Targeting AI

The AI application startup, which was founded in 2016 and was valued at more than $2.1 billion in 2021, uses a reasoning engine to help employees search for information across the enterprise. Since its inception, a key ingredient in the company's success has been AI and generative AI technology. "We were the first company after Google to deploy BERT in production," said co-founder and president Va...

When generative AI became the next big thing in tech, enterprise software giant Oracle bet heavily on a startup to provide it with foundation and large language models rather than scramble to develop its own. That then-fledgling company was Cohere . Founded in 2019, the generative AI vendor raised $270 million in a Series C round, and its investors included Oracle, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, and...

At the beginning of the wave of generative AI hype, many feared that generative models would replace the jobs of creatives like artists and photographers. With generative AI models such as Dall-E and Midjourney seemingly creating unique works of art and images, some artists found themselves at a disadvantage. Some say the generative systems took their artwork, copied it and used it to produce thei...

President-elect Donald Trump during his election campaign offered clues about how his administration would handle the fast-growing AI sector. One thing is clear: AI, to the extent that it is regulated, is headed for deregulation. "It's likely going to mean less regulation for the AI industry," said Makenzie Holland, senior news writer at TechTarget Editorial covering tech regulation and compliance...

When Candace Mitchell was young, she discovered a love for computers and haircare. Her interest in technology led her to study coding in high school, leading her to build websites. Meanwhile, she also considered going to cosmetology school. She found a middle ground in beauty technology , later becoming co-founder and CEO of Myavana, a Black-owned beauty technology vendor. Myavana uses AI technolo...

Open source AI models are closing the gap in the debate between open and closed models. Since the introduction of Meta Llama generative AI models in February 2023, more enterprises have started to run their AI applications on open source models . Cloud providers like Google have also noticed this shift and have accommodated enterprises by introducing models from open source vendors such as Mistral...

Nearly two years after the mass consumerization of generative AI with the introduction of ChatGPT, the technology is now moving from experimentation to implementation. A recent survey by TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group found that generative AI adoption is growing. The analyst firm surveyed 832 professionals worldwide and found that adoption has increased in the last year. "We're in the acce...

As one of the top cloud providers, Google Cloud also stands at the forefront of the generative AI market. Over the past two years, Google has been enmeshed in a push and pull with its chief competitors -- AWS, Microsoft and OpenAI -- in the race to dominate generative AI. Google has introduced a slate of new generative AI products in the past year, including its main proprietary large language mod...

The growth of generative AI has put diversity front and center.  In the last year, there have been concerns that GenAI systems such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini are not trained with enough diverse data sets.  For instance, the introduction of the Lensa app two years ago allowed people of color to generate avatars of themselves. Concerns were raised, however, after some users said Lensa's generated...

The growth of deepfakes in the past few years is a threat to not only organizations but also the U.S. general election in November. Information security vendor Pindrop saw a sharp rise in deepfakes in the first few months of the year compared to the previous year. Deepfakes of Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden and state-level candidates have circulate...

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a product of two decades of California politics who has longstanding ties to the tech and AI communities in her home state. But in her role as President Joe Biden's vice president during the past four years, Harris was tasked with overseeing Biden's executive order on AI , with its emphasis on government regulation. And it was she who hosted leade...

For the past year, the Targeting AI podcast has explored a broad range of AI topics, none more than the fast-evolving and sometimes startling world of generative AI technology. From the first guest, Michael Bennett , AI policy adviser at Northeastern University, the podcast has focused intently on the popularization of generative AI, while also touching on traditional AI. While that first episode...

AWS is quietly building a generative AI ecosystem in which its customers can use many large language models from different vendors, or choose to employ the tech giant's own models, Q personal assistants, GenAI platforms and Trainium and Inferentia AI chips. AWS says it has more than130,000 partners, and hundreds of thousands of AWS customers use AWS AI and machine learning services. The tech giant...

The biggest global retailer sees itself as a tech giant. And with 25,000 engineers and its own software ecosystem, Walmart isn't waiting to see how GenAI technology will play out. The company is already providing its employees -- referred to by the retailer as associates -- with in-house GenAI tools such as the My Assistant conversational chatbot. Associates can use the consumer-grade ChatGPT -lik...

While Apple garnered wide attention for its recent embrace of generative AI for iPhones and Macs, rival end point device maker Lenovo already had a similar strategy in place. The multinational consumer products vendor , based in China, is known for its ThinkPad line of laptops and for mobile phones made by its Motorola subsidiary. But Lenovo also has for a few years been advancing a “ pocket to cl...

The rise of generative AI has also brought renewed interest and growth in open source technology. But the question of open source is still "open" in generative AI. Sometimes, the code is open -- other times, the training data and weights are open. A leader in the open source large language model arena is Meta. However, despite the popularity of the social media's giant's Llama family of large lang...

In intellectual tech circles, a debate over artificial general intelligence and the AI future is raging.  Dan Faggella is in the middle of this highly charged discussion, arguing on various platforms that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be here sooner than many people think, and it will likely take the place of human civilization.  "It is most likely, in my opinion, that should we have...

Salesforce was an early adopter of generative AI, seizing on large language model technology from OpenAI to integrate into its own applications. But the CRM and CX giant quickly evolved an open model strategy. It now gives customers access to multiple third-party LLMs while providing its own AI trust layer to try to ensure that Salesforce users can safely rely on AI-generated outputs. Jayesh Govin...

The explosive popularity of generative AI has been accompanied by the question of whether developers are finding great uses for the new technology. While the hype around GenAI has grown, the perception of its usefulness for developers has changed. "Developers are eager to kind of embrace AI more into their complex tasks, but not for every part, and they're not open to the same degree," GitHub rese...

The growth of generative AI technology has led to concerns about the data AI technology companies use to train their systems. Authors, journalists and now musicians have accused generative AI vendors of using copyrighted material to train large language models. More than 200 musicians signed an open letter released Tuesday by the Artists Rights Alliance calling on AI developers to stop their "assa...

From bias to hallucinations, it is apparent that generative AI models are far from perfect and present risks. Most recently, tech giants -- notably Google -- have run into trouble after their models made egregious mistakes that reflect the inherent problem with the data sets upon which large language models (LLMs) are based. Microsoft faced criticism when its models from partner OpenAI generated d...

AI hardware and software provider SambaNova Systems seeks to put enterprise customers in charge of their data while using open source models. A smaller competitor of AI hardware vendor Nvidia, the AI vendor is trying to distinguish itself by helping enterprises train and deploy large models that they can't train on Nvidia's systems. "What we try to focus on is how do we actually create a hardware...

Generative AI vendors and investors have turned their attention from last year's innovative frenzy to ROI, monetizing the language models that have revolutionized the tech world in a short time. That's the outlook on 2024 from Kashyap Kompella , founder and analyst at RPA2AI Research, who was a guest on the Targeting AI podcast from TechTarget Editorial. "If we think about it, 2023 really was the...

The fear of AI technology eliminating thousands of jobs or affecting the hiring process continues to prevail in the age of generative AI. While many believe that AI technology will  augment workers , some are already seeing the effect of AI in the job market. Indeed, tech companies and other large enterprises have laid off thousands of workers in recent months, though staffing levels are mostly st...

Data labeling and annotation vendor Sama seeks to make an impact not only in the tech market but also in parts of the world where it's hard for people to partake in the digital economy. As a women-led B Corporation chartered to do social and environmental good, Sama employs numerous people in countries such as Kenya and has created, said CEO Wendy Gonzalez on the latest episode of the Targeting AI...