The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Month: February 2024 (Page 1 of 3)

Couchbase adds vector search to database platform

February 29, 2024 /

Couchbase, Inc. cloud database platform company, introduced vector search as a new feature in Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) and Couchbase Server to help businesses bring to market a new adaptive applications that engage users in a hyper-personalized and contextualized way. The new feature offers vector search optimized for running onsite, across clouds, to mobile and IoT devices at the edge, so organizations can run adaptive applications anywhere.

While vector-only databases aim to solve the challenges of processing and storing data for LLMs, having multiple standalone solutions adds complexity to the enterprise IT stack and slows application performance. Couchbase’s multipurpose capabilities deliver a simplified architecture to improve the accuracy of LLM results. Couchbase also makes it easier and faster for developers to build such applications with a single SQL++ query using the vector index, removing the need to use multiple indexes or products. With vector search as a feature across all Couchbase products, customers gain:

  • Similarity and hybrid search, combining text, vector, range and geospatial search capabilities in one.
  • RAG to make AI-powered applications more accurate, safe and timely.
  • Enhanced performance because all search patterns can be supported within a single index to lower response latency.

https://www.couchbase.com/blog/announcing-vector-search/

IBM announces availability of open-source Mistral AI Model on watsonx 

February 29, 2024 /

IBM announced the availability of the popular open-source Mixtral-8x7B large language model (LLM), developed by Mistral AI, on its watsonx AI and data platform, as it continues to expand capabilities to help clients innovate with IBM’s own foundation models and those from a range of open-source providers.

The addition of Mixtral-8x7B expands IBM’s open, multi-model strategy to meet clients where they are and give them choice and flexibility to scale enterprise AI solutions across their businesses.

Mixtral-8x7B was built using a combination of Sparse modeling — a technique that finds and uses only the most essential parts of data to create more efficient models — and the Mixture-of-Experts technique, which combines different models (“experts”) that specialize in and solve different parts of a problem. The Mixtral-8x7B model is widely known for its ability to rapidly process and analyze vast amounts of data to provide context-relevant insights.

This week, IBM also announced the availability of ELYZA-japanese-Llama-2-7b, a Japanese LLM model open-sourced by ELYZA Corporation, on watsonx. IBM also offers Meta’s open-source models Llama-2-13B-chat and Llama-2-70B-chat and other third-party models on watsonx.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-02-29-IBM-Announces-Availability-of-Open-Source-Mistral-AI-Model-on-watsonx,-Expands-Model-Choice-to-Help-Enterprises-Scale-AI-with-Trust-and-Flexibility

Flux launches full release of WordPress on decentralized platform

February 29, 2024 /

Flux, a global decentralized technology company specializing in cloud infrastructure, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and decentralized storage, officially launched WordPress on its platform following a successful Beta phase that commenced in February 2023, making the most popular content management system (CMS), WordPress, accessible on Flux’s decentralized infrastructure.

The backbone of this innovative offering lies in Flux’s extensive network, encompassing not only enterprise-grade nodes, but also nodes ranging from individual users to data centers, designed to guarantee peak performance for WordPress sites. This infrastructure addresses crucial web metrics such as bounce rate and conversion rates, which are significantly affected by loading speeds.

Flux’s decentralized WordPress solution offers an efficient, cost-effective, and scalable hosting option. The ease of deploying a WordPress site on Flux, demanding minimal technical expertise, ensures accessibility for a wider audience, which is reinforced by extensive support resources helping to make the technology user-friendly and empowering for all.

Key features include geolocation capabilities for optimizing site performance based on user concentration, alongside built-in redundancy to guarantee maximum availability. With a four-tiered pricing plan that competes favorably with traditional hosting services, Flux delivers web hosting for all project sizes and budgets with accessibility at its core.

https://wordpress.runonflux.io

Gilbane Advisor 2-28-24 — Doctor chatbot, GenAI bubble

February 28, 2024 /

This week we feature articles from Rachel Draelos, and César A. Hidalgo.

