IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • Microsoft Releases an AI Chatbot for Marketers, Customer Reps, and Sales People

    Microsoft Releases an AI Chatbot for Marketers, Customer Reps, and Sales People

    IBL News | New York

    Microsoft Corp is deploying a new Open AI-powered assistant, called Dynamics 365 Copilot, that handles tasks such as sales, marketing, and customer service.

    This way is trying to catch up with rivals in the corporate applications market, such as Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP.

    Dynamics 365 Copilot can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries.

    It also can help marketers come up with customer categories to target and write product listings for e-commerce.

    To help customer service representatives, Copilot will comb through a company’s materials and a customer’s case history and offer answers based on that knowledge.

    The new capabilities were released in preview form last Monday for early customers.

    “If you think of a customer service agent, he’s dealing with a customer inquiry and 18 different databases internally to come up with the responses,” Microsoft’s CEO Nadella said. “Now you have this copilot that allows you to interrogate the 18 databases and craft a response without distracting the agent from the customer,” he said.

    Marketers can have chats with their customer data software in plain English to develop targeted customer groups and also get suggestions for additional segments they may not have thought of.

    The bot will also help them get creative, making suggestions for email campaigns based on topics and requested tone.

    On March 16, Microsoft plans to launch a set of AI enhancements for its Office software.

    In business applications, Microsoft was lagging behind its rivals. Now the company is adding language-generation tools to everything from its Bing internet-search engine to the Teams corporate-conferencing software.

  • Salesforce Issues a ChatGPT-Style AI Agent For Writing Marketing Content

    Salesforce Issues a ChatGPT-Style AI Agent For Writing Marketing Content

    IBL News | New York 

    Salesforce said it’s releasing an OpenAI-powered chatbot, called Einstein GTP, to help salespeople, customer service agents, and marketers do their jobs. This new tool will be able to write customer service responses and marketing content. It’d be in Salesforce’s words “the world’s first generative AI for CRM.”

    Salesforce is the latest tech powerhouse joining the AI chatbot phenomenon, a technology that has taken the industry by storm since the Microsoft-backed startup opened ChatGPT to the public in November.

    Salesforce said that to avoid potential misinformation, it has narrowed the field of data that can influence the answer and involved human agents.

    Like Microsoft with its Dynamics applications Copilot, Salesforce is showing off services that can write marketing emails.

    Also, Salesforce clients will be able to exchange Slack messages with a ChatGPT chatbot that can show data from Salesforce.

    “In combination with our Data Cloud and deeply integrated with Customer 360, including Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, Einstein GPT will open the door to the next level of intelligence and drive digital transformations in our new AI world,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement about the new offering.

    Salesforce started working with OpenAI’s language models a year ago.

     

    https://youtu.be/2WBeEaDUo1s

    https://youtu.be/YAsKRxXdyj0

  • Israeli Start-Up D-ID’s API Enables Face-to-Face Chats with AI

    Israeli Start-Up D-ID’s API Enables Face-to-Face Chats with AI

    IBL News | New York

    The Israeli AI start-up D-ID issued an upgraded API that allows to create digital assistants who can interact with consumers face-to-face.

    These interactive digital humans — available through a pro, paid account on — combine D-ID’s popular AI video technology with large language models such as GTP-3 and LaMDA.

    In other words, this generative AI API supports synchronistic, streamed videos from audio files.

    To create a talking head video, it’s required to upload any image of a face and make it talk with a simple API request.

    This AI Presenter chooses a voice from text-to-speech options or uploads an audio recording of your own.

    D-ID’s software lets users personalize the video, at scale, in over 100 languages.

  • OpenAI Expects Revenue of $200M In 2023, After Making $30M Last Year

    OpenAI Expects Revenue of $200M In 2023, After Making $30M Last Year

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI expects revenue of $200 million in 2023 after making $30 million last year, according to Fast Company and Reuters.

    As the main revenue source, OpenAI has a paid tier for ChatGPT, for $20 per month, along with a businesses-oriented ChatGPT-specific API.

