Salesforce says we’re in the middle of an AI revolution that will culminate in an artificial general. … [+]
CRM and cloud software pioneer Salesforce is building toward artificial general intelligence for business, founder, CEO and chairman Marc Benioff said today at the company’s Dreamforce conference. Benioff calls Dreamforce the world’s largest AI conference, and will host OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman in a talk later today.
At the conference, Salesforce announced Einstein Copilot, which will help the company’s 20,000 global “trailblazers” build AI-inspired apps for their businesses around the world without code.
But the company’s ambitions are clearly far ahead.
“AI will change everything. Everything is going to change,” Benioff said, talking about predictive artificial intelligence and creative AI, adding that Salesforce’s platform will soon be “autonomous with agents. And soon there will be AGI.”
Benioff outlined four waves of enterprise AI, the first two of which are currently real, available and shipping:
- Predictor
- The creator
- The sovereign and the agent
- Artificial General Intelligence
“Agents“Intelligent automations are driven by AI to accomplish tasks, communicate information, make decisions, or learn new things. AGI is artificial general intelligence — human-level or enhanced cognition — that experts agree on. But those who think it’s possible are deeply divided on timelines.
Jeffrey Hinton, 2018 Turing Award winner, former head of Google’s DeepMind division, and one of the “g”The odfathers of deep learning“, AGI says may be 5-20 years away, but stresses its lack of confidence.
Geoffrey Hinton’s Artificial General Intelligence Timeline Predictions
“I now predict 5 to 20 years but without much confidence,” he said On Twitter, now X. “We live in very uncertain times. It’s possible that I’m completely wrong about digital intelligence overpowering us.
Benioff made the comment at the start of an in-depth presentation of his company’s AI plans and offerings, noting that Salesforce is now the world’s third-largest software company with revenue guidance of $35 billion by 2024. Is. As of 2014, there are 300 AI patents, and its employees have written 227 AI research papers. In many ways, Salesforce sees itself as a key contender for enabling the AI-first enterprise, as companies that can best implement AI technology in the next five years will be left behind. There is a possibility of
Salesforce’s Einstein AI engine already makes more than a trillion predictions a week, the company says, and Chief Technology Officer Parker Harris said the company has built “more than 10 LLMs.”
LLMs are large language models that drive some of the most sophisticated and influential AI engines of the past few years, such as ChatGPT.
“We want to reach AI nirvana,” Benioff said.
AI Nirvana, perhaps, occurs when companies can implement AI to streamline processes, enable faster decisions, and smoother customer service. Others at Salesforce say it’s an important step in the technology’s evolution.
“When Google came out 20 years ago … everybody got smart,” Clara Shea, Salesforce’s CEO for AI, told me earlier this week. “We are now witnessing one of those seminal moments … we are witnessing a step forward in human potential.”
AI nirvana also sounds like “hyper-automation.”
As CTO Harris pointed out, this hyper-automation means AI that auto-builds websites, auto-generates product descriptions for e-commerce apps, auto-builds landing pages for marketing campaigns. Generates automatically. Salesforce demonstrated how client Williams-Sonoma is using AI for its service representatives to automatically suggest answers to customer questions, proactively suggest solutions to problems, and ask clients Have a conversation. For sales reps, Salesforce showed how AI can set up meetings, record notes from those meetings, and create action items.
According to the company, Salesforce innovates in AI
As with previous Salesforce AI presentations, the word “trust” featured heavily in Benioff’s presentation. Benioff acknowledged that there is a trust gap in the industry.
“We all know what can happen if AI goes wrong,” he said. “Ever see that movie with HAL? Let’s keep it moving in the right direction.”
(HAL is, of course, in AI. 2001: A Space Odyssey Who tries to kill an astronaut. Famously, the seminal computer software company IBM has HAL each letter followed by one.)
Salesforce has established policies and procedures, as well as no fewer than six ethical AI councils, to make AI safer, Benioff says. The company also emphasizes its key principles of ethical AI, including “our product policies protect human rights,” “we advance responsible AI globally,” and “transparency builds trust.” “
A challenge to the company’s AI mission: When I pressed Salesforce CEO for AI Clara Shih for specifics on how AI will improve customer service, she didn’t have concrete numbers. It seems clear that better data, tighter integration, and faster innovation will help companies serve customers better. But hard data to support this in the real world is still missing.
As for AGI, or artificial general intelligence, it’s hard to tell whether Benioff is seriously pushing it as a corporate initiative or simply saying it’s the final state of AI development currently in sight. Is. Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil thinks It will take another six years to get there, while others just don’t want to speculate on timelines.
The biggest question about AGI if we achieve it, however, is not whether it will make business a little faster, but whether we will survive its arrival.
Credit : www.forbes.com
