Richard MacManus

When it comes to generative AI, the open source community has embraced Meta AI’s LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), which was released in February. Meta made LLaMA available in several sizes (7B, 13B, 33B, and 65B parameters), but at first it was restricted to approved researchers and organizations. However, when it was leaked online … Read more

“Generative AI is one of the best augmentation means — not substitution, augmentation. Augmenting the professions that actually exist. Augmenting an auditor, augmenting a tax advisor, augmenting a legal expert, augmenting a strategic adviser.” So says Nitin Mittal, who is leading a new generative AI practice within Deloitte Consulting, when I asked him how generative … Read more

Nvidia has announced a new safety toolkit for AI chatbots called NeMo Guardrails, which acts as a kind of censor for applications built on large language models (LLMs). The software has been released as an open source project. Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research at Nvidia, spoke about the new software yesterday in a briefing … Read more

The Australian public company Atlassian has just launched a new generative AI feature in its cloud software suite. Called Atlassian Intelligence, it’s being touted as “a new virtual teammate” and was built in collaboration with OpenAI. Ahead of the announcement, I spoke with Atlassian’s Sherif Mansour (the company’s Head of AI) and Luke Heinrich from … Read more

The metaverse hype was a dominant storyline in the tech industry over 2022. But after the initial loud posturing of Meta (née Facebook), it dawned on the industry that in order for the metaverse to succeed, open standards would need to be defined and alliances formed around those standards. That was why, in June of … Read more

Microsoft recently open sourced a product called Semantic Kernel, a lightweight software development kit (SDK) allowing developers to integrate AI technology into their applications. To find out the thinking behind Semantic Kernel (which Microsoft abbreviates as SK) and how it might be used by developers, I conducted an email interview with the project leader, John … Read more

If 2022 was the year when AI broke through to become a society-changing technology, 2023 has been the year of AI breaking through in the enterprise. Put it this way: generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have become a familiar part of the lexicon for IT departments the world over. Your CIO is now … Read more

14 years ago, I sat down with a representative from Wolfram|Alpha, which billed itself as a “computational knowledge engine.” I described it at the time as a tool that enables “users to type human-like statements and have computations done on those.” It was also written about in the tech media as a potential “Google killer.” … Read more

Remember the catchphrase “Big Data”? It spawned many successful companies in the cloud computing era — such as Snowflake, Databricks, DataStax, Splunk and Cloudera. But now we’re in the AI era and supposedly machine learning software is at or near “intelligence” now (even if it is prone to hallucinating — but then, aren’t we all?). … Read more

There is a rush of companies trying to bring large language models (LLM) and generative AI to the enterprise, and Vectara is one of them. To find out how Vectara is pitching its product to enterprise customers, and how it is trying to solve AI hallucinations, I spoke with founder/CEO Amr Awadallah. Awadallah has a … Read more

Tecton, a machine learning (ML) “feature platform” company founded by the creators of Uber’s Michelangelo ML platform, today announced version 0.6 of its product. The update allows users to “build production-ready features directly in their notebooks, and deploy them to production in a matter of minutes,” said Mike Del Balso, co-founder and CEO of Tecton. … Read more

AI21 Labs, an Israeli generative AI company, today announced its latest large language model (LLM), called Jurassic-2. Up till now, the base model of AI21 Labs has been Jurassic-1, the largest version of which has 178 billion parameters. That made it among the largest LLMs on the market — slightly bigger than OpenAI’s 175B parameter … Read more

Last month, Cloudflare launched a new service called Wildebeest, allowing Mastodon users to set up and run their own instances on its infrastructure. Wildebeest uses a laundry list of Cloudflare services, including Supercloud, Workers, Pages, Durable Objects, and Queues. It’s very much about showcasing Cloudflare’s own products, but (as with Fastly) it is also encouraging … Read more

OpenAI has just announced an enterprise version of its popular generative AI product, ChatGPT. But in this case, OpenAI is a fast follower — not the first-to-market. Cohere, a Toronto-based company with close ties to Google, is already bringing generative AI to businesses. I spoke with Cohere’s President and COO, Martin Kon, about how its … Read more

At the end of last week, news hit that Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma might not go through, as the U.S. Justice Department is reportedly preparing an antitrust suit to block the deal. This news came in just a couple of days after I spoke with Figma’s CTO, Kris Rasmussen. He wasn’t willing to … Read more