The Gilbane Advisor

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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

Foxit launches standalone web-based AI platform

January 14, 2025 /

Foxit, a provider of PDF and eSignature products and services, helping knowledge workers to increase their productivity and do more with documents, announced the launch of Foxit AI, a standalone web-based AI platform that delivers document-centric AI capabilities to users across industries.

Foxit AI offers a comprehensive suite of features, including AI-powered chat assistance, document and image analysis, advanced summarization, multilingual translation, text enhancement, and the ability to analyze multiple documents simultaneously. By combining intuitive design, cross-device accessibility, and seamless integration with Foxit’s broader ecosystem, Foxit AI empowers users across industries to streamline workflows, gain actionable insights, and maximize productivity.

Whether simplifying complex legal documents, generating concise summaries, or translating content for global audiences, Foxit AI is designed to provide an efficient, secure, and user-friendly solution tailored to modern document management challenges.

https://foxit.com

Contentstack acquires Lytics

January 8, 2025 /

Contentstack, a composable digital experience platform (DXP) provider, today announced its acquisition of Lytics, a real-time customer data platform. The acquisition, which closed in December of 2024, brings comprehensive audience insights, content analytics and profile management to the Contentstack platform, unlocking real-time personalization for known and unknown users. Major global brands including Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Glassdoor, Universal Music Group, LiveNation, Clorox and Ancestry will join the Contentstack customer community. 

With the Lytics acquisition, Contentstack addresses the actionable first-party data activation side of the equation. The technology gives brands:

  • Real-time engagement data and audience insights for both known and unknown visitors.
  • The ability to easily create audience profiles and segments out-of-the-box.
  • A data activation layer that enables users to access and understand customer data and send it across preferred channels instantly.

The Lytics acquisition creates a combined entity with over 500 customers and 500 employees.

https://www.contentstack.com ■ https://www.lytics.com

Gilbane Advisor 1-8-25 — o3 and ARC, Simpson’s Paradox

January 8, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Melanie Mitchell, and Maria Mouschoutzi.

Additional reading comes from Chia Jeng Yang, Nilay Patel & Mustafa Suleyman, Kate Knibbs, and Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan, and Louie Peters.

News comes from Graphlit, RWS, Brightcove, and Grammarly & Coda.

Next issue arrives January 22.

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

Opinion / Analysis

OpenAI’s o3 model aces the “Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus” — but what does it mean?

The most interesting AI news in December was OpenAI’s announcement of remarkable benchmark results with their o3 model. Melanie Mitchell’s article on o3’s significance is the best and most balanced I have read. (13 min)

https://aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai-just-solve-abstract-reasoning

Water cooler small talk: Simpson’s Paradox

Is your data tricking you? What can you do about it?

Sophisticated data analysis is a woefully under-represented skill in organizations. We can’t all be statisticians, but decision-makers need to be more aware of the potential to be misled by even by well intentioned and proficient data collection results.

Maria Mouschoutzi provides an excellent example of “how aggregated data can hide or misrepresent subgroup-level patterns”. You don’t need any statistics knowledge, or code (there is a small amount) to understand the article and how to deal with this particular pitfall. (9 min)

https://towardsdatascience.com/water-cooler-small-talk-simpsons-paradox-caf98151db0e

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Graphlit Agent Tools Library streamlines unstructured data ingestion and AI agent workflows

The toolkit builds on Graphlit’s RAG-as-a-Service platform, enabling developers to rapidly build AI agents that streamline data handling and LLM-driven workflows.
https://www.graphlit.com

Brightcove partners with Acquia

The partnership with Acquia provides customers with integrated DAM and CMS capabilities to help customers build more cohesive, easy-to-deploy martech stacks.
https://www.brightcove.com/en/company/press/brightcove-partners-with-acquia-to-benefit-customers

RWS releases Tridion Sites 10.1

Web content management platform enables more granular control and management of global content, multilingual marketing campaigns, and digital experiences.
https://www.rws.com/about/news/2024/rws-launches-latest-version-tridion-sites

Grammarly to acquire Coda

Acquisition extends Grammarly beyond an AI assistant to become an AI productivity platform for Apps and Agents.

https://coda.io/blog/about-coda/grammarly-acquires-coda ■ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-acquires-coda

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.

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Graphlit Agent Tools Library streamlines unstructured data ingestion and AI agent workflows

December 31, 2024 /

Unstruk Data Inc, an AI software provider, introduced the Graphlit Agent Tools Library, now live on GitHub (github.com/graphlit/graphlit-tools-python). This new toolkit builds on Graphlit’s RAG-as-a-Service platform capabilities, enabling developers to rapidly build AI agents that streamline data handling and LLM-driven workflows. By eliminating infrastructure complexities, Graphlit positions itself as a comprehensive solution for organizations seeking to harness large language models (LLMs) and unstructured data at scale. Features include:

  • Multi-Agent Orchestration
    Built-in CrewAI integration offers a streamlined path to multi-agent collaboration without heavy coding.
  • Extensive Data Connectivity
    Ingest data from Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint, Notion, Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, Teams, GitHub, Jira, Linear, ensuring seamless integration of diverse sources into agentic workflows.
  • Robust RAG Tools
    Offers built-in capabilities for PDF OCR, content chunking, vector embeddings, and RAG conversation history in a single library of agent tools.
  • Multi-Model Compatibility
    Integrates with top LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Google AI, Groq, Mistral, etc.) for context-rich, near-real-time decision-making.
  • Multimodal Data Support
    Ingest and process diverse data types—including text, audio, video, and images—with automatic transcription and image embeddings for deeper AI insights.
  • Azure-Native Security
    Inherits enterprise-grade encryption, auto-scaling via Azure Functions, and compliance readiness (SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA) from Microsoft Azure, ensuring robust governance for sensitive data.

https://www.graphlit.com

Brightcove partners with Acquia

December 18, 2024 /

Brightcove, a streaming technology company, is sharing enhancements to its platform through strategic partnerships to enhance the video content creation, distribution and monetization, and to help customers build more cohesive, easy-to-deploy martech stacks.

The relationship with Acquia is part of a broader initiative to co-sell and co-market integrated solutions that drive mutual customer success. For example, Brightcove has been able to grow its enterprise customer base across industries, including financial services, healthcare, travel and tourism, and technology, as well as media companies. With Brightcove’s capabilities integrated within Acquia’s DAM (digital asset management) and the Drupal CMS, system integrators and agency partners have a video solution to add to these digital experience platform (DXP) practices, especially for clients who leverage video as a critical part of their digital strategy. 

Brightcove’s integration with Acquia DAM centralizes the storage and management of images, videos and documents, improving content deployment speeds. Brightcove’s APIs further extend the reach of Acquia’s capabilities, including the Brightcove Video Connect for Drupal. Customers can manage Brightcove video and players in their Drupal site from a single interface. Together, Brightcove and Acquia allow for a broader distribution of interactive video experiences that increase viewer engagement, and optimize marketing outcomes.

https://www.brightcove.com/en/company/press/brightcove-partners-with-acquia-to-benefit-customers

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