Welcome to the AI Ecosystem Report, featuring practitioner analyst and entrepreneur Toni Witt. This series is intended to deliver the timely intelligence about artificial intelligence (AI) you need to get up to speed for an upcoming client engagement or board meeting.
Highlights
Innovation (00:51)
Generative AI made appearances in Super Bowl commercials, which cost advertisers around $7 million for a 30-second ad:
- Etsy had a commercial showcasing its new AI feature fueled by OpenAI’s GPT-4, which it calls “gift mode.” This leverages GPT-4 and machine learning to make gift recommendations for products hosted on Etsy.
- Microsoft promoted copilots in its commercial.
- Google‘s ad highlighted the AI-powered features of its Pixel 8, particularly demonstrating how AI helps those with vision impairments take photos.
- Cybersecurity platform CrowdStrike portrayed a lead female actress who represented its AI security copilot — as a human version of a copilot — called Charlotte AI.
- BODYARMOR used generative AI for the first half of its commercial, showing a clearly AI-generated game, saying that “nothing in sports should be artificial” and using its tagline that “nothing is more real” than its drink.
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Each commercial presented a picture that AI can be a tool for creativity, personalization, and engagement. While the purpose of these ads is primarily to sell more products, the commercials are still reflective of conversations happening in society right now.
Funding (03:46)
Startup Perplexity raised $73.6 million to expand from 38 employees to 60 employees as well as to continue advancing its product. At a high level, its product is a chat interface on its website. Users can plug in questions and it provides a written response. This search startup is unique because its search tools are based on multiple LLMs, including those from OpenAI, Meta’s Llama, Google’s Gemini, and more.
Google and Microsoft’s Bing are the two dominant search engines. However, neither of them has the flexibility that a startup has by using multiple models from different providers. Because Perplexity does have that capacity, it can lead to advantages such as performance gains, lower dependence on certain models, and less bias by sourcing information from different models.
Perplexity provides the sources and citations for where the information was pulled from. It also gives users the option to filter and curate how they receive that information, like academic papers rather than YouTube videos, for instance. The startup is working on its own in-house GenAI model.
Solution of the Week (08:06)
Pecan AI supports making big data-driven decisions around conversions, sales, analytics, churn, retention, lifetime value, demand forecasting, and more. It focuses on predictive modeling and helps automate everything from data prep to production monitoring.
Organizations that want to further leverage big data and turn machine learning into analytics but don’t have the resources to invest in data science can benefit from Pecan AI’s offerings. It shortens the pipeline to having a big data strategy in place and providing returns.
Additionally, Pecan AI refines models that users interface with over time based on individual uses; it refines the underlying neural networks. So, the system will improve and mold itself around your needs as you continue to use it.
