If you wanted to previously find an image that perfectly matched what you saw in your head online, you had to type in a wordy search inquiry. You’d hit send and hope you find the perfect match from the billions of images out there.
Now, that mental snapshot can be crafted in seconds by artificial intelligence and sometimes it’s even better than you could imagine.
“We want to solve a big problem that everyone has, which is roughly half of the searches today are going unanswered,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer. “But with A.I., we can now start to answer more and more of those questions.”
Microsoft invested $10 billion in Open A.I., the artificial intelligence research laboratory responsible for text-based ChatGPT and image generator DALL-E. It recently combined its powers with its search engine Bing. Not only will it store the searches, it will use third-party apps like Open Table and the breadth of the internet to give you simplified answers. Think of it as the modern version of Ask Jeeves, but it actually works, Mehdi said.
“You can just talk to it like an everyday person, and the A.I. does all the work and comes back with simple answers,” he explained.
When you describe something to Bing through its chat function and ask for an image, it will generate it for you using DALL-E technology in seconds -- even if it’s something that never existed like Baby Yoda sharing a drink with Boba Fett in Mos Eisley.
Or you can ask Bing to come up with reference images to give to a contractor. Mehdi recently queried for pictures of a mid-Century modern-style bar to serve as inspiration for an upcoming house remodeling project.
“It's going to make people in their current jobs that much more productive, that much more effective, than we're seeing that today,” Mehdi said. “Second, it’s going to create a new set of jobs where people can learn how to take advantage of the A.I.”
If what you need can only be described in words, Bing and ChatGPT combine together to give you answers with context. Instead of having to research individual items and draw your own conclusions, it will compile the results for you. It can be especially useful when it comes to travel.
“Travel planning takes multiple weeks, people taking lots of notes, lots of tabs, having to compile it together,” he said. “What you can see here is in one chat session, you can literally just ask multiple questions like we were saying, “Hey, give me a day-by-day itinerary. Tell me about the festivals. What should I wear? What should I know about the customs of coming in?”
At the end of the day, it will save us time.
“We're automating the mundane tasks, the things you don't want us to do so it frees you up to do the really interesting work,” Mehdi said.
An economic development agency, the Northwest Arkansas Council, is looking to draw technology professionals to their region of the Southern state with incentives like $10,000 worth of Bitcoin and a new bicycle. Nelson Peacock, president and CEO of the private nonprofit made up of companies like Walmart and Tyson Foods, joined Cheddar to talk about the program to further power his local economy. "By offering the payment in Bitcoin, we're looking to identify those people with interest and expertise in the underlying technologies, the blockchain technologies," he said.
After months of investors turning to crypto as a hedge against inflation, instead of the traditional hedge of gold, one crypto exchange is working with a token creator to launch a digital coin backed by a physical asset. GCOIN gives customers a digital title of ownership to 99.99% pure physical gold which is stored in a secured vault. Brent de Jong, GCoin's founder and Kristin Boggiano, Co-Founder and President of CrossTower, a cryptocurrency exchange, join Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss the GCOIN rollout, customer interest, why crypto is used as an inflation hedge, and more.
Retail platform operator and delivery company, Foxtrot,
raised $100 million in a Series C round led by D1 Capital Partners. Foxtrot bills itself as the modern convenience store that combines what it calls in-store curated discovery with 30-minute delivery and 5-minute pickup. Since launching first as a digital-only delivery service, the company has since grown into a popular local retailer, opening 16 brick and mortar locations across Chicago, Dallas, and Washington, DC. Foxtrot co-founder and CEO Michael LaVitola joined Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
The January 6 committee has subpoenaed four tech giants for more information on what they did and didn't do leading up to last year's deadly Capitol insurrection. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit were asked to assist the investigation in August, but the committee says their responses have been 'inadequate.' Craig Timberg, a national technology reporter at the Washington Post, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell for more details about the subpoenas, why this is happening now, and how it might impact social media companies moving forward.
As Meta and Microsoft ramp up their AR and VR tech futures, analysts have been waiting on word from Apple, but the consumer tech giant is reportedly delaying such an announcement. Doug Astrop, a managing partner at Exponential Investment Partners, joined Cheddar to dive into the rumors about the possibilities of a foray into the metaverse by Tim Cook's megacorp sometime in 2022 or 2023. "We can't really predict with a great deal of certainty how it's going to play out, but I'm confident Apple's going to be a big player and do very well in any scenario that unfolds," said Astrop.
Makena Kelly, politics reporter at The Verge, joins Cheddar News to discuss what's next for net neutrality as Biden's other nominee for the FCC, Gigi Sohn, awaits votes from the committee and Senate.
Specializing in AI, robotics, and automation for the global supply chain, Symbotic announced last month it will be tapping the public markets in a SPAC deal with investment giant SoftBank. Symbotic CFO Tom Ernst and Vikas Parekh, a managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers spoke with Cheddar about going public and the future of modernizing logistics amid the constrained supply networks. "The supply chain is fundamentally broken," said Ernst. "By employing the best in modern technology for autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence, we're able to fundamentally rethink the way in which you receive and store and sort goods, making for a dramatically more efficient supply chain."
Michael Hershfield, Founder & CEO of Accrue Savings, joined Wake Up With Cheddar to discuss the company's new round of funding, and its core mission of rewarding consumers for saving rather than taking on more debt with buy now, pay later options.
