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The will-he-won't-he metaverse discussion continued as Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Instagram to outline the company’s artificial intelligence plan.
The focus of his presentation extended beyond generative AI to AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, an as of yet still theoretical version of AI that will be able to understand, learn and reason in much the same way a human can.
The post didn't offer enough details to draw any conclusions about the company's specific future plans, but one notable absence suggested a change of course for the tech giant. The metaverse was not mentioned once during his talk.
“Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” Zuckerberg said. "We're bringing our two major AI research efforts (FAIR and GenAI) closer together to support this. We are currently training our next-gen model Llama 3, and we are building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap.”
This roadmap, he added, includes 350k H100s by the end of this year, and overall, almost 600k H100s equivalents of compute, if you include other GPUs.
But there is more to it that just this. Zuckerberg also outlined how and what Meta will be working on over the next year to enable work on AGI. Part of it, according to an interview in the Verge, is a massive investment in Nvidia chips and graphic cards for a total investment of an estimated $9 billion.
How it amounts to this colossal sum is technical, but what is notable is that Meta plans to train new models like Llama 3. The new models will be responsibly open sourced and made widely available, according to Zuckerberg, an approach he categorized as much different than its predecessors.
“This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great that we should open source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can, so everyone can benefit,” he said in the video.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the company's plans. Quoted in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Dame Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton and a member of the UN’s advisory body on AI described Zuckerberg’s ambition as scary.
“The thought of open source AGI being released before we have worked out how to regulate these very powerful AI systems is really very scary,” she said. “In the wrong hands technology like this could do a great deal of harm. It is so irresponsible for a company to suggest it."
Microsoft Releases Copilot Pro
While Zuckerberg mulls Meta's AI ambitions, Microsoft keeps churning out new releases and updates based on its massive investment in OpenAI. The latest is its release of Copilot Pro premium service for $20 per month.
Copilot Pro gives subscribers access to the AI tool in Excel, PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams as well as priority access to GPT-4, which is available on both iOS and Android. For existing Microsoft 365 customers, Copilot Pro gives them access to Copilot in all apps.
The new offering provides users specifically with:
- A single AI experience that is the same across all workspaces for the web, on PCs and across your apps. It will also be coming to mobile devices soon.
- Access to Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote on PC, Mac and iPad for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.
- Priority access to the very latest models including GPT-4 Turbo during peak times for faster performance.
- Enhanced AI image creation with Image Creator from Designer.
- The ability to build your own Copilot GPT — a customized Copilot tailored for a specific topic in the Copilot GPT Builder.
While the company is billing Copilot Pro as the best offering for individuals, for organizations Copilot in Microsoft 365 is the best bet. The latter has also been updated, with two of the most notable changes being:
- Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now generally available for small businesses, with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard Customers able to buy between one and 300 seats for $30 per person per month.
- It is also removing the 300-seat purchase minimum for commercial plans and making Copilot available for Office 365 E3 and E5 customers. Up until now it required a Microsoft 365 license.
Oracle Expands OCI Gen AI Services
Microsoft isn't the only company expanding its reach in the world of generative AI: Oracle just launched a number of betas for its OCI Generative AI service.
OCI, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI services, is a fully managed service that provides a set of state-of-the-art, customizable large language models (LLMs) that cover a wide range of use cases for text generation.
It integrates LLMs, including Cohere's Embed v3 and Meta' Llama 2, to meet a wide range of business needs and now comes with support for over 100 languages and an improved GPU cluster management offering.
Organizations can deploy it either through Oracle Cloud or on-premises via OCI Dedicated Region.
One of the main updates from OCI this time around is focused on text generation and summarization as well as semantic similarity tasks. The most recent models from Cohere and Llama support these efforts, with Oracle offering them as a management service that can be accessed through API calls.
Organizations will also be able to embed Oracle generative AI offering into their own technology stacks, but will still benefit form Oracle data security and governance. Customers also will be able to refine any of those models’ using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques so the models will understand and work with the internal operations of the company.
RAG is a generative AI technique that combines information retrieval with text generation, which enables AI models to retrieve relevant information from a knowledge source and pull it into generated text.
Now in beta, OCI Generative AI Agents service with a RAG agent provides LLMs with the ability to provide contextualized results that are enhanced with enterprise data. It means that users will be able to interact with different data sources across the enterprise without the need for specialist skills.
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This is only the beginning for these agents. While the beta release will support OCI OpenSearch there is more on the way, with a wider range of data search and aggregation expected this year. It will also offer access to Oracle Database 23c with AI Vector Search and MySQL HeatWave with Vector Store.
In the future, Oracle plans to offer prebuilt agent actions across applications like Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle NetSuite and Oracle Health.
Finally, to give users access to open source libraries like Hugging Face’s Transformers or PyTorch, it will be expanding OCI Data Science capabilities so users can build, train and manage LLMs with open source libraries.
This is only the start according to the company, with more on the way in 2024.
Time to Go ROAMing?
Last year, Howard Lerman, the cofounder of the “cloud headquarter” company Roam, outlined in an interview with Fortune the pain points that drove him to create what he describes as a “clouduaters.”
His list was a familiar one: productivity, remote work, workspaces and meetings. He also discussed Roam in the interview.
Roam, according to its website, is an immersive platform that offers a virtual office for customers, guests and even colleagues to work in.
In fact, it goes as far as to describe it as an entire office building that organizations “can customize for the specific composition of your company or team, consisting of individual offices, conference rooms, team rooms, theaters, and more.”
Last week, in a statement on its LinkedIn page, the company announced that “after a 2-year private beta, 7,660 waitlist requests, 6,000 pioneering members, and 300 customers, Roam is now available for companies up to 50 people.”
There is not a lot more information about it for the moment, however, going back to the website you get on idea of what is on the way. The website notice reads:
“It is an entire office building that you can customize for the specific composition of your company or team, consisting of individual offices, conference rooms, team rooms, theaters, and more. Roam freely within your Roam. Remote office buildings exist in a broader Roamverse, where users can visit other Roams as well.”
So, if Zuckerberg has his metaverse, then Roam has its Roamverse, which in the current debate over remote working has something that every office worker can really come to grips with.
For the moment, users can automatically add Roam Meetings to your Google Calendar™ invitation with one click. Just select Roam from the “Add video conferencing” dropdown. Expect more on the way from this start-up.
Notion Launches a New Calendar
Late last year, we took a look at the workplace collaboration tool developer Notion. At the time, a spokesperson told us that they were not targeting CIOs, rather, looking at employees to bring its tools into their workplaces and then advocate for them. Notion COO Akshay Kothari called them 'Notion Champions' in an interview with Protocol, but the technique is more commonly known as shadow IT.
The implication, of course, is that Notion is focused on developing tools that workers will use rather than part of a global enterprise collaboration strategy. While it is impossible to separate the two in real terms, it means that its focus has been on tools that workers want and need.
The most recent example of this has just been released in the shape of a new standalone calendar app.
While calendar apps are not going to rock the digital workplace, used effectively, they can make a huge different to the organization of work.
According to a blog post about the release, most calendars are disconnected from other tools which creates gaps in the calendars. Meetings, for example, exist separate to project timelines and they aren't populated with our personal plans either. The result? Missed deadlines and double-booking.
The new Notion calendar will act as a layer across all work done in Notion through note, projects, tasks and meetings without leaving the calendar. It can also integrate personal calendars so your entire life can be seen in a single view. Also worth noting is the calendar can act as a standalone and does not have to be integrated into other Notion products.
The move follows the company's acquisition of the calendar app Cron Calendar in 2022. Notion promises more in the future, but didn't offer any further specifics.
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