Now or Never

Generative AI has taken the enterprise world by storm.?Microsoft?set the ball rolling, and now?Salesforce,?Zoho, and others are all vying for a piece of the action. The race is on, and those slow to adapt, risk being left behind.?IBM, not so sure.

In conversation with?AIM,?Vernon Keenan, Senior Industry Analyst at SalesforceDevops.net said that he doesn’t think Microsoft is positioned to take back huge market share from Salesforce in the CRM space. He said that the deal with OpenAI will give generative AI proponents something to hold on to if they are Salesforce customers.?

“The problem is that none of the Salesforce products demonstrated today are shipping,” said Keenan. “We shall see how it goes since there is now a huge pressure for Salesforce to deliver because Microsoft has shipping versions of Copilot in the market today.”?

Salesforce has currently partnered with OpenAI, which is, again, backed by Microsoft, to fulfil its generative AI ambitions. On the contrary, Salesforce also announced the launch of a new?$250 million generative AI fund?to focus on responsible generative AI, where it looks to invest in OpenAI rivals, including?Cohere?and?Anthropic, alongside?Hearth.AI, and?You.com.?

Meanwhile, Zoho told?AIM?that it is working on?launching generative AI solutions for businesses?shortly – not sure if they would be relying on OpenAI – but the company is looking to invest heavily in research and development to develop their own foundational models and AI capabilities for existing products and services.?

Read the in-depth story here.?

Nandan Knows?

From the monumental Aadhaar project to the groundbreaking UPI, Nandan Nilekani's fingerprints can be found all over India's tech landscape. As the non-executive chairman of Infosys and a graduate of IIT Bombay, Nilekani has cemented his position as the titan of the Indian tech space.?

However, what's truly fascinating is his close relationship with the Indian government. As a go-to guy for all things tech, Nilekani has become an integral part of the government's strategy to push India to the forefront of the digital age. His latest initiative, 'Namma Yatri,' is just another example of his unwavering commitment to using technology for the betterment of society. Learn more about Nilekani’s fascinating journey?here.?

They are thinking?

Professor?Thomas Hartung?and his team of scientists from John Hopkins University have proposed that ‘organoid intelligence’ (OI) may be the future of computing. OI involves using 3D clumps of living human brain cells, called?organoids, to create biocomputers that could potentially revolutionise the field of computing, including artificial intelligence.

In an exclusive interview with?AIM, Hartung recounts his experience presenting the paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2016, where he described the physiological activity of the organoids as akin to "thinking”. The audience was stunned. “Since then, my constant answer has been—Yes,?they are thinking, but there is nothing to think about, as there is no input and output.”?Read more here.?

Consistency Models?

Last week, OpenAI published a?paper?on consistency models discussing a new class of generative models distinct from diffusion models or GANs, specifically designed for one or few-step generation with a notably improved distilled method.?

So far,?diffusion models?have become the foundation of the revolution in generative AI – some of the prominent names using this technique include, DALL.E 2, Stable Diffusion, Imagen and others. But the newly proposed technique by OpenAI claims to produce the same quality output as diffusion models in a much lesser time. This is because the consistency model works on a single-step generation process like GANs.?Read more here.