Morning Brew - ☕ DIY AI

Why Databricks enlisted its workforce to train its AI
April 19, 2023

Emerging Tech Brew

Microsoft

Happy hump day, comrades! We’ve got news about bugs (insects and spying devices) as well as AI updates from enterprise startup Databricks and Sturppy, a Denver-based software company.

In today’s edition:

Patrick Kulp, Jordan McDonald, Drew Adamek

AI

Tearing down the house that ChatGPT built

A computer with the ChatGPT logo under magnifying glasses Francis Scialabba

Enterprise tech startup Databricks recently gave its 5,000 employees an unusual task: Write up random bits of question-and-answer dialogue, text summaries, creative prose, and anything else that might be useful for an AI to know about the world.

The goal was to collect enough data to train a machine learning model that could serve as a smaller but less expensive alternative to OpenAI’s enterprise-level ChatGPT, one that businesses could use to build their own AI language programs.

“We’re kind of doing a reverse Jeopardy,” Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told Tech Brew. “We’re trying to show the model how to behave.”

Databricks released the result last week in the form of Dolly 2.0, which the company claims is the first open-source instruction-following large language model (LLM) trained on human-generated data that’s available for commercial use.

By making the model open-source, the goal is to give businesses the ability to build and own affordable AI language models without third parties or API fees. It can be used for enterprise tasks ranging from aspects of drug discovery to insurance underwriting, Ghodsi said.

Keep reading here.PK

     

TOGETHER WITH MICROSOFT

We built this workplace on AI

Microsoft

Of course, employee wellness is important. But employee engagement and productivity are important too, and it can be hard to juggle all three—unless you have the right tools, that is.

Tools like Copilot from Microsoft, the AI assistant feature that’s totally integrated into the Microsoft 365 apps you already use. To learn more about Copilot, join Microsoft’s upcoming digital summit on April 20. Register for the summit to:

  • hear the latest research insights and speak about fundamental workplace shifts
  • experience a technology showcase on Microsoft Viva’s AI-based innovations that can empower and engage your workforce
  • attend panel discussions to discover expert insights and gain inspo from your peers

Get plugged into Microsoft’s innovative tech and learn more about how to use engagement and productivity to hit your business goals.

Reboot your workplace tech.

FOOD TECH

A bug’s life, part II

A bug’s life, part II Innovafeed

Large warehouses filled with insects? We’d normally take a hard pass—but they actually play a key role in filling gaps in our complicated food supply. As Tech Brew reported a few weeks ago, companies like Ynsect—which raised an additional ~$175 million recently, per Bloomberg—grow insects to feed fish that need reliable sources of protein:

Companies like Ynsect and Innovafeed, two major players in the industry, provide insect feed to pet-food companies and fish-farming operations in the aquaculture industry.
The aquaculture industry is heavily reliant on fishmeal, which is made from smaller marine life. Fishmeal supply is unstable due to factors including overfishing, pollution, and a decrease in fish catches, according to the scientific journal Animals. That is a whale-sized problem for aquaculture demand, which has increased 30% from the average in the early 2000s globally; it accounted for 7% of domestic seafood production by weight in 2022, according to NOAA.
If fishmeal stock struggles to keep up with demand, it could hinder a growing international aquaculture industry. That’s where insects come in: Insect-feed companies are hoping to meet that demand with supply, mixing their feed with fishmeal (or replacing it) while maintaining a similar nutritional profile.

Keep reading how companies like Ynsect manage massive insect farms.—JM

     

FINANCE

Our new CFO literally never sleeps

finance and AI working together Jittawit.21/Getty Images

Well, that was fast. Only four and a half months after a prototype of ChatGPT was released, a company has built and publicly launched an AI CFO. Finance professionals now need to confront the impact that AI is going to have on the finance function—whether they are ready or not.

Sturppy, a Denver-based software company, released a ChatGPT-4 tool as part of its Sturppy Plus FP&A platform on April 8. Called ChatCFO, and currently in alpha testing, it uses AI and natural language processing to interact with and interpret an organization’s financial data. But it’s not simply a ChatGPT plugin; instead, it’s based on a proprietary program and the company brands it as a “personal AI CFO available 24/7.”

It’s the first AI chatbot in production that is trained specifically on financial data that he’s seen and is an important first step in the introduction of AI chatbots into the finance function, Glenn Hopper, director at Eventus Advisory Group and author of Deep Finance: Corporate Finance in the Information Age, told CFO Brew.

“It’s not quite a robot CFO yet. It’s probably not even a junior analyst yet,” Hopper said. “But these are the seeds of what that will be.”

Keep reading here.DA

     

BITS & BYTES

Inese Online/Getty Images

Stat: A mere 7% of Swedes use Twitter on a daily basis, according to a study cited by the head of social media for Sweden’s public radio, Sveriges Radio. The broadcaster said in a blog post that it would abandon the social media network because it had “lost its relevance to Swedish audiences,” the AP reported.

Quote: “Is it really really more important that a firm have apprenticeship programs for traditionally disadvantaged groups, or better that they be able to build the damn stuff and build it well?”—Lee Branstetter, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to The Information in a story about the potential downsides of a government-subsidized EV and battery industry

Read: The end of faking it in Silicon Valley” (the New York Times)

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Written by Patrick Kulp, Jordan McDonald, and Drew Adamek

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