The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Gilbane Advisor 3-5-25 — Web Stockholm syndrome, reducing hallucinations

March 5, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Alissa Cooper, and Simon Willison.

Additional reading comes from Hamel Husain & Greg Ceccarelli, Hannah Mayer, Lareina Yee, Michael Chui, &  Roger Roberts, Daniel Tunkelang, and Project Liberty.

News comes from Contentstack, IBM & DataStax, MongoDB, Foxit, and Adobe.

Our next issue arrives March 12.

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

Opinion / Analysis

The web can thrive without Google’s search monopoly

The Google online search monopoly case is now in the remedies phase, and the DOJ’s proposal includes a divestiture of Google Chrome. Last week Alissa Cooper published two posts addressing what this might mean for the web.

This post summarizes her analysis, and links to her more detailed post (The true cost of browser innovation: Why Chrome’s divestiture wouldn’t end the open web), supporting her conclusion. If you’re already interested in the topic you could just skip to the more comprehensive post. (6 min)

https://www.techpolicy.press/the-web-can-thrive-without-googles-search-monopoly

Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes

Simon Willison… “The real risk from using LLMs for code is that they’ll make mistakes that aren’t instantly caught by the language compiler or interpreter. And these happen all the time!”

Testing AI-generated code yourself is, if anything, even more critical than hand-written code. Willison explains, and also provides some tips on how to reduce hallucinations. His audience is mostly developers but this is an important and easy read for tech and non-tech executives. (4 min).

Also see the link below to AI essentials for tech executives. 

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/hallucinations-in-code

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Introducing Contentstack EDGE

The new DXP unifies the company’s headless CMS, Lytics customer data platform, personalization, automation, AI, and front-end hosting capabilities.
https://www.contentstack.com/company/press/introducing-contentstack-edge-the-worlds-first-adaptive-digital-experience-platform

IBM to acquire DataStax

Acquisition furthers IBM’s commitment to open-source; helps clients access untapped, unstructured enterprise data to maximize impact of generative AI.
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-02-25-ibm-to-acquire-datastax,-deepening-watsonx-capabilities-and-addressing-generative-ai-data-needs-for-the-enterprise

Foxit adds multi-document analysis to mobile AI Assistant

Enables users to boost productivity with AI-powered summaries, cross-document Insights, and instant data extraction with iOS & Android phones.
https://foxit.com

MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

MongoDB to integrate Voyage AI’s embedding and reranking models, delivering accurate and relevant information retrieval for sophisticated AI use cases.
https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/redefining-database-ai-why-mongodb-acquired-voyage-ai

Adobe brings Photoshop to iPhone, expands web version

New Photoshop iPhone app delivers Photoshop’s core imaging and design tools like layering and masking, tailored for mobile devices.
https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/02/photoshop-mobile-web

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, 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.

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Introducing Contentstack EDGE, an adaptive digital experience platform

February 26, 2025 /

Contentstack, a digital experience platform, announced the launch of Contentstack EDGE, an adaptive digital experience platform built for the AI era. Their next-generation digital experience platform (DXP) unifies the company’s headless CMS, recently acquired real-time customer data platform Lytics, personalization, automation, AI, and front-end hosting capabilities. Together, Contentstack EDGE is capable of delivering adaptive experiences, reacting in real-time to every customer interaction while staying on-brand through AI and data-driven decision-making.

Contentstack EDGE is built on a composable architecture combining its headless CMS and real-time CDP into an easy-to-use solution backed by the company’s Care Without Compromise support program and no-fail AI guarantee.

Contentstack EDGE embraces the company’s vision for digital experiences that are:

  • AI-Powered: Brand-aware generative AI and automated workflows to create, manage, and distribute intelligent content at scale with precision.
  • Data-Driven: Real-time, first-party customer data unified across sources to deliver the right message, to the right person, in the right channel, at the right time, every time.
  • Personalized: Content and journey analytics, and predictive modeling so brands can deliver highly dynamic and responsive experiences in real time.

https://www.contentstack.com/company/press/introducing-contentstack-edge-the-worlds-first-adaptive-digital-experience-platform

IBM to acquire DataStax

February 25, 2025 /

IBM announced its intent to acquire DataStax, an AI and data solution provider. DataStax’s technology will enhance IBM’s watsonx portfolio of products accelerating the use of generative AI, helping companies unlock value from vast amounts of unstructured data.