Additional reading comes from Barr Moses, Paul Baier, David DeLallo, & John J. Sviokla, Jerry Liu, and Selvan Sunitha Ravi, Rebecca Qian, Anand Kannappan, & Clémentine Fourrier.

News comes from Ontotext, Adobe, DataStax & LlamaIndex, and Acquia.

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

Opinion / Analysis

ChatGPT is not a doctor

Rachel Draelos is a doctor, has a PhD in Computer Science, and believes chatbot technology has huge potential in medicine. In this wide-ranging and well-written article Dr Draelos demonstrates why that potential is a a ways off and provides some recommendations. This is an important read for patients, entrepreneurs, doctors, and LLM providers — all of whom will likely learn something. (32 min)

https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpt-is-not-a-doctor-5452a5c5784d

Is Generative AI a Bubble?

There is of course much concern about this. César A. Hidalgo makes the case that we are already in a bubble and in this quick read explains why (it’s the over supply of content not solving for attention scarcity). He remains cheery about the longer term potential. (3 min)

https://twitter.com/cesifoti/status/1761031691819274348

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Content technology news

Ontotext releases Ontotext Metadata Studio 3.7

Ontotext Metadata Studio OMDS 3.7 combines and interlinks textual knowledge with Wikidata to support developing a single, domain focused knowledge graph.
https://www.ontotext.com/products/ontotext-metadata-studio/

Adobe announces AI Assistant in Reader and Acrobat

AI Assistant in beta builds on Acrobat Liquid Mode to further unlock document intelligence with new capabilities in Reader and Acrobat.
https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2024/Adobe-Brings-Conversational-AI-to-Trillions-of-PDFs-with-the-New-AI-Assistant-in-Reader-and-Acrobat/default.aspx

DataStax and LlamaIndex partner to make building RAG applications easier

New integration lets enterprise developers use DataStax RAGStack with LlamaIndex to build GenAI applications with preview of LlamaParse.
https://www.datastax.com/press-release/datastax-and-lamaIndex-partner-to-make-building-rag-applicationseasier-than-ever-for-genai-developers

Acquia enhances brand management capabilities

New integrations for Acquia’s digital asset management solution enable marketers to reuse high-quality assets faster across digital channels.
https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-enhances-brand-management-capabilities

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

Algolia adds Looking Similar capability to AI Recommendations

February 27, 2024 /

Algolia launched a new ‘Looking Similar’ capability as part of its AI Recommendations solution. Looking Similar is an AI model that analyzes images in a retailer’s catalog to find and recommend other items that are visually similar. This new image-based feature is easy to implement and configure, and can enhance conversion rates by providing shoppers with a more visual browsing experience. 

With Looking Similar, users can find items faster that fit a specific theme, vibe, style, mood, or space as a shopper might visually explore products in a brick-and-mortar store. These visual recommendations are particularly useful for shoppers when they come across out of stock items, are simply looking for inspiration, or find a style they like but want differently priced options.

Retailers and marketplaces can implement Algolia’s Looking Similar, analyze a catalog, and quickly generate hundreds of recommendations. These recommendations can be further refined based on a number of preferred attributes such as ‘color’, ‘price’, and ‘size’.

Looking Similar provides retailers with control and empowers them to establish thresholds for the “Similarity” of image matches to create custom filters, specify the number of recommendations to be displayed, and ensure a specific level of image match similarity.

https://www.algolia.com/about/news/algolia-unveils-new-looking-similar-capability-elevating-shopping-experiences-with-image-based-recommendations/

Gilbane Advisor 2-21-24 — Common Crawl, data for what

February 21, 2024 /

This week we feature articles from Stefan Baack & Mozilla Insights, and Steve Jones.

Additional reading comes from Daniel Tunkelang, Kate Moran, Louis Rosenberg, and Matt Marshall.

News comes from Franz, Optimizely & Writer, Otter.ai, and Grammarly.

