Salesforce is All In on AI

And another browser tinkers with generative search

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The Alignment
March 08, 2023

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Here’s what we have lined up for you today -

  1. Salesforce is All In on AI

  2. DuckDuckGo launches DuckAssist

  3. Google issues directive to push AI into all products

  4. A Haiku about commoditisation

Salesforce is All In on AI

Salesforce is doubling down on AI in more than one way.

First, they have announced Einstein GPT, their own AI assistant that is tailor made for their CRM. This is the next iteration of Einstein which has been their AI offering in the CRM space for quite some time now.

Once again it’s no surprise that Einstein GPT is also being built on top of OpenAI models and does things similar to what Microsoft and Hubspot launched recently (which we discussed in yesterday’s newsletter). These include generating content across sales, marketing and customer service.

Second, Salesforce has launched an AI focused corporate venture fund where they will invest $250 million into Generative AI startups. The fund will most likely focus exclusively on startups that are building generative AI for the Enterprise Software layer. They also announced that the fund has made 4 investments so far including You (search engine), Anthropic (foundation models), Cohere (developer platform) and Hearth (relationship management).

DuckDuckGo launches DuckAssist

DuckDuckGo (DDG) is experimenting with AI powered search summarisation on its browser. DDG has a loyal user base that use the browser primarily for its security and privacy, something that Chrome and Bing are not necessarily known for.

DDG’s new feature is called DuckAssist and currently summarises a search query based on Wikipedia text. The goal is to incorporate other (reliable) sources of information as well, but to do so with safety being the priority. Duck assist uses OpenAI’s Davinci GPT model and pairs it with the Claude model from Anthropic (which has a higher focus on safety by constraining how the model pulls and generates information).

Bing made a splash in search with the launch of Bing Chat but was soon met with criticism given the product’s shortcomings (biases and hallucinations). It had to pull back certain features and put up guardrails. Generative powered AI search is still an open battleground and every browser is bringing their own flavour to how they think this technology should be integrated. No one has the answer yet.

Google issues directive to push AI into all products

Just yesterday we were discussing Google's lack of AI deployment in their products despite doing a massive amount of fundamental research.

Now a new internal directive seems to require “generative artificial intelligence” to be incorporated into all of its biggest products within months. This makes sense given that Google’s annual Google I/O event is slated to occur in May and this is usually the time the company announces major upgrades as well as entirely new products.

At this point in time it seems less likely that Google will take a developer platform approach for their AI offerings like OpenAI is doing with their foundry model or even how they went about developing the android ecosystem. Instead they will mostly focus on levelling up current products with state of the art generative AI models.

Around the industry -

Product Watch Whimsical -

Mind maps augmented by AI to supercharge your brainstorming.

We end with a Haiku about the commoditisation of Large Language Models

It’s no secret that every single company under the sun is building something to do with Generative AI, so we asked ChatGPT to compose a haiku about Generative AI and commoditisation.

“Language models grow

Commoditized, vast and wise

Words, once rare, now cheap”