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Greetings!
It’s been nearly a year since we scooped the news that OpenAI, Google, Snowflake and Cohere were all working on artificial intelligence search products similar to the one startup Glean made a big splash with. Glean’s AI-powered search lets workers at companies easily find emails, Slack messages and other data scattered across business applications. As we said at the time, it seemed like everyone was trying to be like Glean.
Well, guess what? Everyone is still trying to be like Glean! That’s our takeaway from AI product announcements Amazon and Google made today, revealing that both tech giants have sprinkled some new AI features into their existing enterprise software products. Now they are bundling their enterprise search products with new AI features and pitching them as a way for businesses to equip all of their employees with AI.
Amazon’s new offering, Quick Suite, fuses its business-focused chatbot, Q for Business, with a product customers use to analyze corporate data with charts and graphs. Google’s new Gemini Enterprise offering includes Agentspace, the Glean clone it announced last December and launched to all customers in July. Both offerings include some new AI features and connections to more third-party applications, but these are essentially rebrandings.
What’s really happening here is that Amazon and Google are trying to chip away at the perception that it’s hard for big companies to get value from AI. By making AI sound easy to use and turning that messaging into a mantra, they hope to get a foothold with nontechnical employees in companies. That in turn could generate the kind of self-perpetuating buzz that initially helped fuel Glean’s rise.
Of course, a few months after Glean launched its first agent-building service last year, Salesforce’s Slack unit limited the service’s ability to search users’ Slack messages. That raises questions about Glean’s long-term growth prospects. It's doubtful Salesforce would take similar steps to block Amazon’s and Google’s access, though, since it has long-term agreements to rent cloud servers from both those companies.
OpenAI’s European Complaints
We’d love to hear how Google and Amazon respond to this one. OpenAI has complained to Europe’s antitrust chief, Teresa Ribera, that it is having “difficulties” competing with big tech firms, Bloomberg reported.
OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT—which as we know is far and away the dominant AI chatbot—wants the regulator to do something to stop “lock-in of customers by large platforms,” according to Bloomberg’s report.
That’s rich, given how successful ChatGPT has been. It’s a little hard to see that competition from its slower-moving rivals has hurt it, at least so far.
If any company is a threat, it’s Google, which even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledges seems to have its act together. Altman told Stratechery columnist Ben Thompson this week, “Google’s doing incredible work right now, but clearly they didn’t in that first period of time where ChatGPT got to market.” We’ll await regulators’ responses with bated breath.—Martin Peers
In Other News
• The court overseeing Elon Musk’s breach of charitable trust lawsuit against OpenAI has ordered the deposition of the company’s former chief technology officer, Mira Murati. The court is seeking information such as “the extent to which [OpenAI CEO] Altman was sidelining safety procedures in the pursuit of commercial interests,” according to a legal filing from Musk’s lawyers.
• Andreessen Horowitz has hired Raghu Raghuram, former CEO of VMware, as its newest general partner, according to the firm’s co-founder, Ben Horowitz. Raghuram will serve as a general partner investing in AI infrastructure and growth-stage companies.
• U.S. auto safety regulators are probing Tesla’s driver assistance technology known as Full Self-Driving. They say they have identified 58 reports of vehicles using the software running red lights and violating other traffic laws.
• SoftBank-owned PayPay, a major mobile payment app in Japan, said it has acquired a 40% equity stake in Binance Japan, a subsidiary of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV, in which we talk with the co-founder of Base Power, a company that raised $1 billion this week for its batteries to power homes in Texas.
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