Good morning.
The A.I. takeover of the business world continues apace. Mark Cuban said recently: “I don’t care how big you are or how small you are, you have to learn about A.I.” I agree.
But where are we on the hype curve? Yesterday, I stopped by a Salesforce event hosted by CEO Marc Benioff in New York to promote its new products—which are essentially its old products with A.I. attached and “GPT” added to the name—Tableau GPT, Slack GPT, Einstein GPT, Sales GPT, Service GPT. Benioff, as always, is all in.
Anyone who is old enough to remember the 1990s may think this sounds similar to the dot com craze—when businesses by the hundreds attached “.com” to their name and saw valuations soar. But tech analyst Dan Ives says this is not “a 1999 moment”—with a bubble about to burst—but rather “a 1995 moment”—with a long and steep runway ahead.
As someone who has spent my life attempting to acquire facts and uncover truth, I continue to be disturbed by ChatGPT’s casual disregard for both. I asked Benioff about this yesterday. His response:
“We haven’t solved this problem. We’re not going to solve this problem. That’s why we need to keep a human in the loop…The way we’ve implemented this, there’s always somebody involved before they push the send button.”
That’s somewhat encouraging. But we still face the challenge of teaching people to separate good information from bad—a challenge we haven’t done very well in addressing to date.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
