AI on the Desktop, The "New" Browser Wars

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Feature Story: AI on the Desktop is The New Browser Wars

[Image generated by the Midjourney. The prompt is listed at the end of the email.]

The hardest thing about writing a newsletter about AI is that by the time you finish it, the world seems to have changed so much that you feel like you need to rewrite your newsletter. But we live in exciting times, and things are moving at breakneck speed. So here’s this week’s newsletter, rewritten about three times. Sorry about the length but lots of exciting things going on.

If you don’t remember The Browser Wars, don’t worry, that means at least you aren’t as old as me. As they evolved, Microsoft, a company called Netscape (which was bought by AOL), and eventually Google battled it out to be the gatekeeper. Now AI from Google, Microsoft, and AI is likely to do the same but for natural language search powered by LLM chatbots.

After last week’s Google I/O conference, it seemed like OpenAI had elicited a response from the sleeping giant. Speculation from many was that OpenAI might be left behind. It doesn’t sound possible, huh? OpenAI was first to market, setting the world on fire growing to over 100 million users in approximately two months. But the tech giants are adding AI to their productivity suites. Google Apps and Microsoft 365 users will have AI baked into their environments in the form of Microsoft Copilot and Google Bard. That doesn’t include Google Android. Finally, I assumed that Apple would upgrade Siri on iPhone to a less narrow AI.

Then OpenAI dropped another bomb, ChatGPT for iPhone, on the Apple Store. In less than 24 hours, it has become the number one free Productivity App on the Apple App Store (along with five other AI chatbot applications). The timing was right, as the mobile marketplaces have become rife with knockoffs.

I am sure we’ll all have personal access to AI in our digital worlds, but that’s just the beginning.

AI-Enabled Applications will be on Everyone’s Desktop and Smartphone

Open AI moving onto the iPhone along with Microsoft and Google incorporating their Microsoft Copilot and Google Bard technology will create an explosion in the number of individual users knowingly interacting with AI. This really provides a bump in the overall AI users taking the numbers into the billions in a very short amount of time.

This is all happening very quickly. At Google I/O, the yearly gathering for developers last week, AI took center stage with multiple announcements highlighting Google's dedication to incorporating the technology across its product range. According to observer counts, CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned the term “A.I.” 27 times during his 15-minute keynote, and they made a plethora of AI-related announcements.

• Google updated their LLM from PaLM to PaLM 2, which will power Google’s updated Bard chat tool, the company’s competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

• The Google Workspace collection will now flaunt an AI enhancement, incorporating auto-generated tables (not including formulas) for Sheets and creating images in Slides and Meet.

• Google has also introduced MusicLM, an experimental AI tool that can transform text into music.

• The newly launched Sidekick panel from Google resides on the side of Google Docs, continuously analyzing and comprehending the entire document as the user writes.

But these are just industry titans; as is the case, innovations will likely come from smaller scrappier companies and individuals. For example, AutoGPT and BabyAGI are two open source projects that have gained much attention in creating Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Agents. There are tons of other creative uses too numerous to mention.

The Future of AI, Domain-Specific Apps

Once Google and Microsoft add AI to their install bases, I think AI is no longer a differentiator but simply table stakes. I think what will be truly amazing is applications that cannot only comprehend our spoken and typed queries but are also trained on data specific to companies and industries like medical research.

Domain-specific applications will provide high-quality information and capabilities in industries that highly-trained practitioners staff. In this study, the authors analyzed 195 patient questions chosen at random from a social media platform. They compared physician responses to chatbot responses to patient questions posted in a public forum. The results indicate that chatbot responses were rated higher than physician responses in quality and empathy.

Global financial information company, Bloomberg, created its chatbot BloomGPT leveraging data collected and curated by Bloomberg's data analysts for four decades. Capitalizing on this expansive cache of financial data, the team constructed a 363 billion token dataset comprising English financial documents. By creating this private chatbot, they could avoid the privacy concerns about training shared LLMs and provide a way to modernize and make their existing data more accessible to internal staff and potential customers.

It seems like the only existential threat to OpenAI was open source. Companies like Hugging Face distribute open-source models, and many others do as well. But once again, Open AI seems to be on this; they are preparing an open source model for release, according to a source quoted by The Information.

Next week I plan to dive into Large Language Models and more of the details around this technology.

Geeking Out on AI: Vector Databases, Long Term Memory for AI

[I published this article last week in The New Stack, a media platform for the people who build and manage software.]

Artificial Intelligence, such as ChatGPT, acts much like someone with endemic memory who goes to a library and reads every book. However, when you ask an AI a question that was not in the book at the library, it either admits it doesn’t know or hallucinates. There’s a solution for that, read the article on Vector Databases to find out more.

Tip of the Week: Embedding ChatGPT into your Apps

It won’t be long until Google and Microsoft embed AI chat capabilities into their productivity suites. For example, I have been using a Chrome extension called UseChatGPT.ai to access ChatGPT from my browser window as a sidebar. It seems similar to Google’s Sidekick, which I mentioned earlier but allows me to use ChatGPT rather than Google Bard. It’s good and has made me even more productive, but I am sure this is just the beginning of AI everywhere.

What I Read this Week

• Chatbots Don’t Know What Stuff Isn’t - Quantum Magazine

• How to Use Large Language Models (LLM) in Your Own Domains - Eileen Pangu on Medium

• Meta's open-source ImageBind AI aims to mimic human perception - Engadget

• Machines of mind: The case for an AI-powered productivity boom - Brookings Institute

• Open-Source AI Is Gaining on Google and ChatGPT - The Information (I love the Information, and this link should work for everyone, but if not, and if you want a subscription, you can use this link to get 25% off.)

• OpenAI rolling out ChatGPT plugins to Plus users - Mashable

• You’re Probably Underestimating AI Chatbots - Wired

• Introduction to Prompt Engineering: The Alchemy of AI and the Future of Human-Machine Creativity - Reuven Cohen on LinkedIn

• Google’s PaLM 2 paper shows that text-generating AI still has a long way to go - TechCrunch

• Will AI transform the CEO’s role or replace it entirely? - Raconteur

What I Listened To This Week

AI Tools for Business Users

There are so many new tools I think it’s hard to keep up, so I have curated some that I think are useful.

• StableVicuna, the AI World’s First Open Source RLHF LLM Chatbot, can use it at https://clipdrop.co/stable-diffusion in their sandbox without installing it.

• UseChatGPT.ai - Use ChatGPT in your browser; see the tip of the week above

• Beautiful.ai - This app is growing on me. It’s like Canva and ChatGPT had a child; it’s the perfect mix of human design and AI assistance.

• Gamma - This is the app I think is most promising right now for the automation of presentations, hat tip to the ChatGPT Report for pointing it out.

• Notion - I have been an Evernote user, but after seeing several articles on Notion, I have become a fan of productivity. It’s also AI-enabled using the Anthropic’s Claude LLM.

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