AI: beyond Sticks & Stones

…Google stays above Elon/Zuck fray

Meta’s momentum with its Twitter clone Threads continued over the weekend, and surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT as one of the fastest consumer ramps in tech history:

“Threads reached the 100 million milestone even faster than OpenAI's generative chatbot ChatGPT, which surpassed 100 million monthly users in two months.”

Of course the media is transfixed on the competition with Elon Musk owned Twitter, as the main metrics to beat:

“The Threads app still has lots of room to grow, having not yet launched in Europe, where Meta Threads head Adam Mosseri said there is still some regulatory complexity to navigate. If Threads is able to retain its userbase, it could solidify its position as a real competitor for Twitter, which reported nearly 238 million monetizable daily active users in its last quarterly earnings report as public company last summer.”

And of course, the cage-match fueled rivalry between the two tech billionaires continued to make relatively unsavory headl new: 

“Musk and Zuckerberg were also taking shots at one another over the weekend, as Zuckerberg mocked Musk's tweet style and Musk called Zuckerberg a derogatory name.”

Specifically, believe it or not, 

“The ongoing feud between the billionaire leaders of rival social media giants Twitter and Meta continued this weekend, with Elon Musk trolling Mark Zuckerberg in a pair of tweets that called the Meta CEO a “cuck” and proposed a “literal dick measuring contest”

The broader context of all this of course, is that these are AI-fueled consumer products that can drive new users to experience AI algorithmic surfaced content in their news feeds far beyond using LLM AI technologies as a Search proxy. I outlined this in a post a few days ago. 

We are at the beginning of what’s possible with these AI technologies beyond Search, and Threads is but a glimpse of the products and services to come. Not just from tech giants like Meta and of course companies like TikTok, Google, and other ‘AI Native’ startups to come. 

As an example of those initiatives, was Google working on a medical version of their Palm LLM AI tech:

“Google’s Med-PaLM 2, an AI tool designed to answer questions about medical information, has been in testing at the Mayo Clinic research hospital, among others, since April, Med-PaLM 2 is a variant of PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O in May this year. PaLM 2 is the language model underpinning Google’s Bard.”

As the Wall Street Journal clarifies further:

“Google is testing an artificial-intelligence program trained to expertly answer medical questions, racing against rivals including Microsoft to translate recent AI advances into products that would be used widely by clinicians.”

“The November release of ChatGPT, a computer program that can fluently respond to a range of queries across subjects, has sparked early experiments at health systems across the U.S. to use the underlying technology in patient care.”

“Google is betting that its medical chatbot technology, which is called Med-PaLM 2, will be better at holding conversations on healthcare issues than more general-purpose algorithms because it has been fed questions and answers from medical licensing exams. The company began testing the system with customers including the research hospital Mayo Clinic in April, said people familiar with the matter.”

It’s a bit removed from the daily drama of a Twitter/Threads online battle, but an important reminder that AI tech has interesting consumer applications to come at scale, far beyond our daily headlines of Elon/Zuck blow by blow battles. Stay tuned.