It took OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT only 60 days to reach 100 million users when the AI model was released in November 2022, eclipsing adoption records previously set by popular apps such as Twitter, Facebook, Netflix and Instagram. So it should come as no surprise that an entire ecosystem of companies and advanced technologies has sprung up around generative AI in a remarkably short period of time.
This development is reshaping the narrative around how AI will be implemented across a wide range of industries and areas of society. The large language model has become a gateway to a much broader set of opportunities involving autonomous agents, business workflows and security solutions, all amid rapid advances in computing capabilities.
‘We’re moving into a world where the ecosystem around a model matters more than the model itself,” said Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of model repository Hugging Face Inc. “Making an LLM is one thing. It looks like the end goal, but in the end there will be so much more.”
Partnerships and funding from tech players
Wolf spoke on Tuesday during a briefing for the media at the HumanX conference in Las Vegas, an inaugural gathering that attracted more than 3,000 attendees. The event offered a prime opportunity for the major model providers to showcase just how much the ecosystem surrounding AI has grown.
OpenAI announced the signing of a five-year contract worth $11 billion with CoreWeave Inc., an AI infrastructure startup that is backed by Nvidia Corp. AI21 Labs Ltd., with funding from Nvidia and Google LLC, released its Maestro software system on Monday, designed to significantly boost the output quality of LLMs.
“Maestro learns your specific enterprise environment,” Ori Goshen, co-founder and co-CEO of AI21 Labs, said during an appearance at the conference on Monday. “It sets a new contract with AI.”
Mistral AI, with a strategic partnership to distribute its models through Microsoft’s Azure platform, participated in the launch of “Project Europe” this week. The initiative is designed to supercharge Europe’s startup growth by capitalizing on the success of ventures such as Mistral, which has a $6 billion valuation.
Yet it was the model provider Anthropic Inc. that generated some of the biggest buzz at HumanX this week. The company’s focus on reasoning models and coding agents, such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code released at the end of February, have drawn attention from the enterprise world.
Mike Krieger of Anthropic talks with The Verge’s Alex Heath about interest in his company’s AI coding agents during HumanX.
In an on-stage interview at the conference, Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger, onetime co-founder of Instagram, noted that more than 100,000 people had used the coding agent since its release barely two weeks ago. And he steadfastly maintained that Anthropic’s focus will continue to be on the enterprise market.
“The critical path for us isn’t through mass-market consumer adoption right now,” Krieger said.
Yet Anthopic’s alliances with major industry players such as Amazon.com Inc. and Google may inevitably force the model provider to reevaluate its strategy. Press reports this week disclosed that Google owns 14% of the high-profile AI model provider, and major investor Amazon has just debuted a major upgrade to its voice assistant called Alexa+ that leverages Anthropic’s algorithms.
Asked about Anthropic’s interest in moving into additional voice assistant platforms, perhaps including Apple Inc.’s Siri, Krieger coyly deferred comment on his firm’s plans.
“Talk to Claude,” Krieger said. “It figures out intent much better. I would love to power as many of those things as possible.”
Agents take center stage
If Claude was asked to provide a short answer about the future direction of the AI community, it would likely only need one word: agents. The rise of agentic AI was on full display this week in Las Vegas.
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced availability for a “Responses API” to simplify the process of creating and deploying agents, intelligent pieces of software that can perform independent tasks for users. The release followed OpenAI’s introduction of an agent in January called Operator that employed its own browser to perform tasks, and the February rollout of Deep Research, an agent integrated into ChatGPT for generating cited reports on user-specified topics.
“I do things with Deep Research that I just not have done any other way,” said Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, during a question/answer session at the conference. “The models are getting good enough now that they’ll be able to go off and do things for you in the real world.”
The leap into agentic AI by model providers offers one perspective on where agents may be headed, but it is the significant push by major industry players such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Salesforce Inc. that may ultimately set the course.
Amazon’s recent decision to form a new group within its cloud business that will focus on AI agents underscored how major enterprise players have lined up to have an impact in this nascent market. The new group will be led by longtime AWS executive Swami Sivasubramanian (pictured), who previously led the firm’s AI and data initiatives.
AWS’ Swami Sivasubramanian and theCUBE’s John Furrier
In an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE during the HumanX event, Sivasubramanian explained why agents had become a prime initiative for AWS and its CEO Matt Garman.
“Both Matt and I truly believe this will be the next multibillion-dollar industry,” Sivasubramanian said. “We thought it would be super-important for me to double down and spend all of my time thinking through this problem because this will be the next wave of innovation. This reminds me so much of the early days of AWS when we were innovating.”
That innovation is expected to include providing the tools that enterprises will need to manage a significant number of agents deployed throughout organizations. Amazon is seeking to capitalize quickly on agentic AI as it becomes more of a priority for cloud customers.
“We are at a moment and transformation where you can move from passive understanding and conversational agents to actually do the next step when it comes to automating workflows or transforming productivity or driving innovation and research,” Sivasubramanian told SiliconANGLE. “The industry is going to shift more and more to these agentic AI models.”
Another company making a big bet on AI agents is Salesforce Inc. The CRM provider unveiled its “Agentforce” platform in September and followed that with a series of enhancements that included a library of pre-built skills and enhanced reasoning. Earlier this month, the company added new capabilities for agents to take action proactively and a toolset for faster agent building, customization and deployment.
Salesforce has crossed the 500,000-deal threshold since September for its Agentforce offering, according to Adam Evans, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce AI, who appeared in a question/answer session during the conference. The company is also seeing expanded interest in agents across verticals beyond the ever-popular customer service application.
“Customer service continues to be the No. 1 thing,” Evans said. “But we see it across the board including financial services and regulated industries. This is a brand-new thing. It’s not like traditional software.”
This week’s gathering in Las Vegas provided a closer look at the dynamics shaping a sector of the tech industry that is moving at light speed. As evidenced by the interest of cloud providers, CRM powerhouses, and an assortment of information technology infrastructure players, AI has already moved well beyond being the cloistered province of data scientists and compute engineers. It has gone mainstream and even the most significant participants in AI are struggling to keep up.
“It’s going to be a lot faster of an industry,” said OpenAI’s Weil, whose prior experience included executive roles at Microsoft Corp., Twitter Inc., Instagram Inc. and Facebook Inc. “We’re all learning how these things work. It’s just a wild world to live in.”
Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE
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