AI everywhere

Vandan Desai -

It's been a while since the blockbuster release of ChatGPT. The adoption of this product was not only fast; but it has now set up a trend.

After Microsoft made a massive investment, Microsoft Edge and Bing is now powered by AI.

The new Bing is like having a research assistant, personal planner, and creative partner at your side whenever you search the web. With this set of AI-powered features, you can:
- Ask your actual question. When you ask complex questions, Bing gives you detailed replies.
- Get an actual answer. Bing looks at search results across the web to offer you a summarized answer.
- Be creative. When you need inspiration, Bing can help you write poems, stories, or even create you a brand new image.

In the chat experience, you can also ask follow-up questions such as, “can you explain that in simpler terms,” or, “give me more options” to get different and even more detailed answers in your search. However, in chat, each conversation will have a limited number of interactions, to keep the interactions grounded in search.

Imagine your search results being offered in small quantities in a chat window - instead of throwing you the kitchen sink. After using it for sometime - its intuitive, simple and effective.

Later they announced Microsoft 365 Copilot - no its not Clippy:

Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and more — to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and uplevel skills. Today we’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads.

Sounds pretty impressive right? It is. I had the opportunity to give it a try and this is pretty darn good.

As Microsoft continues to integrate AI in its software and other tools, other software vendors aren't sitting quiet. A lot of tools that I use daily for work or personal use; now have new AI feature popping up.

Ever since Warp Terminal came out, I have been using it for all of my CLI needs. Recently a new version talked about AI. I rolled my eyes and thought lets go check out this gimmick. Let me tell you this - it ain't any gimmick, this AI integration they have done; although simple, its damn powerful.

Getting CLI commands or bash scripts ready made is very power. This is super productive. I have been able to automate my scripts and troubleshoot way faster. Spoke to a DevOps colleague of mine who users Warp and he quotes:

I can feel being 50-60% more productive. Dude, I'm working at the speed of light now.

Notion, another tool that I use for taking down notes, writing blog articles - like this one. I asked AI to write something and here is the output:

Notion has also hopped onto the AI trend with its new AI-powered writing assistant. It provides helpful suggestions for grammar and sentence structure, and even makes suggestions to improve clarity and conciseness. The feature is currently in beta, but it's already proving to be a useful tool for those who use Notion for writing and note-taking.

It keeps the context in mind and gives you a pretty good suggestion.

Just make sure you verify AI suggested text before publishing them 😁

And last but not least, the latest in AI - Cursor. An editor made for programming with AI. In their own words:

Write: Generate 10-100 lines of code with an AI that's smarter than Copilot

They claim its better compared to Github's Copilot, but the very first step was to enalbe Github Copilot on launch.

After giving it a go for a couple of hours, all I can say is I will be sticking with Visual Studio Code and maybe Github Copilot for now. But this looks very promising too.

I'm now on a hunt to find out applications that are now integrating these generative AI tools. It has been a while where I have been this excited and I look forward to see what new AI capability is someone going to bring out tomorrow.

There is definitely a long way to go but AI is here to stay and these are very exciting times.

For the time being, you can ask AI to do something productive, answer a burning question, solve the nagging issue with your code, or write a damn haiku about you or your product or your company.

tldr;

  • There is an explosion of LLM based AI integration with almost every tool and utility you use today. Some of them are great.
  • AI is not going to replace jobs, but I strongly believe people who use AI will definitely end up replacing people who don't.