The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Gilbane Advisor 1-29-25 — Picking a go-to AI, DeepSeek implications

January 29, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Ethan Mollick, and Alberto Romero.

Additional reading comes from Daniel Tunkelang, Cassie Kozyrkov, Mike Masnick, and Om Malik.

News comes from Progress Software, Perplexity, TransPerfect, and TileDB.

Next issue arrives February 12.

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

Opinion / Analysis

Which AI to use now: An updated opinionated guide

Picking your general-purpose AI

Ethan Mollick’s article is unbiased, non-technical, recent (well, 2 days old), includes 7 models, a feature table, and examples. This is a valuable resource for anyone who isn’t a full-time AI expert or practitioner, or doesn’t have the time or interest to try out all the models on their own.  (10 min)

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/which-ai-to-use-now-an-updated-opinionated

7 implications of DeepSeek’s victory over American AI companies

DeepSeek burst into the AI mainstream a week ago on Monday, after DeepSeek R1 was released. Excitement and panic ensued as analysts and investors digested the potential implications. Alberto Romero published a good technical analysis, and followed up yesterday with a look at some larger market and political issues — both articles are worth reading. This free version of his post expands on 5 of the 7 implications he mentions. (14 min)

https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/7-implications-of-deepseeks-victory

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Progress launches Progress Data Cloud Platform

The new Progress Data Cloud platform enables managed hosting of feature-complete instances of Progress Semaphore and Progress MarkLogic.
https://www.progress.com/data-cloud

Perplexity introduces Sonar Pro API

With Perplexity’s features combined with Sonar and Sonar Pro API you can build GenAI search capabilities with real-time, web-wide research.
https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/getting-started

TransPerfect acquires H2A

Enables TransPerfect to enhance its global business services and broaden support for clients with diverse language needs.
https://www.transperfect.com/about/press/transperfect-expands-global-contact-center-and-bpo-capabilities-acquisition-h2a

TileDB now available in AWS Marketplace

Research, business and data teams can organize, structure, collaborate and analyze structured and unstructured data in one place.
https://tiledb.com

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 most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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

TileDB now available in AWS Marketplace

January 23, 2025 /

TileDB, a database designed for discovery, announced its availability through AWS Marketplace. AWS customers now have access to TileDB’s omnimodal capabilities directly within AWS Marketplace, streamlining the purchase and management of TileDB within their AWS environment. This expanded accessibility ensures a more diverse range of organizations can advance research and therapeutic development.

“Frontier” data is novel, large, diverse and complex, extremely valuable. Harnessing its power is key to an organization’s ability to unlock important insights and gain competitive advantage. For example, in healthcare and life sciences, diverse multiomics data is a valuable asset that fosters innovation, providing a clear competitive advantage by dramatically shrinking time to discovery for life-saving therapies. However, existing cloud database management systems struggle to efficiently manage such vast and varied frontier data, including population genomics, single-cell analyses, bioimaging, and other large datasets.

TileDB makes it possible for organizations to catalog all their data centrally, whether common and conventional or frontier and multimodal. This omnimodal architecture not only simplifies data discovery and enables secure collaboration, but also empowers research teams to make breakthrough correlations with speed.

https://tiledb.com

Progress launches Progress Data Cloud Platform

January 23, 2025 /

Progress, a provider of AI-powered digital experiences and infrastructure software, announced the launch of Progress Data Cloud, a managed Data Platform as a service designed to simplify enterprise data and artificial intelligence (AI) operations in the cloud to accelerate digital transformation and AI initiatives while reducing operational complexity and IT overhead.

Progress Data Cloud enables managed hosting of feature-complete instances of Progress Semaphore and Progress MarkLogic, with plans to support additional Progress products in the future. Benefits include:

  • Eliminates infrastructure complexity with always-on infrastructure management, monitoring service, continuous security scanning and automated product upgrades.
  • Reduces IT costs and bottlenecks with predictable pricing, resource usage transparency and no egress fees.
  • Hardens security with an security model that is SOC 2 Type 1 compliant.
  • Supports GenAI demands and large-scale analytics.

For MarkLogic customers Progress Data Cloud accelerates time to production by offering managed hosting for the Progress MarkLogic Server database and the Progress MarkLogic Data Hub solution with full feature parity.

For Semaphore customers Progress Data Cloud provides a new generation cloud platform with all existing Semaphore functionality plus new features for improved performance, security, reliability, user management and SharePoint Online integration.

https://www.progress.com/data-cloud

TransPerfect acquires H2A

January 23, 2025 /

TransPerfect, a provider of language and AI solutions for global business, announced the acquisition of H2A, a French company providing contact center customer experience and business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions.

H2A provides inbound and outbound customer support, telemarketing, order processing, and technical support for industries including telecommunications, retail, finance, and public services. The company’s focus on operational efficiency and client satisfaction has enabled it to consistently improve customer engagement and streamline business operations for its clients.

Joining forces with H2A will enable TransPerfect to enhance its global business services and broaden support for clients with diverse language needs. H2A will continue to operate under its current leadership team, with General Manager Marilynn Genieyz and Operations Director Anne-Sophie Samet joining TransPerfect’s senior management team.

https://www.transperfect.com/about/press/transperfect-expands-global-contact-center-and-bpo-capabilities-acquisition-h2a

Gilbane Advisor 1-22-25 — Knowledge graphs & trust, unverified code no-no

January 22, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Juan Sequeda, Dean Allemang & Bryon Jacob, and Steve Jones.

Additional reading comes from Eli Pariser & Deepti Doshi, Tim Bray, Ethan Mollick, and Sara A. Metwalli.

