Winter is here, but not for AI
The current interest in AI shows no sign of waning, so this year at least the Summer of AI hasn’t led to an AI Winter. Quite the reverse in fact, as barely a week goes by without another billion or two being invested in the likes of Anthropic.
Salesforce
The Winter release of Salesforce went live in October, bringing additional generative AI capabilities, albeit they still can’t really by customised yet. Copilot Studio is where the real power will be, but this isn’t expected to be GA until Dec ‘23 - Feb ‘24 according to the roadmap. Given the first date is less than a month away, I think it’s likely to be nearer the end of that timescale, and I predict it will be the minimum capabilities Salesforce think they can get away with!
The Einstein Trust Layer is real though, even if some parts of the diagram (like Toxicity Detection and Audit Trail) aren’t GA yet. This is Salesforce’s secret sauce in the battle for AI customers - security and control is wrapped around pretty much every step of the process. It will be even better when we can configure and extend it ourselves.
Just as I was typing this edition, the news broke that Lidiane Jones is stepping down as CEO of Slack to take over at Bumble after less than a year in post. Could we be in for a repeat of Everybody Out! from December 2022, when a swathe of Salesforce senior executives jumped or were pushed in a very short space of time?
Changing tack to events - if you are in London w/c 13th November 2023, it’s the Salesforce UK Week of Innovation. This looks like a follow up to the Salesforce Live UK&I event of 2022, but spread out over 2.5 days with each half day having a specific focus. I’ll be on the BrightGen stand on Monday afternoon, so hopefully I’ll see one or two of you there.
Other
The UK hosted the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park on 1st/2nd November 2023. 28 countries signed the Bletchley Declaration which commits them to … well nothing really, but you have to start somewhere.
A couple of days before this, President Biden issued an executive order with a lot more tangible targets. While it targets the US, and potentially is only in effect the winner of the 2024 election takes office, given that many of the top AI companies are US based means it will affect all of us.
It’s OpenAI’s dev day today (6th November 2023) and there were some exciting announcements, including :
Chat-GPT 4 Turbo, trained up to April 2023 and with a 128k context window. I’ve tried this out in the OpenAI playground (where it’s known as gpt-4-1106-preview) and it is really fast.
Call multiple functions in a single message (see here if you haven’t used function calling before)
JSON mode - constrain the output to valid JSON. This will save me several tokens of pleading with it to stop telling me it’s a large language model!
Assistants API, this is really interesting from the Salesforce consultants perspective, as it seems to be offering similar capabilities to Einstein Copilot - call models and tools, execute functions. At first glance it seems like something that Salesforce might leverage for Copilots 2.0, but Assistants also uses persistent and infinitely long threads, which doesn’t chime with the zero-retention policy.
You can see announcements, demos and more in the Opening Keynote, and get full details of at the official landing page.
Me
On 25th October I delivered the third webinar in BrightGen’s Get AI Ready! series, focusing on the announcements from Dreamforce and a deep dive into the Einstein Trust Layer (it’s not a layer!). If you didn’t join live (that hurts, I won’t lie), you can view the recording below:
In keeping with the Winter 24 theme, I took a close look at the new Apex Comparator interface. I also delved into Einstein Sales Emails, even though those have been GA for a while longer.
And finally, more of an opinion piece on why the Einstein Trust Layer (it’s not a layer!) is great, but it needs to be a platform to deliver real value for the enterprise.