This Week in AI: Chatbots, the CIA and Limitless Voice

The fastest human can’t even sniff the 50 mile-per-hour (mph) top speed of a gazelle.

But on a level field, even the fastest gazelle will never outrun a middling cheetah — whose own impressive 75 mph upper limit is impressively dwarfed by the peregrine falcon, which has a top diving speed of 242 mph, making it the fastest member of the entire animal kingdom.

It is a similar story in the tech world, only with artificial intelligence (AI) playing the part of a peregrine falcon. But, in this case, nearly everything else is moving at the speed of a snail.

This, as another week has passed, bringing more market launches of generative AI advances from some of the world’s most valuable companies.

It was just two weeks ago that the AI industry’s leaders went down to Washington to talk shop with policymakers; already, those discussions may be out of date.

As the forward march of AI progress turns into a sprint, these are the stories PYMNTS has been keeping up with.

The Month of AI Integrations

Big Tech’s AI arms race got a big shot in the arm this week, building off of some solid momentum last week.

That’s because Meta on Wednesday (Sept. 27) introduced 28 new AI-powered chatbot personas, a new generation of smart glasses, and more AI experiences designed to create some competitive separation from its peers, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the upstart pioneer OpenAI, who have all hitched their wagon to generative AI products.

As PYMNTS noted, nearly all of the models on the market today can increasingly interact with users across the three key areas of natural language (voice), text-based conversation and visual imagery. This plurality of multimodal AI driven experiences means that, outside of the data the models are trained on, the winning formula for Big Tech when it comes to AI may be leveraging their own captive audiences.

Perhaps that’s why, OpenAI — which, despite being one of the fastest growing platforms in tech history, still boasts a fraction of the audience share that Google, Meta and other Big Tech companies enjoy — is so dead set on pulling ahead, announcing Wednesday (Sept. 27) a new update allowing ChatGPT users to surf the web, expanding the chatbot’s data access to real-time information.

And in order to stand out even further, the big news on Tuesday (Sept. 26) was that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly interested in creating a native hardware device to house OpenAI’s generative AI software. Altman is said to be working with Jony Ive, the highly regarded ex-chief design officer at Apple responsible for the company’s iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad products, to develop “what new hardware for the AI age could look like.”

In order to fund its ambitions, OpenAI is reportedly looking to raise some fresh cash at the eye-popping valuation of $90 billion.

For reference, Character.AI, a startup focused on the same AI chatbot technology that Meta is doubling down on, is reportedly in discussions to raise funding that could value the company at a comparatively paltry $5 billion.

Taking Advantage of AI

All the multimodal AI platform updates made it seem like the long-awaited VoiceTech renaissance could finally be here — or at least around the corner from being around the corner.

But what has most certainly arrived is the right-now impact of AI as it relates to streamlining and enhancing legacy back-end workflows.

Uber Freight on Thursday (Sept. 28) unveiled its latest product roadmap, incorporating AI-powered software to transform the global movement of goods.

Also on Thursday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) rolled out the general availability of Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that provides access to foundation models from leading AI companies via a single application programming interface (API).

In a similar vein, Cloudflare, a connectivity cloud company, and Microsoft announced Wednesday that they are now collaborating to enable businesses to run AI models in the most suitable locations for their needs; while SAP has unveiled Joule, a generative AI assistant for business operations.

To help manage the computing power necessary for all these new tools, Microsoft is reportedly looking into developing a lower-cost AI.

And for businesses with less financial heft to their war chests, Paygeon unveiled on Tuesday its new AI-powered financial platform designed for small businesses and startups.

Finally, not to be left out, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s Open-Source Enterprise division has developed an internal AI tool designed to make life a little easier for its employees and analysts as they sift through zettabytes of data for glimmers of intelligence.

The CIA plans to roll out the AI tool across the entire 18-agency U.S. intelligence community, which includes the National Security Agency (NSA), the FBI, and agencies run by branches of the military to assist and streamline their own intelligence gathering.