI proponents and tech experts are already speaking about against the commission’s findings, voicing concern that the focus on regulation will stifle innovation.

    “Europe wants to be more competitive in the digital economy,” wrote Eline Chivot, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation in Brussels. “But it cannot substitute regulation for innovation. Rather than trying to achieve competitiveness in AI through policies designed to disadvantage foreign providers and promote European digital sovereignty, European policymakers should instead focus on developing an AI strategy that invests in people, data, and digital infrastructure, and creates a more innovation-friendly regulatory environment, so that European firms can better compete with China and the United States.”

    One thing is certain: The debate about AI, its future and the best way to safely develop the technology is far from over.

  • Quill Gets Backing From Slack Investor

    Quill Gets Backing From Slack Investor

    According to a report by TechCrunch, Index Ventures has backed Slack competitor Quill. While that may not seem unusual in and of itself, it’s notable due to Index Ventures being a Slack investor.

    Slack has taken the business world by storm, easily becoming one of the most popular office communication and collaboration platforms. At the same, it has faced criticism for being too “busy,” overloading users with notifications and direct messages.

    Led by Ludwig Pettersson, Quill offers a more streamlined experience, focusing on “meaningful conversations, without disturbing your team.” It’s designed to offer more focused conversations, with an emphasis on threads.

    Former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, who worked with Pettersson at OpenAI and led a previous $2 million round of funding, told TechCrunch: “It’s relentlessly focused on increasing the bandwidth and efficiency of communication. The product technically works super well–it surfaces the right information in the feed and it’s pretty intelligent about how it brings the right people into conversations.”

    Quill’s latest round of funding, a $12.5 million Series A funding at a $62.5 million valuation, was led by Sarah Cannon, an Index Ventures partner and former Slack board observer.

    Whatever Quill’s success, one thing is clear: Slack is facing increasing competition from all sides. Startups like Quill are rising up to improve on Slack’s perceived shortcomings, while established companies like Microsoft have competing tools backed by entire ecosystems of business software. Slack will have to continue to improve and evolve to maintain its position.

  • Reddit Raises New $50 Million Round Of Funding

    Reddit Raises New $50 Million Round Of Funding

    Reddit said on Tuesday that it has closed a new $50 million round of outside funding led by Y Combinator President Sam Altman with participation from Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin and Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen.

    Other investors mentioned further down in the announcement include Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Jared Leto, Jessica Livingston, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner, Calvin Broadus Jr. (Get it, Snoop Dogg!), and CEO Yishan Wong.

    The company discusses its plans for the money on its blog:

    reddit has had a long and complex history, starting as one of the first Y Combinator companies, then as a division of Conde Nast, and three years ago spun out as an independent entity. During all of this time we have operated with a shoestring budget. This made us become efficient; it also meant that we were only able to work on essential features and were always understaffed. Even with the last year’s hiring (we’re 60+ strong now), we’ve found that there are still a lot more features you’ve been asking for that we haven’t always been able to get to as fast as we’d like.

    Thus, we’re planning to use this money to hire more staff for product development, expand our community management team, build out better moderation and community tools, work more closely with third party developers to expand our mobile offerings (try our new AMA app), improve our self-serve ad product, build out redditgifts marketplace, pay for our growing technical infrastructure, and all the many other things it takes to support a huge and growing global internet community.

    Interestingly, reddit says it has come up with a new way for its investors to give 10% of their shares back to the community.

    In a reddit post (via TechCrunch), Wong says they’re thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it backed by those shares of the company, and then distributing it to the community.

    Image via reddit

  • Loopt Sees iOS 5 Notifications As Huge for Daily Deals Space

    Users of iOS devices are anticipating the release of iOS 5 later this year for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is the way it handles notifications. Rather than the screen takeover, notifications will be more subtle, appearing at the top of the screen, much like Android.

    Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of Loopt, “strongly believes” that no mobile service will see a bigger benefit from this aspect of the iOS update than those offering deals. He shared some thought on this with WebProNews.

    Loopt says being able to surface deals in an unobtrusive (but easily accessible) way is huge, as deals that don’t interrupt but are available for you to see at all times will be much more attractive to mobile users (both for current and incoming smartphone users). Altman thinks we’ll see a lot more users opting in to deal notifications as a result.

    “We’re finally reaching a place with mobile technology where we can actually bring super-relevant, limited-time deals to consumers when they’re near the deal location,” he tells us. “With mobile notifications, instant deal gratification is possible. We’ve been sending location-relevant deals/rewards through Loopt since March, and we were really excited to incorporate Groupon Now! deals into our offering more recently. Consumers love the surprise and delight of discovering a deal without having to proactively look for it. There’s a lot of potential in this.”

    He’s referring to a partnership Loopt and Groupon launched last month. Here’s our interview with Altman about that:

    On why the deals space will benefit more than other spaces from this iOS update, Altman says, “Everyone loves a good deal, but not everyone wants a screen-filling message when there’s a deal around. I think we’ll see more people opting in (and staying opted in) to non-intrusive alerts. More notifications sent equates to more traffic to the deal services and ultimately more people coming through the doors of local businesses.”

    “We might see more levels of notification, with apps tiering out notification priority and frequency so the user can decide,” he adds, referring to the industry at large.

    He says Android has “absolutely” provided a glimpse of what players can do on a wider scale, once the iOS update rolls out. “Android’s notifications are similar, we’re excited to see this kind of implementation on iPhone,” he says.

    Apple calls iOS 5 “the most extensive software update ever for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.” It has over 200 new features and gives devices access to the company’s iCloud service. The notifications feature comes with a “notifications center,” which Apple has touted as one of the “key” features. It aggregates all notifications, and can be accessed by simply swiping down from the top of the screen. It also shows stocks and weather at the top of the screen, and will display a little pop up at the top to let you know about a notification while you’re watching a video or playing a game.