2023 – The year people get excited – and stay excited – about AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) – the tech behind Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Sydney – are mixing up the world of conversational AI, and we are excited.
There are two things that excite me most. First, just the fact that innovation is thriving at startups again. After a tough year for the tech industry, the launch of ChatGPT reminded us that bold and driven teams across the world are working on remarkable new technologies that hold the potential to shake Google’s (and Microsoft’s?) dominion from the bottom-up. For Ultimate, the craze around conversational AI also means we’re able to take a giant leap towards more humanized, empathetic interactions with customers through automation, leaving an era of clunky chatbots in the dust once and for all.
The second thing to be excited about is the technology itself. LLMs are typically based on neural networks and are trained using a technique called unsupervised learning, where the model learns to predict the next word in a sentence based on the previous words. Although LLMs have been around for years, OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – proved that they can make AI more accessible to mainstream consumers. This has sparked the imagination of thousands of entrepreneurs and developers to integrate OpenAI’s software into their offering – and to start creating their own.
Curious to learn more about ChatGPT and the tech behind it? Get our in-house AI researchers' take on it here.
Humanizing AI – in real time
Natural language processing, the type of AI that lets chatbots converse with us naturally instead of being restricted by a set of keywords, is our bread and butter. And we at Ultimate have been in the luxurious position to ride multiple waves of NLP improvements over the past few years, while we powered AI automation for companies at the forefront of tech and CX innovation.
Or, as our Senior AI Researcher Meysam recently put it, “We’re not actually riding the wave. We pretty much are the wave.” And we think it’s our deep AI expertise, incredibly hardworking team, and pragmatic approach to new technologies that makes that statement sound particularly true.
2023 marks the year people get excited – and stay excited – about AI. But as has become clear over recent months, many AI experts are still cautious about putting generative AI in front of customers in its current iteration. So we want to bring some of our pragmatism to the mix to create the version that can. Powered by a deep understanding of the tech we build, we’re balancing genuine excitement about this technological revolution with a no-nonsense approach to mitigating risks, considering technical safeguards, and making sure there’s always a quality product to back up the hype.
We’re integrating the game-changing tech of the moment into our product suite, building on a foundation of technical rigor and close collaboration with our customers that has propelled us to a leading position in the AI and automation space.
And we’re letting you join us on this journey: Instead of building a product and letting you in once it’s done and polished, we are going to build quickly, and we are going to build in public.
And this blog and video series is meant to share our honest learnings with you in real time. We’ll be covering:
- What’s so exciting about LLMs?
- How can we use LLMs in customer support automation, specifically?
- What are the challenges we face while integrating this new and exciting tech into our product?
- What are we doing to address these challenges?
- How do we see the world of LLMs developing in the near future now that there is so much attention and money poured into the technology?
We’re on the cusp of something great. Join us as we push the boundaries of everything we previously thought possible to transform the world of conversational AI.