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One of the last big tech events of the year wraps up today in Las Vegas, namely Amazon AWS's re:Invent conference. While Amazon — like every other tech vendor — has been building its generative AI capabilities over the year, three notable announcements came out of the conference that have implications for the digital workplace.
1. Amazon Q
The first is the new generative AI assistant called Amazon Q. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky unveiled Q during his keynote, stating it was specifically designed for the workplace and therefore adaptable to a range of work situations. Workers can query it, solve problems with it, generate content with it and pull insights from data in organizational siloes. Q can make writing code easier for developers. In sum, everything we've come to expect from generative AI.
Q is accessible through the AWS Management Console, developer environments like Slack, a few other third-party apps and individual company’s documentation pages. Selipsky was quick to note that questions asked on Amazon Q would not be used to train any of its models.
Here it's worth noting the release of the new Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock, which allows companies to set the parameters around the kinds of data a model can use.
The company claims Q has been trained on 17 years of AWS knowledge and experience, and changes the way developers and IT professionals build, deploy and operate applications and workloads on AWS.
It also says it has more than 40 built-in connectors for data sources, including Amazon S3, Dropbox, Confluence, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Zendesk, as well as the option to build custom connectors for internal intranets, wikis, run books,
Amazon Q is currently only available for contact centers, but will be integrated with other Amazon work services very soon. It costs $40 per agent per month. According to AWS’s Connect website, users can try Amazon Q in Connect “for no charge until Mar. 1, 2024.”
2. Amazon Transcribe
AWS also added new languages to its Amazon Transcribe offering, which provides a speech foundation model for 100 languages, as well as several other capabilities. AWS customers can also use Transcribe to add speech-to-text capabilities to their apps on the AWS Cloud.
The company describes Transcribe as a fully managed automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that allows users to add speech-to-text capabilities to applications. According to the post, Transcribe has been trained on “millions of hours of unlabelled audio data from over 100 languages” and uses self-supervised algorithms to learn patterns of human speech in different languages and accents.
The company claims the new version of the tool improves the previous version's accuracy by 20% to 50% across many languages.
Amazon is clearly not the only company offering transcription services. Otter has been providing AI transcriptions to consumers and enterprises since 2016 and released a new tool in June that offers rapid summarization of meetings along with the principal points. Meta has also announced it is working on a generative AI-powered translation model that recognizes nearly 100 spoken languages.
3. AWS with Nvidia Chips
The development of generative AI also depends on computing power. To enhance its offer here, AWS announced an expansion of its partnership with Nvidia which will result in AWS deploying Nvidia’s GH200 chips in 2024. Nvidia designed these chips specifically for building and running generative AI applications.
Demand for high-end chips has skyrocketed since the beginning of the year as organizations increasingly looked to generative AI to solve workplace problems. The resulting shortage of Nvidia chips was a big driver behind this announcement.
AWS, in response to this need, stated it will offer Nvidia’s latest H200 AI graphics processing units. It also announced its new Trainium2 artificial intelligence chip and the general-purpose Graviton4 processor.
Amazon’s strategy to date has been focused on building its own chips and giving its customers access to Nvidia chips. Microsoft is taking a similar approach with its recent announcement that it too will be offering access to Nvidia H200 GPUs.
Microsoft, OpenAI Sued for Copyright Infringement
With the Sam Altman furore now in the rearview mirror, Microsoft and OpenAI are back to business as usual. In this case, its legal business as usual.
The two companies are being sued by Hollywood Reporter editor Julian Sancton over claims that the companies used his and other authors' nonfiction books to train their large language models.
According to the suit, which was filed in a Manhattan federal court, OpenAI copied nonfiction books, including Sancton's "Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night" to train its GPT large language models.
ChatGPT confirmed in response to an inquiry that Madhouse was included in its training dataset, according to the complaint.
Susman Godfrey LLC, the legal firm representing Sancton, issued a statement which in part reads, “OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business valued into the tens of billions of dollars by taking the combined works of humanity without permission. Rather than pay for intellectual property, they pretend as if the laws protecting copyright do not exist.”
It added: “While OpenAI and Microsoft refuse to pay nonfiction authors, their AI platform is worth a fortune. The basis of OpenAI is nothing less than the rampant theft of copyrighted works.”
This is the first time OpenAI and Microsoft have been named as codefendants in a legal suit.
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However the case is not as straightforward as it seems. Last week, a similar lawsuit filed by comedian Sarah Silverman against Meta over unauthorized use of copyrighted books for its Llama 2 model was largely dismissed.
How Sancton fares is far from clear. However, it’s unlikely this will be the last trip to court for either OpenAI or Microsoft as OpenAI has used thousands of copyrighted works without permission to teach its large language models.
Google Drive Files Loss
Earlier this week, Google acknowledged it had identified the bug causing some users of its Drive desktop platform to lose access to their files. Reports from customers using version 84 of the platform started appearing on the community support pages on Nov. 27. The company has not yet found a solution to the bug, but expects one in the coming days. In the interim, it recommended that anyone affected by the bug do the following:
- Do not click "Disconnect account" within Drive for desktop
- Do not delete or move the app data folder
The company also suggested people save a back up of their app data folder if possible.
