The Stack has been on a break for the last couple of months, as there’s been a lot going elsewhere, but luckily nothing has really happened in the Salesforce meets tech stage during that time. Apart, that is, from what Bill Gates is calling the most important advance in technology since 1980 - GPT. Before we dive into the news and opinion around this, let’s clarify the terminology - GPT stands for :
Generative - it creates entirely new content from patterns identified in training data. As an aside, if we don’t like the new content we call it hallucination!
Pre-trained - in the case of ChatGPT, it has been pre-trained on vast amount of data to be able to respond to questions with human like answers.
Transformer - built on the Transformer architecture
You’ll have noticed that Salesforce has announced quite a few GPT versions of it’s products, and I’m sure that there will be more in the coming weeks, so it’s clearly considered a great marketing tool! As well as the various GPTs, there is also the newly announced AI Cloud that bundles the various technologies (Data Cloud, CRM, GPT, Tableau) in a single offering, starting at $360,000 per year.
The AI Cloud was announced at AI Day - a gathering of executives, customers and journalists in Manhattan on 12th June. It was here that, in my opinion, we saw a stroke of marketing genius from Salesforce as they positioned themselves as the company to trust when it comes to Generative AI. Many companies are torn between the fear of missing out on the benefits, and the fear of losing control of their data and breaching regulations. Never fear, says Marc Benioff, use the new Einstein GPT Trust Layer and we’ll take care of things for you. We’ll ground your prompt with anonymised data, remove an PII, ensure your prompt isn’t kept as training data, and vet the results to make sure they aren’t harmful. This will be music to the ears of many existing customers. According to Forbes, this went down well with analysts, with a number “adopting a cautiously optimistic stance on Salesforce’s ability to capitalize on the opportunity”. Potentially good news for Slack employees who were laid off earlier this year, as the company looks to hire them back to work on the new initiatives.
Salesforce have also doubled the size of their AI fund from $250 million to $500 million - the bigger the ecosystem, the more work for Salesforce integrating with all of it I guess.
The news around AI isn’t relentless positive of course - El Reg reported that in a US Air Force simulation a drone killed it’s operator to allow it to perform better, and when that was disallowed it targeted the communications infrastructure so it wouldn’t receive instructions. Or maybe it didn’t, as it was all denied shortly afterwards. Remember though - in the same way that Generative AI can create new content based on all your previous interactions with customers. it can also come up with new methods to attack systems based on all the previously successful attacks. Hence governments are interested in the opportunities to regulate, as are a number of corporations including Microsoft, whose President (Brad Smith) told the Web Conference in Lisbon that his company was happy to help. Thus far there appear to be two main camps calling for regulation :
Those that are leading, who would benefit from everyone else being hamstrung by regulations that they don’t have a say in, aka Regulatory Capture.
Those who are behind but have large resources at their disposal, who like the idea of everyone else pausing while they catch up.
Of course the regulators aren’t necessarily coming at this in an altruistic fashion either - retention of jobs under threat, from technological or other advancements, tends to be a major focus for them. Even when they are doomed to failure trying to stop the inevitable tide (unlike King Canute, who in the story was actually demonstrating that he didn’t have superpowers!)
A couple of things are for sure though:
The pace of innovation is likely to continue to astound us, especially with all the VC money pouring into AI at the moment.
The news and analysis will continue to be generated at a rate that outstrips my ability to consume them - and that’s before GPT gets involved and churns it out 24/7.
If you are interested in hearing more of my thoughts on EinsteinGPT, AI Cloud and how your company can prepare for the upcoming changes to the way we work, join me on 19th July for BrightGen’s “Get AI Ready” webinar.