    Also, OpenAI products like Whisper, an audio transcription tool, and Codex, which turns natural language prompts into code, are already being commercialized.

    In addition, Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest backer, has pumped $29 billion.

    Designed for research purposes, San Francisco – based ChatGPT, which employs 375 researchers, engineers, and policy specialists, has now reached 100 million users, according to analytics firm Similarweb.

    OpenAI’s generative AI balances accuracy and creativity in its responses. But the technology designed to generate stuff on the fly can end up “hallucinating,” as AI developers call it.

    Experts in generative AI now say that if the chatbot’s reliability issues persist, ChatGPT would fail to prove trustworthiness, jeopardizing OpenAI’s position as the poster child for Silicon Valley’s most promising technology in decades. It would relegate the company’s tools to novelty status 55 days after its launch.

    OpenAI Chief Technology Officer, Mira Murati, in the picture above, disagreed and said that she is convinced that we’re seeing the next big wave of AI.

    OpenAI already has hundreds of enterprise customers using its technology, from Jasper, the 2-year-old AI-content platform that makes $90 million a year selling copywriting assistance, to Florida’s Salvador Dalí Museum, where visitors can visualize their dreams in an interactive exhibit powered by Dall-E.

    Then there’s Microsoft. After first incorporating OpenAI technology into products such as GitHub Copilot, Designer, and Teams Premium, it’s now infusing Bing with ChatGPT-like capabilities.

    Plus, competitors are starting to challenge OpenAI.

    Last August, Stability AI launched its AI image generator, Stable Diffusion, making it immediately available to consumers.

    In the wake of ChatGPT, Google fast-tracked the release of a chatbot, dubbed Bard, and China’s Baidu announced plans to unveil its chatbot, Ernie.

     

  • Character.ai, an Alternative to ChatGPT, Valued at $1 Billion

    Character.ai, an Alternative to ChatGPT, Valued at $1 Billion

    IBL News | New York

    Generative artificial intelligence chatbot company Character.ai is now valued at about $1 billion after an investment of more than $150 million led by Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, The Financial Times reported.

    Launched less than six months ago, Character.ai uses large language models, the technology that underlies chatbot ChatGPT. The company was founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who previously built Google’s conversational model LaMDA.

    Andreessen’s investment is the latest sign of the hype around the sector after Microsoft and Google struck big partnership agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic.

  • OpenAI Will Offer A Dedicated ChatGPT Platform for Businesses

    OpenAI Will Offer A Dedicated ChatGPT Platform for Businesses

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI — the owner of ChatGPT — is preparing the launch of a new AI platform for developers who need larger workloads on a dedicated capacity for their learning models, like GPT-3.5.

    This platform, called Foundry, allows customers to have full control over the model configuration and performance profile.

    According to TechCrunch, Foundry will offer rentals based on dedicated compute units with three-month or one-year commitments.

    The service will be costly. Running a lightweight version of GPT-3.5 will cost $78,000 for a three-month commitment or $264,000 over a one-year commitment.

    OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said it costs a few cents per chat to run ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral chatbot.

    In a move toward monetization, OpenAI recently launched a “pro” version of ChatGPT, ChatGPT Plus, starting at $20 per month, and teamed up with Microsoft to develop Bing Chat.

    Separately, OpenAI continues to make its tech available through Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, a business-focused model-serving platform and maintaining Copilot, a premium code-generating service developed in partnership with GitHub.

  • OpenAI launches an API for ChatGPT. Quizlet and Shopify, Among the Early Adopters

    OpenAI launches an API for ChatGPT. Quizlet and Shopify, Among the Early Adopters

    IBL News | New York

    OpenAI launched ChatGPT API for businesses with dedicated capacity plans, priced at $0.0002/~750 words yesterday.

    San Francisco-based startup also announced that the open-source speech-to-text model Whisper is available at its API, giving developers access to speech-to-text capabilities. The API is priced at $0.006 / minute, rounded up to the nearest second.