The acquisition also builds on IBM’s commitment to open-source AI. DataStax is the creator of AstraDB and DataStax Enterprise, NoSQL and vector database capabilities powered by Apache Cassandra; and Langflow, the open-source tool and community for low-code AI application development.

IBM will continue to support, engage, and innovate with the open-source Apache Cassandra, Langflow, Apache Pulsar, and OpenSearch communities in which DataStax participates. IBM’s long-standing commitment to open-source AI includes the open-source IBM Granite foundation models and Instruct Lab, an approach to advancing true open-source innovation around LLMs.

IBM helps clients scale generative AI and transform their business using enterprise data. The acquisition of DataStax enhances these efforts. Their vector database excels at harnessing unstructured enterprise data and accelerating its time to value, and Langflow provides a graphical, low-code design environment and component orchestration for generative AI apps that facilitates collaboration across diverse skillsets.

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2025.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-02-25-ibm-to-acquire-datastax,-deepening-watsonx-capabilities-and-addressing-generative-ai-data-needs-for-the-enterprise

Foxit adds multi-document analysis to mobile AI Assistant

February 25, 2025 /

Foxit, a provider of PDF and eSignature products and services, helping knowledge workers to increase productivity and do more with documents, today announced the addition of multi-document analysis to its AI Assistant feature within its mobile apps for iOS and Android. This new and unique capability enhances the AI Assistant’s functionality, enabling users to analyze multiple documents simultaneously directly from their mobile devices.

The introduction of multi-document analysis caters to the evolving needs of professionals who require efficient tools to manage and process large volumes of information. The new feature is designed to simplify workflows by allowing users to:

  • Summarize Multiple Documents at Once: Create concise summaries for all uploaded documents, saving time by avoiding the need to review each individually.
  • Ask Questions Across Files: Get answers that draw insights from multiple documents simultaneously, ideal for comparing contracts, reports, or research materials.
  • Extract Key Information: Pinpoint critical data, such as deadlines or figures, or find patterns and trends from across multiple files in seconds.

The multi-document analysis feature is now available in the latest update to Foxit’s PDF Reader and PDF Editor mobile apps for iOS and Android.

https://foxit.com

Adobe brings Photoshop to iPhone & expands web version

February 25, 2025 /

Adobe announced it is bringing Photoshop to mobile and expanding the web experience, with Photoshop on iPhone available today and Android coming later this year. The new mobile app is designed for a new generation of image and design enthusiasts to the potential of Photoshop in an easy-to-use mobile interface. Photoshop’s new app brings existing customers the ability to make edits anywhere.

Adobe’s new Photoshop Mobile and Web plan delivers more advanced image editing and design capabilities to mobile and web creators, including tools for precise selections, targeted adjustments, advanced color corrections, expanded access to commercially safe AI with Firefly-powered generative AI tools, full format support for opening and editing any Photoshop document and more. The new offering allows creators to work on the same project across devices.

Photoshop is also introducing a new Photoshop Mobile and Web plan which enables more creative power and precision with expanded access to Photoshop on the web and advanced editing features on mobile.

The free Photoshop mobile app offers premium upgrades through a new Photoshop Mobile and Web plan at $7.99/month or $69.99/annually, which includes additional features on mobile and iPad, along with access to Photoshop on the web.

https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/02/photoshop-mobile-web

MongoDB acquires Voyage AI

February 24, 2025 /

MongoDB, Inc., a database for modern applications, announced it has acquired Voyage AI, a provider of embedding and reranking models for AI applications. Integrating Voyage AI’s technology with MongoDB will enable organizations to easily build trustworthy, AI-powered applications by offering accurate and relevant information retrieval deeply integrated with operational data.

The risk of hallucinations has limited the use of AI applications for mission-critical use cases. These hallucinations typically occur when the AI model lacks sufficient understanding or context of data within an enterprise.

