Does your company offer a product or just a feature? Dozens of companies have invested heavily in creating PDF readers that sit on top of OpenAI's GPT-4 or plug in to ChatGPT Plus, including AI PDF, AskYourPDF, ScholarAI, and Webpilot. Unfortunately (for them), OpenAI's recent update to ChatGPT Plus includes the ability to read PDFs. Oops!
This isn't really a lesson in AI, it's an old saw; building a third-party feature is only a good strategy if the company that owns the product decides to buy you or when your niche is so small that they're happy you're dealing with it. Otherwise, when the dragon breathes out (to mix my metaphors), nothing good happens.
OpenAI's multimodal update raises several questions, but foremost is whether or not big tech is the future of AI. Do you really need immense computational power to do generative AI, or are there smaller models (requiring less resources to build and use) in our future? I'm also wondering about how "general purpose" the big models will become and how useful those features will turn out to be. Everyone can use a word processor. Can everyone use a multimodal autocomplete engine?
As always your thoughts and comments are both welcome and encouraged. Just reply to this email. -s
ABOUT SHELLY PALMER
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named he covers tech and business for , is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular . He's a , and the creator of the popular, free online course, . Follow or visit .