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

Opinion / Analysis

Training data for the price of a sandwich

It’s easy to think you know what Common Crawl is, but if you’re using some version of it as a key source for training data for generative AI, you need to do your own due diligence. This article from Stefan Baack and Mozilla Insights is a little bit repetitive so a quicker read than it first appears, and well worth it. (43 min)

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/generative-ai-training-data/common-crawl/

Your data warehouse thinking is killing your AI ambitions

I’m not sure how many of you don’t already know the difference, but Steve Jones’ article is a useful explanation for reading, or sharing, with certain colleagues…

“The reality is that traditional data warehousing thinking and its idea of some mythical “perfect” post transactional data set only exists because historically data hasn’t been important, except for finance regulations… 

The future is different, AI is critical to that future, AI that works at operational speed and can be engaged in operational decisions. This is the participation of data in business, the day-to-day, minute-to-minute running of the business, not simply reporting after the fact what went on…” (7 min)

https://blog.metamirror.io/your-data-warehouse-thinking-is-killing-your-ai-ambitions-849356dd3679

More Reading

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Content technology news

Otter.ai announces Meeting GenAI

AI Chat allow users to tap into the collective wisdom from past meetings no matter which platform.
https://otter.ai

Optimizely integration with Writer now live

Writer’s enterprise-grade, industry-specific generative AI capabilities within the Optimizely Content Marketing Platform.
https://www.optimizely.com ■ https://writer.com

Grammarly announces general availability of App Actions

New third-party app integrations and actions enable businesses and professionals to simplify workflows and reduce constant context-switching.
https://www.grammarly.com/app-actions

Franz announces Gruff 9

The web-based Knowledge Graph visualization tool offers LLM integration and unique RDF* (RDFStar) features for building AI applications.
https://allegrograph.com/products/gruff/

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

DataStax and LlamaIndex partner to make building RAG applications easier

February 20, 2024 /

DataStax announced its retrieval augmented generation (RAG) solution, RAGStack, is now generally available powered by LlamaIndex as an open source framework, in addition to LangChain. DataStax RAGStack for LlamaIndex also supports an integration (currently in public preview) with LlamaIndex’s LlamaParse, which gives developers using Astra DB an API to parse and transform complex PDFs into vectors in minutes. 

LlamaIndex is a framework for ingesting, indexing, and querying data for building generative AI applications and addresses the ingestion pipelines needed for enterprise-ready RAG. LlamaParse is LlamaIndex’s new offering that targets enterprise developers building RAG over complex PDFs; it enables clean extraction of tables by running recursive retrieval, promising more accurate parsing of the complex documents often found in business.

RAGStack with LlamaIndex offers a solution tailored to address the challenges encountered by enterprise developers in implementing RAG solutions. Benefits include a curated Python distribution available on PyPI for integration with Astra DB, DataStax Enterprise (DSE), and Apache Cassandra, and a live RAGStack test matrix and GenAI app templates.

Users can use LlamaIndex alone, or in combination with LangChain and their ecosystem including LangServe, LangChain Templates, and LangSmith.

https://www.datastax.com/press-release/datastax-and-lamaIndex-partner-to-make-building-rag-applicationseasier-than-ever-for-genai-developers

Acquia enhances brand management capabilities

February 20, 2024 /

Acquia announced new integrations for its digital asset management solution, Acquia DAM, that expand its brand management capabilities. These integrations — with Acquia Campaign Studio, Adobe Stock, and Google Translate reduce the complexity of maintaining a consistent brand experience across digital channels.

Acquia DAM is now integrated with Acquia Campaign Studio, the company’s marketing automation solution. The integration leverages Acquia’s instant search connector tool, so once a user is authenticated in the DAM connector within Campaign Studio, they can search, view, and select the asset of their choice within Campaign Studio’s email and landing page builders. Pictures in email and landing page builders dynamically change when updated in Acquia DAM.

An Adobe Stock integration automatically syncs a customer’s newly licensed Adobe Stock assets with Acquia DAM, bringing in essential metadata and offering smoother workflows. Creative pros can choose which types of Adobe Stock assets to monitor and sync, and the integration handles file copying and categorization in Acquia DAM. Customers can now use Google Translate to automatically translate text from selected metadata fields within Acquia DAM. The DAM automatically repopulates these fields with translated content in up to 20 languages.

https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-enhances-brand-management-capabilities

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