The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Year: 2023 (Page 12 of 23)

Gilbane Advisor 6-7-23 — Moats, text-to-SQL, semantic search

June 7, 2023 /

This week we feature articles from Jerry Liu, and Scott Brinker.

Additional reading comes from Sarah Perez, Rada Mihalcea, Oana Ignat & Zhijing Jin et al, Ben Thompson, and Airbyte.

News comes from PingCAP, SearchStax, Datometry & Databricks, and Snowflake & Neeva.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index/

Opinion / Analysis

The key point of Google’s “we have no moat” memo on generative AI is that ecosystems are the moat

Scott Brinker has a good read inspired by the Google “no moat” memo. He thinks the memo is “right on the money” and makes a convincing case why. (8 min)

https://chiefmartec.com/2023/06/the-key-point-of-googles-we-have-no-moat-memo-on-generative-ai-is-that-ecosystems-are-the-moat/

Combining text-to-SQL with semantic search for retrieval augmented generation

LlamaIndex is already useful for combining proprietary internal and external data and knowledge bases with LLMs to build custom data applications. LlamaIndex creator Jerry Liu describes their latest tool.

“We have created a brand-new query engine… that can query, join, sequence, and combine both structured data from your SQL database and unstructured data from your vector database in order to synthesize the final answer.” (10 min)

https://medium.com/llamaindex-blog/combining-text-to-sql-with-semantic-search-for-retrieval-augmented-generation-c60af30ec3b

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Content technology news

PingCAP Unveils TiDB 7.1

With simplified operations and enhanced MySQL compatibility users can accelerate the productivity of developers and infrastructure engineers.
https://www.pingcap.com

SearchStax launches SearchStax for Good

Developers at non-profit organizations can build web and mobile applications without the high cost of managing search infrastructure.
https://www.searchstax.com/ss-for-good

Datometry partners with Databricks

To help enterprises accelerate migrations from data warehouses to the lakehouse without having to rewrite or redefine application code.
https://datometry.com

Snowflake acquires Neeva​

Will incorporate Neeva’s search experience that leverages generative AI across the Data Cloud to benefit customers, partners and developers.
https://www.snowflake.com/blog/snowflake-acquires-neeva-to-accelerate-search-in-the-data-cloud-through-generative-ai/

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

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PingCAP unveils TiDB 7.1

June 5, 2023 /

PingCAP, a developer of distributed SQL database solutions, announced the release of TiDB 7.1, the newest iteration of its open source product, with enhanced features, improved performance, and greater ease of use. TiDB powers all applications with elastic scaling, real-time analytics, and continuous data. With simplified operations and enhanced MySQL compatibility, users can better meet high customer expectations and accelerate the productivity of developers and infrastructure engineers. TiDB 7.1 allows users to:

  • Stabilize business-critical workloads by giving multi-workload stability control to DB operators and significantly improving tail latencies.
  • Speed up workloads with fewer resources via architectural enhancements for higher throughput, lower storage costs, and reduced scaling time.

TiDB 7.1 also makes generally available multiple enhancements and key features added in prior non-stable releases since TiDB 6.5, including:

  • Multi-tenant UX – Allows operators of TiDB to set resource quotas and priority for different workloads.
  • Added flexibility and speed with a multi-value index – Also known as a JSON index, a multi-value index (supported in MySQL) enables an N:1 mapping of index records to data records.
  • Accelerated Time to Live (TTL) – Better performance and resource utilization by parallelizing across TiDB nodes.
  • Accelerated analytics with late materialization.

https://www.pingcap.com

SearchStax launches SearchStax for Good

June 2, 2023 /

SearchStax, a cloud search platform enabling web teams to deliver search in an easy and cost-effective way, announced the launch of a new program, SearchStax for Good, that provides web and mobile development teams a frictionless way to simplify the management of Apache Solr workloads in the cloud.

SearchStax for Good is designed specifically for non-profits to help eliminate both the infrastructure management problem, as well as to remove the high barrier to entry from a budgetary perspective. By offering an extended no-cost period of full-featured service, SearchStax for Good enables qualifying non-profits a way to get search infrastructure up and running immediately, without having to figure out how to re-allocate budget, or needing to first get budget approval.

Upon the initial launch of SearchStax for Good at DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023, SearchStax for Good will offer non-profit organizations 6 months free of SearchStax Cloud Serverless, a solution that delivers fast, scalable, and cost-effective Solr, thereby giving web and product teams the ability to build quickly and scale automatically while optimizing resource utilization. After the initial six-month period ends, participating organizations can continue using the service at a 40% discounted rate.

https://www.searchstax.com/ss-for-good

Optimizely expands partnership with Contentsquare

June 2, 2023 /

Optimizely, a digital experience platform (DXP) provider, announced it has expanded its partnership with digital experience analytics platform Contentsquare to enhance its experimentation capabilities with comprehensive journey analytics. Zone-Based Heatmaps from Contentsquare is a part of a two-way integration that provides Optimizely Web Experimentation users with insights on customers’ in-page behavior, a deeper understanding of the reasons behind experiments’ performance, and a pathway toward optimized digital experiences.

Available as a Chrome Extension, Zone-Based Heatmaps allows marketing teams to access a holistic view of customer behavior needed to establish always-on optimization that fuels personalization. Zone-Based Heatmaps enables marketing teams to glean and quickly act on unique engagement, conversion, and revenue data for each of its website page elements. Paired with Optimizely, marketers can perform deeper evaluations of ongoing and completed experiments and uncover new, revenue-driving experiments to run.

