AI reshaped search. What's next?

Welcome to another edition of what we’re determined to make the best damn newsletter in AI. Here we’ll break down AI topics that matter, open your mind to use cases, and keep you ahead of the curve.

Our #1 goal is to be useful. So please shoot us an email 📩 if you have questions or feedback, and especially if you implement something we share!

Here's what we're covering today:

• Microsoft event debrief: why this tech will reshape every software category

• A deep dive into how the new Bing actually works

• AI search wars updates

Let’s get to it! 👇

ANNOUNCEMENT

A big thank you: we’ve been able to make the membership more accessible 🙏

We’ve received a TON of positive support for the pre-launch of our premium membership in the last few weeks - thank you!

Our primary goal is to provide both a focused community and helpful resources that are accessible to everyone who is serious about applying AI into their work, business, or products.

Our commitment to our goals combined with your early support has allowed us to decrease the price of our premium membership to $12/month (or $99/year)!

So if you haven't already, join our membership of like-minded individuals applying AI. Launches Feb 15! And everybody who's already joined - you've got an email from us with your options.

TODAY'S PERSPECTIVE

"This tech is going to reshape pretty much every software category" - Microsoft CEO

This was a big week for AI. Both Google (Bard) and Microsoft (Bing) announced ChatGPT-inspired search offerings. Bing is being rolled out via a waitlist, and Bard’s release date is yet to be announced.

Rachel was in person at the Bing launch event where Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO), Sam Altman (Open AI CEO), Sarah Bird (Responsible AI Lead for Microsoft) and others presented. And this content is not sponsored, but Microsoft did pay for the trip.

Of course, we had our AI Exchange community top of mind the entire time.

We’re here to help you apply AI in your work, products and life. Here’s what you should take away from everything that happened this week:

1/ Big tech is pivoting and making unprecedented investments.

Google, Meta and Microsoft have all pivoted their focus squarely on AI.

An engineering leader of Bing shared that this new ChatGPT-powered experience required substantial changes to the technology that powered Bing. And they’ve been working on it since before ChatGPT’s launch.

That suggests ~4-6 months of development time. Now if you consider the breadth of large technology companies that have re-evaluated their strategies since the ChatGPT explosion, that suggests we have many, many more AI features and pivots in our near future.

2/ Search is changed forever.

While today's leading versions of AI search (You.com, Perplexity.ai, Bing) links to sources, it feels very uncertain whether search will continue driving traffic to websites. A good search experience answers your question, not finds you a link.

One of the most interesting parts to us about Bing’s current release is that it has ad placements. However, they are limited and feel forced as “citations”.

Searching for information isn’t the only activity poised to change. It’s not hard to imagine shopping straight from chat.

3/ Today’s limitations of AI are not slowing anybody down.

Language models like ChatGPT can still conjure false information, even when connected to real time information and context via search.

Google’s stock price dropped materially as it’s public Bard was ostricized for a false claim in its release demo. And we’ve gotten the new Bing to give us multiple false summaries.

Regardless, consumer demand is high enough that these tech giants are choosing to go forth and iterate through feedback to get these AI products to be increasingly factual over time.

4/ AI is coming to every product near you.

Microsoft also unveiled an Edge extension which brings the new Bing chat experience to any web page. It includes has a lightweight “Compose” feature to help you generate emails, LinkedIn posts, and more.

Add to this - Intercom's announcement, Quora's launch of Poe, and Canva's rolodex of AI features. We can expect a lot of AI to show up on many of our favorite products.

So what does all of this mean for you?

We are nearly halfway through Q1. If we were to recommend one strategic objective to you and your team, it would be to start developing AI literacy in your organization.

Simple steps like encouraging your team use ChatGPT, hosting a prompt battle as your next team bonding event, and generally encouraging discourse on the latest AI news with your team are all good steps.

Organizations that don’t adopt AI will be outcompeted by those who do.

Of course, we are 100% focused on this. It’s why we launched our membership!

USE CASE DEEP DIVE

Build your own Bing

We don't have exact details or inside info on how it works. But generally, we've seen enough of these "ChatGPT connected to the internet" and "ChatGPT connected to documents" products to understand the broad stroked of how they work.

And "how to add my own data to ChatGPT" is a question many people are asking!

So here's a high level explanation of how products like the new Bing and other "ChatGPT over outside data" products work:

1. You need to connect some type of external dataset, such as a dataset of reviews of your favorite restaurants

2. Then when you ask a question, you use a system to fetch or "retrieve" the most relevant items in your dataset to that question. There are a many different methods here for finding the most relevant items - using embeddings is one of the most common.

3. Then you add that as additional context to the original prompt, and send that all to GPT/ChatGPT.

4. Then the response you get back from GPT was generated with the context of the data you provided it.

Here's a bit of a nerdy diagram we made describing this —

But you can actually recreate the same thing in ChatGPT too --

See? It uses the context you gave it.

This is one of the most popular use cases for applying AI right now. It can help with:

• Powering a slack bot to do Q&A over your internal Wiki

• Launching a chat bot on your website for your customers

• Getting your marketing material generated with your brands' products in mind

• & more!

We are working on no-code tutorials for this in our membership launch, so keep an eye out!

LINKS

For your reading list 📚

More play by play of the AI search wars this week

• Google's live event stream covering Bard and Lens, it's Augmented Reality meets AI meets Search product. They misplaced the phone for the demo though...

• Chinese company Baidu also announced they are entering the AI search wars with their competing product, Ernie

And if you're curious about the AI landscape as a whole...

• Here's where investors think the biggest opportunities with AI will be

• Check out NFX's open source generative tech market map

• And Sequoia's Generative AI Application landscape

That's all!

We'll see you again on Tuesday. Thoughts, feedback and questions are much appreciated - respond here or shoot us a note at [email protected].

Cheers,

🪄 The AI Exchange Team