Richard MacManus

No prizes for guessing the focus of this year’s Microsoft Build developer conference. Of course, it was AI — just as it had been at Google I/O earlier this month. But whereas Google’s AI announcements seemed disorganised and all over the map, Microsoft came up with a cohesive framework to entice developers: its new “Copilot … Read more

Developer tools are scrambling to integrate AI into their products, no matter which part of the developer workflow they cater to. One example is Gradle Build Tool, an open source build automation tool that has been around for fifteen years now. The company behind it, Gradle Inc, has been paying particular attention to AI, since … Read more

We first profiled Pinecone in early 2021, just after it launched its vector database solution. Since that time, the rise of generative AI has caused a massive increase in interest in vector databases — with Pinecone now viewed among the leading vendors. To find out how Pinecone’s business has evolved over the past couple of … Read more

Jyoti Bansal is the CEO of Harness, a DevOps company that has recently fine-tuned its tagline to “the industry’s first Software Delivery Platform to use AI to simplify your DevOps processes.” Harness isn’t the first company to pivot hard towards AI, of course, but given its focus on continuous delivery, I took the opportunity to … Read more

Today at Google I/O, the web giant’s annual developer conference, Google announced a bunch of new AI tools — including new tooling for the TensorFlow ecosystem, a new one-stop shop for developers called ML Hub, and upgrades to its cross-platform set of ML solutions called MediaPipe. Ahead of the announcements, I conducted an email interview … Read more

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