In addition to Optimizely and Contentsquare customers, this news could help users of Google Optimize who will need an experimentation offering when the platform sunsets on September 30, 2023.

https://www.optimizely.com/insights/blog/optimizely-x-contentsquare-5-ways-were-better-together/

Gilbane Advisor 5-31-23 — Gen AI gradient, massive multilingualism

May 31, 2023 /

This week we feature articles from Irene Solaiman, and the Meta AI Blog.

Additional reading comes from Stephen O’Grady, Max G. Levy, and Huw Roberts, Alexander Babuta, Jessica Morley, Christopher Thomas, Mariarosaria Taddeo & Luciano Floridi.

News comes from Docugami, Acquia, Adobe, and Elastic.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index/

Opinion / Analysis

Generative AI systems aren’t just open or closed source

“Conversation around generative AI tends to focus on whether its development is open or closed. It’s more responsible to envision releases along a gradient.”

Irene Solaiman proposes a framework of six levels of access to generative AI systems. Her focus is on policy and responsible and ethical release of these systems, and her framework provides a useful foundation for thinking about release strategies, and relevant policy decisions at different points along the gradient. 

(4 min summary): https://www.wired.com/story/generative-ai-systems-arent-just-open-or-closed-source/
Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04844v1

Introducing speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and more for 1,100+ languages

Meta AI reports on their Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project which combines “wav2vec 2.0 … and a new dataset that provides labeled data for over 1,100 languages and unlabeled data for nearly 4,000 languages.”. They include a short demo, info on error rates, and links to the code and the technical paper. (7 min)

https://ai.facebook.com/blog/multilingual-model-speech-recognition/

More Reading

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Content technology news

Docugami announces integration with LlamaIndex

Combine LlamaIndex with Docugami’s Document XML Knowledge Graph to build LLM applications that connect users to their own business documents.
https://www.docugami.com/blog/llamaindex

Acquia updates Acquia DAM

Enhancements to its digital asset management platform, Acquia DAM (Widen), includes an AI chatbot to assist in creative workflows and collaboration.
https://www.acquia.com/products/acquia-dam

Adobe unveils Generative Fill for Photoshop

The beta release is Adobe’s first Creative Cloud application to deeply integrate Firefly. Document Cloud, Experience Cloud and Adobe Express to follow.
https://firefly.adobe.com/

Elastic unveils the Elasticsearch Relevance Engine​

Companies can use their structured and unstructured data to build custom generative AI apps without the cost of running LLMs.
https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search/generative-ai

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, web, data, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news weekly. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

Datometry partners with Databricks

May 30, 2023 /

Datometry, provider of a database virtualization solution, announced their partnership with Databricks to accelerate the transition of enterprises from classic data warehouse technology to the lakehouse. The partnership will help enterprise customers overcome the lock-in of legacy vendors.

Enterprises struggle to move their workloads off legacy data warehouses like Teradata and Oracle. Until now, the way companies moved applications off these legacy systems was to rewrite them and translate the embedded SQL with conversion tools. This approach is not only costly and time-consuming but also error-prone and poses significant risk to an organization.

Datometry has joined the Databricks Technology Partner Program to offer customers a validated integration with Databricks that overcomes the challenges of conventional migrations. With Datometry, enterprises can move their business as-is without having to rewrite or redefine application code.

https://datometry.com

Snowflake acquires Neeva

May 24, 2023 /

From the Snowflake blog…

Search is fundamental to how businesses interact with data, and the search experience is evolving rapidly with new conversational paradigms emerging in the way we ask questions and retrieve information, enabled by generative AI. The ability for teams to discover precisely the right data point, data asset, or data insight is critical to maximizing the value of data.

That’s why Snowflake is acquiring Neeva, a search company founded to make search even more intelligent at scale. Neeva created a unique and transformative search experience that leverages generative AI and other innovations to allow users to query and discover data in new ways.

We plan to infuse and leverage these innovations across the Data Cloud to the benefit of our customers, partners and developers. Neeva allows us to tap into some of the most cutting-edge search technologies available to bring search and conversation in Snowflake to a new level.

As part of the acquisition, we are joined by some of the brightest minds working in search today. Neeva’s leadership and team members have been instrumental in the creation of numerous successful products like Google’s search advertising and YouTube monetization.

https://www.snowflake.com/blog/snowflake-acquires-neeva-to-accelerate-search-in-the-data-cloud-through-generative-ai/

Acquia updates Acquia DAM

May 24, 2023 /

Digital experience company Acquia announced enhancements to its digital asset management platform, Acquia DAM (Widen), including an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to assist in creative workflows. The capability enhances creative collaboration across content and creative teams with an always-ready sounding board and idea generator.

AI Assistant is integrated into the comments functionality of the Acquia DAM review and proofing tool, Workflow. Using it, anyone reviewing a content proof can ask the AI assistant a question in a conversational way and get a response in seconds to help spur creativity. Examples include getting copy suggestions to improve the written aspect of a project, requesting design suggestions, getting suggestions for visuals such as images or videos, receiving suggestions based on audience segmentation such as interests or behavior, or analyzing competitors’ content to help ensure differentiation.

Acquia also released new integrations for Acquia DAM to streamline collaboration across content and marketing teams and extend the value of their content across their martech stacks. These include: Canva, Jira, Dropbox, Marq, and Salesforce.

https://acquia.com/products/acquia-dam

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