Google’s former ad boss Sridhar Ramaswamy is pivoting from consumer search to enterprise A.I.

Last month, Google challenger and search engine Neeva said it was ending its consumer business after struggling to attract new users.  

Founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan had set out to reinvent the search experience with a new generative A.I. engine, but then it became clear that Microsoft planned to spend billions doing just that with Bing. 

“Startups don’t really do that well in a world in which there are people that are just outspending it by many orders of magnitude,” Ramaswamy said on a call with Fortune. “That’s when Vivek and I decided that we would be better off applying our skills in infrastructure, in search, in A.I. and language models to more of an enterprise setting.” 

Now, after being acquired by cloud giant Snowflake, Ramaswamy has plans to build a product that leverages generative A.I. to build SQL queries. Neeva showed demos of it at Snowflake’s summit this week. Ramaswamy said he hopes to launch it in a private preview for customers in a few months.

But even in the enterprise space, Neeva is still guaranteed to come across challengers like Salesforce when aiming to deliver enterprise-ready A.I.

However, Ramaswamy, Google’s former ad boss who has worked in search pretty much his whole life, thinks that Neeva is uniquely positioned. “We are the gold standard in terms of being a safe, secure, trusted, and efficient platform for both data and applications.” He said the team is gathering momentum for what’s called “native applications,” which allow third parties to write applications on top of Snowflake’s, causing Neeva to consider avenues from a first-party perspective and encouraging an ecosystem of developers. 

Ramaswamy said that for business use cases, Neeva is aiming to be reliable and predictable. But the tech is early enough that a human will still need to verify the outputs.

Neeva’s technique involves typing a question into a chatbot, which will then “retrieve a set of documents or a set of facts that are relevant to the question, supply them to the language model, and then have the model generate answers within the context of the facts that have been provided.”

The purpose of that method, Ramaswamy said, is to make the output more grounded and incorporate real-time data into it. 

That emphasis on safety and accuracy has been a long-held value for Ramaswamy. He said growing up, his dad was picky about which newspaper the household bought and avoided those he felt were sensational and that’s driven his values around safety in the industry.

“I’m also old enough to remember the time of cycling to a library to look up an encyclopedia,” Ramaswamy said. “So there’s that little kid in me that sort of likes the idea of like, what is trustworthy?”

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Andrea Guzman

NEWSWORTHY

Inflection AI raises $1.3 billion. San Francisco-based startup Inflection AI launched its first product in May with a personal assistant and companion named Pi. But even more developments on it could come after it nabbed $1.3 billion in a new round of funding from Microsoft, Nvidia, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Bill Gates. The size of Inflection’s new funding round reflects skyrocketing investor enthusiasm for startups pioneering generative A.I. The funding also reflects the cost of creating these models, which are trained on pricey computer chips in large data centers. Inflection seemed intent on surpassing competing systems from OpenAI and Meta in the press release announcing its latest funding round, saying it would use the money to build a supercomputer, in conjunction with chipmaker Nvidia and computing infrastructure company CoreWeave, for training massive A.I. models.

The FTC’s antitrust suit against Amazon. In the coming weeks, the Federal Trade Commission will file a major antitrust suit focused on Amazon’s core online marketplace. Bloomberg reviewed the case’s documents and talked to people familiar with it, finding that the agency’s main allegation is that Amazon has used its power to reward online merchants that use its logistics services while penalizing merchants that don’t. This comes after the FTC has already filed three cases against Amazon, including a case last week alleging that the company tricks consumers into Prime subscriptions. Now, FTC Chair Lina Khan's public comments indicate a desire to restructure the company, which Amazon would likely appeal.

Layoffs hit Niantic. Pokémon Go creator Niantic is cutting about 25% of its workforce and halting production on some games, CEO John Hanke told employees in a Thursday email. Expenses were growing faster than revenue, Hanke said, and the company needs to “weather the current challenges in the market.” Hanke also cited a desire to act on long-term opportunities and will be focusing more on augmented-reality tech than on games. The Wall Street Journal reports that Niantic is working on developing tech for AR headsets and runs Lightship, a platform for other software companies to create augmented-reality experiences.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

$34 billion

—The amount that Microsoft’s Azure cloud server rental business earned in 12 months. That amount is less than half of the revenue of Azure’s competitor, Amazon Web Services, which garnered $72 billion in the 12 months ending June 2022. The Information, which reviewed these numbers in internal documents posted by federal antitrust regulators on a court website this week, reports that this could change investor perceptions of Microsoft’s cloud business, as it suggests it hasn’t done as well as originally thought.

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BEFORE YOU GO

A.I. helped scientists find ghost particles. Neutrinos are hard to detect particles that zoom across space, hence the nickname of “ghost particles.” But now astronomers have detected neutrinos that came from inside the Milky Way, as opposed to faraway galaxies. Vice’s Motherboard reports that this finding will help identify sources of high-energy particles, such as neutrinos and cosmic rays, a major goal for astronomers.

The discovery was accomplished with a detector at the South Pole that had identified neutrinos from distant galaxies, but none from the Milky Way. But after applying machine learning to a 10-year dataset, the detector found “neutrinos from the Galactic plane.” That serves as evidence that our galaxy contains high-energy neutrinos, a study in the journal Science says. Mirco Hünnefeld, a member at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory told Motherboard that with this discovery, “we now have this new lens on our galaxy.”