AI's Smarts Now Come With a Big Price Tag

Calvin Qi, who works at a search startup called Glean, would love to use the latest artificial intelligence algorithms to improve his company's products. Glean provides tools for searching through applications like Gmail, Slack, and Salesforce. Qi says new AI techniques for parsing language would help Glean's customers unearth the right file or conversation a lot faster. So Glean uses smaller, less capable AI models that can't extract as much meaning from text. "It is hard for smaller places with smaller budgets to get the same level of results" as companies like Google or Amazon, Qi says.