Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are changing the way that companies and salespeople are communicating with customers for the better, said Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce's Service Cloud business. "You look at how salespeople work today, and most of them, they dread writing sales emails; they'd much rather be out there with customers," Shih said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday. "So they can offload those tasks that are more mundane … they want to focus on engaging with the customer and problem solving." Shih drew a clear line between how generative AI can be utilized by the general person compared to business clients and enterprise users: "We're not talking about writing funny poems, we're talking about writing sales emails and customer service responses that agents can send to get back to customers faster." Earlier this week, Salesforce launched what it called the first generative AI CRM technology, Einstein GPT.

Open-source technologies have had a profound impact on the world of AI and machine learning, enabling developers, data scientists, and organizations to collaborate, innovate, and build better AI solutions. As large AI models like GPT-3.5 and DALL-E become more prevalent, organizations are also exploring ways to leverage existing open-source models and tools without needing to put a tremendous amount of effort into building them from scratch. Microsoft Azure AI is leading this effort by working closely with GitHub and data science communities, and providing organizations with access to a rich set of open-source technologies for building and deploying cutting-edge AI solutions. At Azure Open Source Day, we highlighted Microsoft's commitment to open source and how to build intelligent apps faster and with more flexibility using the latest open-source technologies that are available in Azure AI. Recent advancements in AI propelled the rise of large foundation models that are trained on a vast quantity of data and can be easily adapted to a wide variety of applications across various industries.

OpenAI just announced pricing for businesses seeking to integrate its ChatGPT service into their own products, and it looks an awful lot like a 90 percent off sale. It all starts with OpenAI, a former nonprofit that's now gunning for riches as lustily as any Silicon Valley unicorn. The company has built a dazzling array of products, including the DALL-E image generator and the renowned ChatGPT service. ChatGPT is powered by a system known as a large language model (or LLM), and it's one of several LLM lines that OpenAI sells commercially. Buyers of LLM output are mostly companies that integrate language-related services like chat, composition, summarization, software generation, online search, sentiment analysis, and much more into their websites, services, and products.

As the search AI chatbot shindigs -- like Microsoft's Bing bot debut and Google's Bard launch -- wind down for now, who knew the hottest, trendiest party in generative AI would be … business productivity apps? After years of being relegated to nerdy, wallflower AI status while self-driving cars, robot dogs and the future of the AI-powered metaverse got the spotlight, generative AI's email-writing, blog-producing, copy-powering abilities are suddenly popular. And top companies from startups to Big Tech are developing tools to gain admittance to the generative AI bash. Follow VentureBeat's ongoing generative AI coverage Arriving fashionably late to this generative AI soiree is San Francisco-based Grammarly. The digital writing assistant with a browser extension is far from a newbie to the AI space, but today the company announced its GPT-powered, chatbot-style GrammarlyGo. The new offering will start rolling out to its 30 million daily customers in beta in early April, as well as 50,000 teams in Grammarly Business.

Generative AI's two-edged sword - more information made available. Well before the birth of the internet, I had become an infomaniac. I devoured tech magazines and books on tech to try and stay up to date on current trends and issues related to my job as a tech analyst. I am also a techie at heart, and my first tech-related job in 1975 was semiconductor-related. I would also go to specialized tech user groups and mini-conferences as my interest in tech evolved and helped me when I joined Creative Strategies in 1982 as their first PC analyst.

When co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced that they were leaving their day-to-day roles at Google parent Alphabet in 2019, handing Sundar Pichai the keys to the kingdom, they mused about Google's age. "If the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost," they wrote. "We believe it's time to assume the role of proud parents--offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!" Four years later, as Google faces incursions from AI rivals dead set on dethroning the company's iconic search business, the absent parents have returned home. Microsoft, a once-dormant rival, has sprung to life with a new version of Bing, aided by OpenAI, the upstart maker of the generative AI bot ChatGPT.

Running ChatGPT costs millions of dollars a day, which is why OpenAI, the company behind the viral natural-language processing artificial intelligence has started ChatGPT Plus, a $20/month subscription plan. But our brains are a million times more efficient than the GPUs, CPUs, and memory that make up ChatGPT's cloud hardware. And neuromorphic computing researchers are working hard to make the miracles that big server farms in the clouds can do today much simpler and cheaper, bringing them down to the small devices in our hands, our homes, our hospitals, and our workplaces. "We have to give up immortality," the CEO of Rain AI, Gordon Wilson, told me in a recent TechFirst podcast. "We have to give up the idea that, you know, we can save software, we can save the memory of the system after the hardware dies."

AI images have shocked the photography world with their hyper-realistic output. But there is seemingly one thing they keep stumbling over -- hands. AI image generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are notorious for adding one too many fingers or morphing digits together, making them look nightmarish. Earlier this year, PetaPixel reported on realistic party pictures generated by AI. But upon closer inspection, the giveaway was the hands; with one girl holding a camera with eight fingers.

"The Stochastic Parrots paper was pretty prescient, insofar as it definitely pointed out a lot of issues that we're still working through now," Alex Hanna, a former member of Google's AI ethics team who is now director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute founded by Gebru, told us. Since the paper's publication, buzz and debate about LLMs--one of the biggest AI advances in recent years--have gripped the tech industry and the business world at large. The generative AI sector raised $1.4 billion last year alone, according to Pitchbook data, and that doesn't include the two megadeals that opened this year between Microsoft and OpenAI and Google and Anthropic.

ChatGPT and Dalle-E are the talks of the town as the new shiny object that could potentially disrupt Google's hegemony. The hype cycle, as usual, is high. AI dominated conversations around tech at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Even at this year's CES trade show, hundreds of exhibitors were listed under the show's artificial intelligence category--double those categorized as metaverse, cryptocurrency and blockchain combined. There is no denying the strength that generative AI is demonstrating.