Week 7 - This Week in Enterprise Tech

This Week in Enterprise Tech? More like This Week in Enterprise AI, as your intrepid heroes Hyoun Park from Amalgam Insights and Charles Araujo from the DX Report analyze AI products from multiple startups, AI value mapping challenges, a new alliance taking on NVIDIA, and the United States' Government's new policies on AI and what they mean for enterprise CIOs.

1. Databricks DBRX Gen AI Model. Databricks unleashed a 132 billion parameter open source model developed in 3 months on a $10 million budget based on a Mixture-of-Experts approach that exceeds other open source models in performance while providing greater speed and compute efficiency. Find out why MoE is the new RAG in Gen AI and why we found this so surprising.

Databricks' announcement: https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-dbrx-new-standard-efficient-open-source-customizable-llms

Additional commentary from Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/27/databricks-spent-10m-on-a-generative-ai-model-that-still-cant-beat-gpt-4/

2. Hume AI's "Empathic AI." Hume AI announces a $50 million B round to support "Empathic AI". Charles and Hyoun debate the efficiacy of pursuing empathic AI based on previous approaches from startups such as Kanjoya and Textio and some of the hurdles and challenges associated with an empathy-based standard of AI for the enterprise.

For more on the funding announcement: https://www.hume.ai/blog/series-b-evi-announcement

3. The Practical Business Value of Gen AI. Hyoun and Charles saw a couple of pieces in the Wall Street Journal this week on the ROI of AI as well as the use of AI in supply chain through established vendors such as Celonis. We discuss what key metrics and ratios CIOs should consider in the value of AI and how to align AI to practical business outcomes.

The WSJ takes on ROI in AI: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cfos-tackle-thorny-calculus-on-gen-ai-whats-the-return-on-investment-24ebf435

And the WSJ take on AI and supply chain:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-seeking-real-world-supply-chain-gains-in-new-ai-tools-023045e7?mod=djemCIO

4. NVIDIA vs. the World in AI. A new consortium including Amazon is seeking to unseat NVIDIA's dominance in AI. Will it succeed? And what does it mean for CIOs seeking to place their bets on AI?

Based on the following Reuters article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/behind-plot-break-nvidias-grip-ai-by-targeting-software-2024-03-25/?taid=6601616d9876060001c70b64

And the following WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/amazon-invests-2-75-billion-in-ai-startup-anthropic-87bb869e?mod=djemCIO

5. US Government Takes a Stance on AI. We saw a two-for-one this week from the US government as the executive branch announced a policy to require every agency to define AI safeguards and have an AI head. And in the legislative branch, the staffers of the House of Representatives have banned Microsoft CoPilot for now. What lessons can enterprise IT take from Government-grade Gen AI?

White House Fact Sheet on AI govermance: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/28/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-omb-policy-to-advance-governance-innovation-and-risk-management-in-federal-agencies-use-of-artificial-intelligence/

Axios breaking the story on the US House banning the use of CoPilot: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/29/congress-house-strict-ban-microsoft-copilot-staffers

This Week In Enterprise Tech is hosted by:

Charles Araujo of The DX Report and

Hyoun Park of Amalgam Insights