Google Offers YouTube Content Analysis with Bard
Google also added to its existing generative AI capabilities this week with the announcement that the Bard chatbot can now answer questions about YouTube content.
The news builds on the launch of a generative AI YouTube extension in September. What's new with this week's news is that the extension can now answer specific questions about the content in each video.
In a post on its Bard Experiment page, Google stated: “We're taking the first steps in Bard's ability to understand YouTube videos. For example, if you’re looking for videos on how to make olive oil cake, you can now also ask how many eggs the recipe in the first video requires.”
This is a major step forward for Bard. Until now its functionality was limited to finding specific videos. By enabling Bard to answer questions about the content, it expands it reach and makes it a lot more attractive to enterprises that use videos across their workplace.
“We’ve heard you want deeper engagement with YouTube videos. So, we’re expanding the YouTube Extension to understand some video content so you can have a richer conversation with Bard about it,” the blog stated.
The release comes on the back of a few similar updates by the company over recent weeks. In September it enabled Bard to pull and understand data from Google Drive, Google Docs, Gmail and similar. It also gave it access to Google Flights and Maps.
At the end of October came the announcement that Bard could now summarize more emails at a time and identify emails by recency and relevancy for a given query.
Google also introduced a feature that will enable Bard to understand key topics in video comments to provide a comprehensive view of the discussions unfolding around a given video’s content.
According to Statista, YouTube had over 785 million users in 2022 and is forecast to reach 1.1 billion by 2028.
Since its launch in 2005 and its acquisition by Google in 2006, YouTube has grown from a repository of amateur videos into the biggest online video platform worldwide. With the addition of YouTube Shorts — the platform’s own short-form vertical video feature — YouTube continues to adapt to users’ demands. Launched globally in June 2021, YouTube Shorts surpassed 50 billion daily views in February 2023.
AvePoint Pushes Confide Into Public Preview
AvePoint has announced the public preview of the latest version of Confide, its collaboration solution designed to support secure communications inside and outside the enterprise firewall via Microsoft 365. It is also features advanced integrations with another tool recently released into public preview, SharePoint Embedded.
SharePoint Embedded offers a headless, API-only pattern to build apps that integrate management capabilities like collaboration, security and compliance into any app by storing content inside an enterprise’s existing Microsoft 365 tenant. General availability is slated for mid-2024.
The combination of the two provides users with a simplified method of working with external collaborators with tight integrations with all of the productivity products found in Microsoft 365. In turn, admins receive tighter and safer integration with Microsoft 365 compliance features to provide better visibility and accountability, unified security and access policies, and confidentiality.
“Microsoft 365 transforms how organizations connect, collaborate, and drive productivity, and AvePoint Confide extends these capabilities to enable secure external engagements well beyond the firewall,” Richard Riley, general manager for low code and content services at Microsoft said in a statement.
ClearPeople Releases Atlas 5
Intelligent knowledge platform provider ClearPeople announced the release of Atlas v5.
The new version gives users access to knowledge stored throughout Microsoft 365 as well as other data sources, using generative AI, Microsoft Azure OpenAI and Microsoft 365.
According to the company, Atlas 5 will improve access to content and knowledge no matter where a person is working, be it SharePoint or Teams, or in the Atlas AI interface. Some of the key features include:
- Governance: Governance and provisioning tools needed get organizations ready for the introduction of generative AI tools like Copilot for Microsoft 365.
- Data collections: Draws data from inside Microsoft 365 and other organizational knowledge sources to create an "authoritative source of truth."
- AI: An AI assistant uses data sources to offer accurate responses to queries, or suggest the best related content for those queries. The Atlas AI Assistant can be used in the Atlas interface in Microsoft 365 apps.
According to Microsoft AppSource, Atlas is for mid-sized and large enterprises in legal, professional services, financial services, construction among others. These organizations are using Atlas to drive significant improvements in productivity, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
ClearPeople was founded in 2003 and is based in London. Atlas 5 is generally available now.
Microsoft Ends Support for M365 Browser Extension
This week, Microsoft made the surprise announcement that it is ending support for the Microsoft 365 extension for both Chrome and Edge — and it's doing so very soon: according to a statement from the company, support for both will end as of Jan. 15.
The Microsoft 365 browser extension is a free extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome first released in 2016. It emerged as part of the Office Online brand and was designed to give users access to Office applications (and later Microsoft 365 apps and documents) via the web.
As of Jan. 15, the extension will no longer receive security updates, non-security updates, bug fixes or technical support. The Microsoft 365 browser extension will also be removed from Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome web stores as an extension add-on.
While the speed of the sunsetting is surprising, what's equally surprising is that Microsoft gave no reason why it is doing this. For anyone that uses it, it provides a very easy way to access Microsoft files and apps without having to trawl through Microsoft 365.
In fact, as recently as August Microsoft announced a refreshed look for the extension. While it’s not a work-stopping loss, its removal will just make it more time-consuming for any of its users to find tools and content across Microsoft 365.
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