Companies need high-quality retrieval that ensures the most relevant information is extracted from their data with precision. Voyage AI’s advanced embedding and reranking models enable applications to extract meaning from specialized and domain-specific text and unstructured data—ranging from legal and financial documents to images, code, and enterprise knowledge bases. Their models are trusted by Anthropic, LangChain, Harvey, and Replit. Currently, Voyage AI’s embedding models are the highest-rated zero-shot models in the Hugging Face community. Voyage AI’s expertise in embedding models and retrieval architectures will enhance MongoDB’s AI capabilities to solve challenging problems with building and scaling AI applications.

Voyage AI’s embedding and reranking models will remain available through Voyage AI, AWS Marketplace, and Azure Marketplace.

https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/redefining-database-ai-why-mongodb-acquired-voyage-ai

Gilbane Advisor 2-19-25 — Open web vs crawlers, prompt-and-pray

February 19, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Shayne Longpre, and Hugo Bowne-Anderson & Alan Nichol.

Additional reading comes from Deborah Turness, Cory Doctorow, Kurt Cagle, and Michael Andrews.

News comes from Perplexity, Sprinklr & Bluesky, Databricks & SAP, accessiBe, and Transperfect.

Our next issue arrives March 5.

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

Opinion / Analysis

AI crawler wars threaten to make the web more closed

There’s an accelerating cat-and-mouse game between web publishers and AI crawlers, and we all stand to lose.

Shayne Longpre explains how this is likely to play out. He is not optimistic, but is hopeful. I’m sure he would love to hear about happier alternatives. You can reach him the Data Provenance Initiative. (5 min)

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/11/1111518/ai-crawler-wars-closed-web

Beyond prompt-and-pray

Building reliable LLM-powered software in an agentic world

Companies may be excited about the potential of AI agents, but enterprise workflows are complex and largely mission-critical, so most organizations are sensibly leery. Hugo Bowne-Anderson & Alan Nichol propose a “Structured automation … development approach that separates conversational AI’s natural language understanding from deterministic workflow execution”. Good advice. (8 min)

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/beyond-prompt-and-pray

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Introducing Perplexity Deep Research

Deep Research performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report.
www.perplexity.ai

Sprinklr announces new integration with Bluesky

Customers can use the Sprinklr platform to engage audiences on Bluesky, deliver consistent content, track metrics, and gather insights to inform brand strategies.
https://www.sprinklr.com

Databricks announces launch of SAP Databricks

The partnership with SAP natively integrates the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform within the newly launched SAP Business Data Cloud.
https://www.databricks.com/blog/introducing-sap-databricks

accessiBe updates accessFlow for native accessibility in web projects

Developers can achieve lasting accessibility improvements at a native level across web projects in alignment with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
https://accessibe.com

Transperfect acquires Apostroph Group

Apostroph expands TransPerfect’s footprint in the region, which includes client service, production, and studio facilities in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
https://www.transperfect.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

Introducing Perplexity Deep Research

February 14, 2025 /

From the Perplexity blog…

Today we’re launching Deep Research to save you hours of time by conducting in-depth research and analysis on your behalf. When you ask a Deep Research question, Perplexity performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report. It excels at a range of expert-level tasks—from finance and marketing to product research—and attains high benchmarks on Humanity’s Last Exam.

We believe everyone should have access to powerful research tools. That’s why we’re making Deep Research free for all. Pro subscribers get unlimited Deep Research queries, while non-subscribers will have access to a limited number of answers per day. Deep Research is available on Web starting today and will soon be rolling out to iOS, Android, and Mac. (Be sure update your apps to the latest version.)

Deep Research takes question answering to the next level by spending 2-4 minutes doing the work it would take a human expert many hours to perform. Here’s how it works:

  • Research with reasoning – Equipped with search and coding capabilities, Perplexity’s Deep Research mode iteratively searches, reads documents, and reasons about what to do next, refining its research plan as it learns more about the subject areas. This is similar to how a human might research a new topic, refining one’s understanding throughout the process.
  • Report writing – Once the source materials have been fully evaluated, the agent then synthesizes all the research into a clear and comprehensive report.
  • Export & Share – You can then export the final report to a PDF or document, or convert it into a Perplexity Page and share it with colleagues or friends.

www.perplexity.ai

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