    ChatGPT API is powered by the same AI model behind OpenAI’s wildly popular ChatGPT, dubbed “GPT-3.5-turbo.”

    “It’s also our best model for many non-chat use cases; we’ve seen early testers migrate from text-davinci-003 to gpt-3.5-turbo with only a small amount of adjustment needed to their prompts,” said the company. [Official documentation]

    GPT-3.5 is the most powerful text-generating model OpenAI offers today through its API suite; the “turbo” moniker refers to an optimized, more responsive version of GPT-3.5 that OpenAI’s been quietly testing for ChatGPT.

    Priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, or about 750 words, the API can drive a range of experiences, including “non-chat” applications. “This is 10x cheaper than the existing GPT-3.5 models,” said OpenAI.

    Snap, Quizlet, Instacart, and Shopify are among the early adopters. “Our early partners have built with the new APIs – and start building next-generation apps powered by ChatGPT & Whisper today,” said the company.

  • Microsoft Releases a Windows 11 Update that Includes AI-Powered Bing Chatbot

    Microsoft Releases a Windows 11 Update that Includes AI-Powered Bing Chatbot

    IBL News | New York

    Microsoft released yesterday a Windows 11 update that adds the AI-powered Bing search and chat features to the taskbar.

    Windows 11 is also getting improvements to widgets, tabs inside Notepad, and a screen recording feature, among other new features.

    “We’re reimagining what I think of as an increasingly AI-powered Windows for the future,” says Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Head of Consumer Marketing, in an interview with The Verge.

    “Soon hundreds of millions of Windows 11 users can get access to this incredible new technology to search, chat, answer questions, and generate content from the right on their Windows taskbar,” said Windows Chief Panos Panay in a blog post.

    The expansion of Bing chat to the Windows 11 taskbar comes just a week after Microsoft rolled out the same mode to Bing on mobile and in Skype conversations.

     

  • Snapchat Introduces My AI, a ChatGPT-Powered Artificial Intelligence Bot Into Its App

    Snapchat Introduces My AI, a ChatGPT-Powered Artificial Intelligence Bot Into Its App

    IBL News | New York

    Snap Inc. announced yesterday that it was introducing My AI, a ChatGPT-powered artificial intelligence bot, into its Snapchat app. The goal is to allow users to talk with the chatbot as they would with their human friends.

    The Chief Executive of Snap Inc, Evan Spiegel, said that My AI will first roll out to subscribers of the Snapchat+ service — which costs $3.99 a month — but he hopes it will ultimately become available to all Snapchat users.

    The chatbot has been trained to avoid swear words and sexually explicit content and to decline requests to write academic essays. Other than that, at launch, My AI is essentially just a fast mobile-friendly version of ChatGPT inside Snapchat.

    The company, with 2.5 million subscribers, has been aiming to diversify its revenue base beyond advertising.

    While ChatGPT — the fastest-growing consumer software product in history — has become a productivity tool, Snap’s implementation treats it like a persona, as shown in the picture below.

    The design suggests that My AI is another friend inside of Snapchat to hang out with, not a search engine.

    Snap is one of the first clients of OpenAI’s new enterprise tier called Foundry, which lets companies run its latest GPT-3.5 model with dedicated computing designed for large workloads.

  • JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs Block Access to ChatGPT

    JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs Block Access to ChatGPT

    IBL News | New York

    The banks JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup are restricting employees from using ChatGPT, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    Also, other business organizations, like Goldman Sachs and Verizon Communications have blocked access to ChatGPT.

    Last week, telecom company Verizon barred the chatbot from its corporate systems, saying it could lose ownership of customer information or source code that its employees typed into ChatGPT.

    The New York City public schools in January banned the chatbot from their internet networks and school devices.

    Companies are using the chatbot to automate tasks, write emails, and research topics, despite the system sometimes responding with misinformation or wrong answers.

    Microsoft Corp., which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, debuted an upgraded Bing search engine using ChatGPT’s technology. Users reported that the search engine, which also functions as a chatbot, responded to questions with sometimes disturbing answers.