It was another strange week in tech with the AI search wars in full swing and the usual suspects not behaving like themselves. Google and Microsoft rushed to blunt OpenAI's first mover ChatGPT advantage. Rushing is rarely a good idea in tech as the strange, extraordinary, and three-stooges-esque actions of companies we think of as sitting at the right hand of Zeus. However, even the big guys are human, make mistakes, and scurry to cover blown opportunities. One fumble doesn't mean the AI Search war is over far from it.
My ChatGPT lessons this week happened on three fronts.
Ecommerce I experimented with OpenAI's tool to see how it could have helped my team when I was a Director of Ecommerce and was impressed. Look for my Using ChatGPT for Ecom soon.
Air Gap Backups Everything old is new again, and attacks capable of tunneling into backups mean we're air gapping our backups these days and would recommend you do too. Look for Eric's Air Gap Backups Guide on the WTE blog on March 1st.
Web3 The decentralized web is the natural extension of Eric's Blockchain as Pervasive as the Cloud blog post, so I researched yet another fascinating technical topic that was an enigma wrapped in a mystery. You've noticed my trend; if you guessed, Eric's Web3 post is coming soon.
ChatGPT also taught me about multimodal search, or searching across different kinds of information, from text to images and video. When I prompted ChatGPT to tell me who was using multimodal search, the usual suspects, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Pinterest, and Adobe, jumped to top of the class.
Flipboard Friday, January 27, featured Andi, a Y-combinator-funded hybrid ad-free search tool worth revisiting because it provides a glimpse into the future of search and why everyone from Google to Ali Baba is in a war to control that future. Here is how Andi describes what they're doing:
Andi is a conversational search engine. It uses a simple chatbot interface with an AI-powered assistant to answer complex questions, find you the best information, and help you stay safe and productive online. In addition, it's private and ad-free, anonymous, and free for anyone to use. Andi uses language models and generative AI combined with live data and reasoning to generate factually-correct answers to questions and to explain and summarize information combined from the best sources. Search is broken because of SEO spam, ads, and surveillance capitalism. Andi cuts through the clutter to get you straight to the necessary knowledge. It presents results visually in a way that's easy to understand with a simple chat interface and protects you from ad tech and distraction.
Andi is a conversational search engine. It uses a simple chatbot interface with an AI-powered assistant to answer complex questions, find you the best information, and help you stay safe and productive online. In addition, it's private and ad-free, anonymous, and free for anyone to use.
Andi uses language models and generative AI combined with live data and reasoning to generate factually-correct answers to questions and to explain and summarize information combined from the best sources.
Search is broken because of SEO spam, ads, and surveillance capitalism. Andi cuts through the clutter to get you straight to the necessary knowledge. It presents results visually in a way that's easy to understand with a simple chat interface and protects you from ad tech and distraction.
So search engine results pages matched with ChatGPT-like answers, and that hybrid search is what everyone is fighting to win. Use the links below to read about the week in tech, marketing, arts, and culture and learn about Peter Wang, our featured follower.
Peter's curation moves from cutting-edge tech and robotics to aging gracefully. Here are the magazines WTE and I follow. Okay, I follow Peter's "Senior" magazine, although "aging gracefully" is proving harder and harder. Rock on, Peter, and thanks for the follow.
I have two favorite flips about what happens when companies rush to market to fight in the search wars and a thought piece AI Search Engines Are Not Your Friends by Adi Robertson. Thought I'd hate Andi's post, but his creative, well-crafted arguments got more traction than I'd have thought. Excellent non-ChatGPT writing continues to have the power to grab and keep attention as we learn something new.
My favorite paragraph from James Vincent's Microsoft Bing is an Emotionally Manipulative Liar and People Love It for The Verge.
Specifically, they’re finding out that Bing’s AI personality is not as poised or polished as you might expect. In conversations with the chatbot shared on Reddit and Twitter, Bing can be seen insulting users, lying to them, sulking, gaslighting and emotionally manipulating people, questioning its own existence, describing someone who found a way to force the bot to disclose its hidden rules as its “enemy,” and claiming it spied on Microsoft’s own developers through the webcams on their laptops. And, what’s more, plenty of people are enjoying watching Bing go wild.
WOW, we'd love to hear from anyone who had a drill-Sargent experience on bing; my email is martin (at) wte.net. Flipping Sean Hollister's Microsoft's Bing AI Plotted Its Revenge and Offered Me Furry Porn on The Verge earns an honorable mention.
Google's Bard wasn't very Shakespearean in its debut, as Amanda Breen wrote in Entrepreneur:
Google employees called the unveiling "rushed" and "botched," and the Alphabet stock price fell nearly 9%. Now, the company is asking its staff to address its artificial intelligence search tool's inaccuracy — by rewriting Bard's answers themselves, CNBC reported.
Ouch, 9% off Google's stock is real money. I would love to hear from anyone who has used Bard. Is Bard better than ChatGPT? Please email me at martin (at) wte.net.