News comes from Contextual AI, Contentstack & Lytics, dbt Labs & SDF Labs, and Foxit.

Next issue arrives January 29.

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

Opinion / Analysis

Knowledge Graphs as a source of trust for LLM-powered enterprise question answering

This paper by Juan Sequeda, Dean Allemang & Bryon Jacob, is the result of two years of research and experimentation primarily focused on the relative contributions of LLMs and knowledge graphs to modern knowledge engineering practices. A really useful and forward-looking contribution. Includes link to last week’s updated PDF. (22 min)

“Our definition of trust is based on three main aspects: (1) LLMs hallucinate, therefore we need to ensure accuracy of responses, (2) LLMs have a black box nature, therefore we need to provide an explanation of where answers come from and (3) there is a risk of incorrect information being used, thus we need to ensure governance.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570826824000441

When did random code execution become a feature?

The largest security hole, presented as a bonus

Steve Jones on AI Agents… “There are three core times you should allow unverified code to be executed within the enterprise:

  • When you want to get fired
  • When you’ve decided that working for the company isn’t for you
  • When you’d really like to be personally liable for significant damages” (4 min)

https://blog.metamirror.io/when-did-random-code-execution-become-a-feature-e2b78a45ad6f

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Contextual AI launches platform for building specialized RAG agents

Specialized RAG agents orchestrate retrieval and generation based on conversational context for complex knowledge tasks with structured and unstructured data.
https://contextual.ai/blog/contextual-ai-platform-generally-available/

dbt Labs acquires SDF Labs

dbt Labs will integrate SDF’s multi-dialect, dbt-native SQL comprehension capabilities into dbt to improve performance and developer experience.
https://www.getdbt.com/blog/dbt-labs-announces-sdf-labs-acquisition

Foxit launches standalone web-based AI platform

Includes AI chat assistance, document and image analysis, summarization, multilingual translation, and text enhancement for modern document management.
https://www.foxit.com

Contentstack acquires Lytics

The composable DXP adds first-party data, audience insights, content analytics and profile management to elevate brand digital experiences.
https://www.contentstack.com ■ https://www.lytics.com

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 most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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

Perplexity introduces Sonar Pro API

January 21, 2025 /

With Perplexity’s Sonar and Sonar Pro API (the latter generally available to all developers starting today), you can build your own generative search capabilities powered with real-time, web-wide research and Perplexity features. We’re also expanding public access to advanced features like JSON mode and search domain filters for select usage tiers. 

The Sonar API is lightweight, affordable, fast, simple to use, and now includes citations and the ability to customize sources. It’s designed for companies who need to integrate lightweight question-and-answer features that are optimized for speed. 

For enterprises seeking more advanced capabilities, the Sonar Pro API can handle in-depth, multi-step queries with added extensibility, like double the number of citations per search as Sonar on average. Plus, with a larger context window, it can handle longer and more nuanced searches and follow-up questions. 

SimpleQA is the prevailing benchmark for factuality, designed to evaluate whether large language models can answer short, fact-seeking questions. Sonar Pro is a top-performing model on factuality because it combines the summarization power of LLMs with access to real-time information rather than relying on stored training data to answer questions.

https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/getting-started

Contextual AI launches platform for building specialized RAG agents

January 15, 2025 /

Contextual AI, an enterprise RAG company, announced the general availability (GA) of the Contextual AI Platform, helping enterprises build specialized RAG agents to support expert knowledge work.

While there is broad consensus that general-purpose AI agents are poised to streamline many generic tasks, Contextual AI believes that specialized RAG agents will instead be required to transform high-value, domain-specific knowledge work. For subject-matter experts in any organization, this means having AI tools that match their level of expertise and can be trusted to address complex or technical problems with confidence. Contextual AI has released public benchmark results demonstrating better performance in advanced RAG workflows across enterprise domains than Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

The Contextual AI Platform includes all the capabilities needed to build, evaluate, and deploy specialized RAG agents, helping accelerate AI initiatives from pilot to production.

Enterprises can use the Contextual AI Platform to create specialized RAG agents that intelligently orchestrate retrieval and generation based on conversational context, delivering accurate responses for complex knowledge tasks across large corpora of structured and unstructured enterprise data. The Contextual AI Platform is powered by RAG 2.0, jointly optimizing the retriever and the generator in the RAG system.

https://contextual.ai/blog/contextual-ai-platform-generally-available/

dbt Labs acquires SDF Labs

January 14, 2025 /

dbt Labs, experts in analytics engineering, has acquired SDF Labs, the team of former Meta and Microsoft engineering leaders behind SDF, a data transformation technology. The acquisition will integrate SDF’s multi-dialect, dbt-native SQL comprehension capabilities into dbt, delivering improvements to dbt performance and enhancing the developer experience, efficiency, data velocity and data quality. the SDF Labs team will become a part of dbt Labs.

SDF Labs, which emerged from stealth in June 2024, has focused its efforts on building a toolset and framework to address the complexities of compiling and understanding SQL that users write, regardless of platform. It’s technology, built on the Rust programming language and natively integrated into dbt.

SDF validates the SQL code a user is writing as it’s being written. This real-time feedback allows developers to embrace modern development accelerants like code completion and content assist as well as pinpoint errors and ensure data quality earlier in the development process. This expedites data velocity, boosts data quality, and makes organizations more efficient in their analytics practices. SQL comprehension also adds a new layer of detailed metadata to dbt’s table- and column-level lineage for enhanced data classification, enabling organizations to accomplish nuanced governance use cases.

https://www.getdbt.com/blog/dbt-labs-announces-sdf-labs-acquisition

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