Big Tech is driving the new UX design of AI
VentureBeat
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Welcome to another edition of 🥁 The AI Beat 🥁!
What a ABC week of AI product news, from Alexa to Bard to ChatGPT and Copilot! So for this week's AI Beat, I unpacked the latest Big Tech product news — but one area stood out to me: The emerging and constantly-improving user experience (UX) design of these AI tools, products and platforms.
This past week was also about:
— Sharon Goldman, senior writer covering AI at VentureBeat
It was an astounding, whiplash-inducing week of AI product news from Big Tech.
A new generative AI version of Alexa with a new, custom-built large language model (LLM) marking a “massive transformation of the assistant we love.” Microsoft’s AI companion Copilot baked right into the Windows operating system (OS), with a view across all applications. Google’s Bard tapping directly into Gmail, Docs, Maps and more.
And just days after announcing its DALL-E 3 new-and-improved image generator with support for text and typography, OpenAI dropped a surprise announcement this morning that ChatGPT will now support both voice prompts and image uploads from users.
There’s plenty to unpack from these announcements. But one area stands out to me: The emerging and constantly-improving user experience (UX) design of these AI tools, products and platforms — that presents AI tools to a user that is AI-aware and creates a friendly experience that allows users to play with the raw materials of an AI model and generate new output. Not just in chatbots, but in image generators, copilot-workflows and personal assistant devices.
It’s clear that Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are driving this trend, which I chatted about a couple of weeks ago with Cassie Kozyrkov , who recently left a decade-long role as Google’s chief decision scientist to strike out on her own.
Cloud giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google ignite battle over AI
There’s a point in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones at which a younger Jedi Master Yoda utters the meme-worthy phrase “Begun, the clone war has,” in his signature. atypical backwards sentence structure.
VentureBeat head of news Carl Franzen was reminded of that line with the news that Amazon is investing a galactic-sized sum of $4 billion into Anthropic, the San Francisco-based startup behind the Claude 2 generative AI chatbot and chief rival of OpenAI and its ChatGPT.
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Google Bard fails to deliver on its promise — even after latest updates
Google revamped its artificially intelligent chatbot Bard last week in a major overhaul that now gives users access to it from some of its most popular products including Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, YouTube, and more. The update theoretically gives Google’s Bard an advantage over ChatGPT, which is the market leader pushed jointly by OpenAI and Microsoft. Together, Google’s search engine and other apps have massively more reach than even Microsoft’s popular Office apps.
The introduction of Bard Extensions is, in theory, a stroke of brilliance. Imagine your AI assistant not just reciting facts from a knowledge base trained on billions of parameters competitive to what ChatGPT offers, but additionally pulling live personalized data from your Google services. The idea of Bard rifling through my Gmail or Google Drive to provide context-specific responses sounds like something pulled from the pages of a William Gibson novel. But here’s where we hit a snag.
Amazon leader says new Gen AI Alexa is a ‘super agent’
In an interview with VentureBeat following yesterday’s Amazon announcement introducing the new large language model (LLM) powering its Alexa device, the company’s generative AI leader, Rohit Prasad, said Alexa is now a “super agent.”
Alexa’s LLM is now integrated with “thousands and thousands” of devices and services, said Prasad, who joined Amazon in 2014 as director of machine learning on Alexa and now is SVP and chief scientist, artificial general intelligence. He told VentureBeat at Amazon’s new second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia that the model connects to the largest set of APIs he could think of. That means that now Alexa is “grounded” in real-time knowledge that is useful and connected directly to users, he explained.
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Former Google AI researcher Jakob Uszkoreit was one of the eight co-authors of the seminal 2017 paper “Attention is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformers architecture that went on to underpin ChatGPT and most other large language models (LLMs). The fact that he is the only one of the cohort that transitioned into biotech — co-founding Inceptive, which recently raised $100 million from investors like Nvidia and Andreessen Horowitz — is no surprise, Uszkoreit told VentureBeat in a recent interview.
“I believe it’s actually a testament to the fact that while our interests overlap a lot, we also are a very diverse group,” he said of the former Google Brain pack (all have since left Google) that includes Aidan Gomez, now CEO of Cohere; Noam Shazeer, now CEO of Character AI; and Llion Jones of Sakana.