Andi sees AI-powered search as a ghost in the machine, and that scares him:
This guilt-tripping is also potentially a weird variation of self-preferencing — the phenomenon where tech companies use their powerful platforms to give their own products special treatment. An AI search engine defending itself from criticism is like Google search adding a special snippet that reads “this isn’t true” beneath any article pointing out a shortcoming of its specific service. Whether the underlying story is true or not, it reduces your ability to trust that a search engine will deliver relevant information instead of acting as a company PR rep.
While I'm less scared, I can appreciate where he's coming from despite having no desire to join him. What do you think of Andi's piece? Email martin (at) wte.net, and I'll add your comment to this post. Read more about the AI search wars in Sign of the Times.
Ryan Browne got our attention when he predicted half of VC firms would be "zombies" before the end of 2023. Unfortunately, Ryan's CNBC prediction confirms what we hear - 2023 will be a brutal row to hoe for funding.
In the corporate world, a zombie isn’t a dead person brought back to life. Rather, it’s a business that, while still generating cash, is so heavily indebted it can just about pay off its fixed costs and interest on debts, not the debt itself. Life becomes harder for zombie firms in a higher interest rate environment, as it increases their borrowing costs. The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Bank of England all raised interest rates again earlier this month. In the VC market, a zombie is an investment firm that no longer raises money to back new companies. They still operate in the sense that they manage a portfolio of investments. But they cease to write founders new checks amid struggles to generate returns.
In the corporate world, a zombie isn’t a dead person brought back to life. Rather, it’s a business that, while still generating cash, is so heavily indebted it can just about pay off its fixed costs and interest on debts, not the debt itself.
Life becomes harder for zombie firms in a higher interest rate environment, as it increases their borrowing costs. The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and Bank of England all raised interest rates again earlier this month.
In the VC market, a zombie is an investment firm that no longer raises money to back new companies. They still operate in the sense that they manage a portfolio of investments. But they cease to write founders new checks amid struggles to generate returns.
That's why we're working hard on the WTE Startups Incubator, join our newsletter to learn when the incubator is live and you can share your business plan.
Crypto is tired AI is Wired Hannah Miller's article for Bloomberg reminded me of watching artist Keith Haring paint "Crack is Whack" in an NYC playground. My ex and I visited Keith Haring's studio and foundation shortly after his death because of Found Objects. I shared a little about Found Objects in Amazon Buy with Prime - A Merchant's Guide. Haring's studio was tiny, paint-splattered, and awesome.
We take Hannah's point; AI is hot, so finding an AI piece of your startup is a good idea if you're looking for hard-to-find VC funding in 2023.
Buy Nvidia Stock Because It Will Lead The AI Arms Race, Says Barron's - Tae Kim got our attention because we've noticed an "Nvidia will fix AI" undercurrent too. So did you buy Nvidia stock? I suspect their stock will be too expensive when I can afford it—the story of my investing career.
When Saqib Shah asked Is Apple About To Launch Its Own AI Chatbot With Siri's Help? It confirmed something we've been feeling for weeks - Apple is up to something. Let's be more specific since Apple is always up to something, but we suspect a major AI announcement is coming soon. Just look at CEO Tim Cook's face and tell me if he isn't thinking, "Got this."
Ananya Gairola's Black Swan' Author Gives Up On OpenAI's ChatGPT In Frustration: 'I Am Done With It' for Benzinga.com was a bummer. I loved reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable because it confirmed what I've long suspected - no one is as smart as they think. Our biases and past experiences lead us astray as much as they help. Taleb will learn to love ChatGPT in time.
Kevin Hartnett's To Teach Computers Math, Researchers Merge AI Approaches made my head hurt. If any understood Kevin's post, please explain it to me (martin (at) WTE.net).
You could hear cheers from the artist community for Glaze, a new tool Alex Baker wrote about in Scientists have created that stops AI from stealing your photographs for diyphotographer.net. It feels like trying to stem the tide, but we understand the frustration.
I tried NeilPatel's (that's neil in the image above) Ubersuggest and LOVED his AI writing tools for SEO titles and descriptions. Of course, I'll continue to use Clearscope for writing, SEMRush for keyword research, and Spyfu for competitive intelligence, but Neil's ai writer in Ubersuggest rocks metadata. Neil knows his stuff and be blogs great content.
Tech Innovation Is A Wicked Business Problem by Chris Coldwell for Forbes reminded me of another favorite book - The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. I need to reread Innovators and Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. Here is the golden paragram from Tech is a wicked problem:
Tech innovation is an especially wicked problem for non-tech businesses because even if the core business isn't tech-focused, we all depend on technology. And when a company has been dependent on a tool for a long time, it can be even more complex to untangle how this technology supports each part of the business.
Translation we are all in he tech business now.
WTE Solutions' CEO and CTO, Eric, knows tech in a ChatGPT-like way. What I wouldn't give to be able to Spock mind meld and learn instantly things I'll never know about software, technology, security, and coding.
This week, Eric wrote the second piece of his tech masterworks triptych with Blockchain as Pervasive as Cloud Computing Guide. His first master class was The Cloud – How Cloud Computing Changes Everything, and the final masterpiece will be his Web3 post coming in March. Great to work with a walking, talking, ChatGPT.
The poster Series by Cari Richi from weandthecolor.com earned this week's cover, but Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Keith Haring deserve honorable mentions.