Google’s AI Search gives sites dire choice: Share Data or Die
AI the biggest gamble in business history
AI the biggest gamble in business history
Business AI search co Sam Altman sees as a threat to OpenAI
Google’s AI Search gives sites dire choice: Share Data or Die
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AI the biggest gamble in business history
The business world is witnessing what could be the most significant gamble in its history. The frenzy surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) kicked off with the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022. OpenAI's chatbot quickly amassed 100 million users within weeks, setting a record for the fastest-growing product ever. This surge in popularity spurred a wave of investment, with spending on AI data centers projected to surpass $1.4 trillion between 2024 and 2027. Nvidia, the leading AI chip manufacturer, saw its market value skyrocket eight-fold to over $3 trillion.
Despite the hype, many AI startups are struggling to turn a profit. The energy and data demands of developing AI models are becoming increasingly burdensome. This growing gap between investor enthusiasm and business reality suggests that 2025 could be a pivotal year. The race is on to enhance AI efficiency and utility before investor interest wanes.
Creating ever more advanced models requires substantial financial resources. Estimates suggest that training the next generation of AI models could cost up to $1 billion. As these models grow in complexity, the costs associated with querying them, known as "inference," also rise.
Globally, companies are innovating to address these challenges, from developing more efficient and specialized chips to creating smaller, less power-hungry models. Some are exploring new high-quality data sources, such as textbooks. While investors have heavily funded leading firms like OpenAI, the performance gap between top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and open-source AI from Meta and Mistral is narrowing.
Certain industries are ahead in AI adoption. For example, 20% of information technology firms report using AI. As AI technology advances, particularly with the anticipated 2025 arrival of "agentic" systems capable of more complex tasks, adoption rates are expected to increase.
Although few companies openly report AI usage, about one-third of American employees use AI weekly for work. This figure is even higher in specific roles; 78% of software engineers and 75% of human resources staff in the U.S. use AI at least weekly, up from 40% and 35% in 2023, respectively. Notably, 75% of OpenAI's revenue comes from consumers rather than corporate subscriptions.
This trend indicates that much AI usage is covert, with employees leveraging it to streamline tasks like text rewriting or report generation. Workers may fear that disclosing their AI use could lead to increased workloads or job cuts. Thus, AI adoption presents both a technological and a managerial challenge....
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Business AI search co Sam Altman sees as a threat to OpenAI
In the wake of OpenAI's recent $6.6 billion fundraising round, CEO Sam Altman has advised investors to steer clear of five AI competitors, according to Reuters. Among these are notable names like Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, and AI search startup Perplexity.
The fifth competitor, perhaps the least known, is Glean, an enterprise search assistant. Founded in 2019 by Rubrik cofounder and former Google engineer Arvind Jain, Glean aids corporate employees in locating information across their company's various tools and data repositories. Glean addresses a fundamental need for businesses: search. "Every company has hundreds, some even more than a thousand different systems or applications," Jain explained. "As we accumulate more information and systems over the years, it becomes increasingly challenging for employees to find what they need, often costing them over two hours a day."
The company enhances AI search capabilities by integrating with applications like Slack and Dropbox, enabling comprehensive searches across a company's data landscape. Initially, Glean's primary focus was on search functionality. "The most basic thing Glean does is respond to your queries with the right information," Jain noted. Enterprise search, however, is a "hard lift and a hard build," according to Hamid. "It seems simple but is actually quite complex, requiring the development of numerous connectors to various SaaS products and the search technology itself."
Ensuring this process is secure and highly-permissioned poses a significant engineering challenge, said Sapphire Ventures' Rajeev Dham. Glean's product, for example, ensures users cannot access information they are not authorized to see, such as confidential financial or HR reports.
Despite Altman's warning to investors, Jain remains optimistic. "It's always flattering to receive such recognition," he said. "The reason we're likely on that list is because we've built something important, something powerful, something others aspire to create.".…
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Google’s AI Search gives sites dire choice: Share Data or Die
Google now displays artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages billed as “AI Overviews.” While websites can opt-out of having their information used by Google to create AI models, they can’t afford to opt out of the overviews because that would risk pushing them down in search results, making it harder to reach their customers. Website publishers have complained that the feature dampens traffic and advertising dollars since users rarely click through to see the data being used to power those results.
That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online.
Google’s dominance in search — which a federal court ruled last week is an illegal monopoly — is giving it a decisive advantage in the brewing AI wars, which search startups and publishers say is unfair as the industry takes shape. The dilemma is particularly acute for publishers, which face a choice between offering up their content for use by AI models that could make their sites obsolete and disappearing from Google search, a top source of traffic.
“It becomes like an existential crisis for these companies,” said Joe Ragazzo, publisher of the news site Talking Points Memo. “These are two bad options. You drop out and you die immediately, or you partner with them and you probably just die slowly, because eventually they’re not going to need you either.”
Google said AI Overviews — the summaries displayed at the top of Google search — are part of its longstanding commitment to serve higher quality information and bolster opportunities for publishers and other businesses. “Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and we intend for this long-established value exchange with websites to continue,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and they’re coming back to search more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered.”….