The Unsung Hero of AI

Looking back at the history of successful companies, a consistent theme emerges: the first mover often does social service, and the second one does business. As seen in WebCrawler to Google, Facebook to Twitter (now X), and Uber to Lyft.

This same dynamic is unfolding in the AI landscape. OpenAI is playing the role of the first mover, laying the essential groundwork for industry advancement, while Databricks is following the second mover, channelling its efforts into profit-driven ventures. Forbes’ latest Cloud 100 list of the sector’s best privately-held companies also resonates with this. “This year, AI is everywhere: New No. 1 OpenAI and No. 2 Databricks are supplying tools to help companies build AI features.”?

In a move that could potentially hurt OpenAI, Databricks recently partnered with Microsoft to sell its new software that helps enterprise customers make AI apps for their businesses via the Azure cloud-server unit. With this, both Databricks and Microsoft enterprise cloud customers will now get to build AI applications leveraging its most trusted AI and data services on the go, thereby driving business as well as profitable endeavours.?

Databricks is betting big on smaller language models with its latest acquisition of Mosaic ML for $1.3 billion in June, paving the way for businesses to build specialised AI applications. MosaicML’s annual recurring revenue had grown from $1 million in January to $20 million by June this year, shared Databricks’ Ghodsi, highlighting the growing interest among enterprise customers.?

A few months ago, the company introduced an open-source language model called Dolly for chatbot development, which is said to provide similar results to ChatGPT using fewer parameters. It is also actively providing support to Llama 2.?

Acknowledging the impact of ChatGPT, Databricks’ chief Ali Ghodsi said that AI went from being abstract to becoming concrete. In June, the company announced that it brought in over $1 billion in revenue for its fiscal year that ended in January, and Ghodsi said that the interest has only picked up since then.?

“This year, there has been a complete revolution in awareness,” he added, saying that he has never spoken to as many CEOs of large enterprise companies as in 2023. He also believes that in the next five or 10 years or so, to be the CEO, one needs to have a data-and-AI background.?

In a bid to help shape the future of data and AI, Databricks recently announced that it is organising its Data + AI World Tour in Mumbai, India on September 15, 2023 (from 10:00-13:00) for the first time ever.?

Register now >>

Top Stories of the Week >>

Now Every Llama Can Code

Meta is planning to launch a code-generating platform called Code Llama. This new tool is said to be based on Llama 2 and is going to be open source. It is expected to be available next week. Read more here.?

Stack Overflow Snatches the Spot from ChatGPT

Ever since ChatGPT first made its appearance in November 2022, Stack Overflow has been facing harsh criticism. But, things seem to be changing in the last few weeks. New research states that the high-profile chatbot might not be the optimal solution for software engineering prompts. In the context of programming questions akin to those on Stack Overflow, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is wrong more than half the time. Read the full story here.?

OpenAI Likely To Pull the Plug on ChatGPT

Don’t panic. It might be too soon to say this, but it is quite possible that OpenAI is likely to pull the plug on ChatGPT. There are reasons that lead up to this. Read the complete story to find out.

People & Tech?>>

[Exclusive] AWS’ Generative AI Play for Bedrock?

In an exclusive interview with AIM, Olivier Klein, Chief Technologist, APAC, AWS, said that the company is focused on democratising access to generative AI and foundational models, to all customer types and business functions, instead of concentrating on just one model. “We envision multiple specialised models serving various purposes,” he added.?

He said that AWS is currently in the early phases of exploring the potential of generative AI and highlighted how services like Amazon Bedrock are being used to make generative AI more accessible to a broader audience.?

Read the full story here.?

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AIM Shots?>>

• Llion Jones, renowned for his co-authorship of the groundbreaking paper – Attention is All You Need has united forces with ex-colleague David Ha to establish Sakana AI, an AI startup in Tokyo. Know more here.?
• OpenAI recently acquired Global Illumination, a New York-based startup leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure and digital experiences.
• In collaboration with Stainless, a platform for high-quality, easy-to-use APIs, OpenAI has announced the release of Version 4 of their TypeScript/Node SDK for the OpenAI API.
• Andrew Ng has come up with a new course “Large Language Models with Semantic Search” in collaboration with Canadian AI startup Cohere. More details here.?
• Wipro recently launched a new Centre of Excellence (CoE) on generative AI in collaboration with IIT Delhi.?
• Redis announced a unified release of Redis 7.2 across all of the company’s products and services, including open source, source-available, commercial cloud, software, and Kubernetes distributions. Check it out here.?
• Management consulting giant McKinsey has unveiled “Lilli,” a generative AI tool designed for internal use.?
• Google-backed Anthropic recently secured $100 million in funding from SK Telecom (SKT), a major player in the South Korean telecommunications sector. Read more here.