Tech news this week: Edge IoT, GPT-4 and Tableau integration

On this week's show, host Antone Gonsalves speaks with IOTech Systems CTO Jim White about edge computing. TechTarget reporter Esther Ajao talks about the latest in AI. And TechTarget reporter Eric Avidon discusses Salesforce and Tableau.

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IoT and the edge

IOTech helps companies connect industrial gear to IoT applications in manufacturing, renewable energy and transportation. It is also beginning to see a wider variety of use cases outside of the traditional manufacturing uses, such as aquaponics, theft detection and battery management.

"Think about a point of sale and a camera over the top of your point of sale," White said. "Yeah, you got the barcode reader, you've got the weigh scale, you've got RFID. But now put a camera on top of that, and the camera sees things as well. A camera is just another kind of point of information, another point of light in that whole mix."

Many of IOTech's edge computing clients are still in their planning phase, but some are beginning to move past it.

"We're seeing a lot more companies coming to us saying, 'Hey we want more of a solution. We want that solution at scale, and we want it today,'" White said. "We're seeing an evolution within the last year really -- from more play time to more real time."

AI news

Open-AI released GPT-4 on March 14, 2023. GPT-4 has better performance capabilities than GPT-3 and uses what they're calling a Socratic method to remember information. This enhanced capability gives GPT-4 a wider array of use cases, including law. GPT-4 passed the Bar exam and various other academic tests. One company -- Casetext -- is working on integrating it into its CoCounsel software.

"With the power of GPT-4 [CoCounsel] can research questions, parse through documents and write things for [lawyers],"Ajao said.

Microsoft also eliminated its AI ethics team to reduce costs the same day as GPT-4's release. Some analysts think this is because Microsoft wants to focus more on innovation, while another speculated it wants to let OpenAI focus on the ethics duties.

"The ethics team was like six people from what I heard, but this team was in charge of translating the technology and how it fits into compliance," Ajao said. "This could perhaps lead to regulation from state and federal lawmakers. Microsoft just put itself under a microscope."

Google also released its PaLM API, which gives developers access to large language models.

"Google is kind of taking a different approach than Microsoft in that Google is giving people a chance to experiment and kind of use the large language models they have and put it into their own applications," Ajao said.

Tableau and Salesforce

This week, Tableau introduced the latest version of its data analytics application.

"I'd say the two highlight features were the availability of a tool called Data Stories, which is an automated data storytelling tool in Tableau server; and an enhanced integration with Slack," Avidon said.

Tableau also recently released a tool called external actions that enables users to trigger actions directly from their dashboards.

"It's something a few other vendors have done as well. Tibco has a similar tool. I think Power BI has something called Power Automate," Avidon said. "But it's a relatively new development within the analytics space that you don't have to do your analysis in one place then move to another place to take action and then go back. It's a time saver, it's an efficiency saver. It's a brain flow and workflow."