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Salesforce follows Microsoft in launching A.I. tools for salespeople with help from OpenAI

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Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce.com Inc., speaks on a panel session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, May 24, 2022.
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Salesforce is the latest tech powerhouse to join ChatGPT mania.
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The company said Tuesday that it will release software incorporating artificial intelligence to help salespeople, customer service agents and marketers do their jobs. Salesforce is calling the offering Einstein GPT, drawing on OpenAI’s technology that’s taken the tech industry by storm since the Microsoft-backed startup opened ChatGPT to the public in November.

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Top technology companies are jockeying to capitalize on the surge in interest in generative AI, which can spit out text or other information after learning from pools of data culled from the internet. These AI models sometimes display incorrect information, prompting companies that sell to big businesses and governments to proceed carefully.

“We’re moving as quickly as we can without compromising the responsible ethical approach,” Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce’s Service Cloud business, said in an interview.

Like Salesforce, Microsoft is trying to keep the spread of incorrect information to a minimum as it brings AI features to its competing Dynamics 365 software. Microsoft said Monday that users can join a waiting list for a customer service feature that automatically drafts email messages, after announcing a similar feature for sales reps last month. Separately, Microsoft is adding OpenAI’s chatbot to its Bing search engine.

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One feature Salesforce is rolling out in Service Cloud will be a chat box with technology that can write an answer to a question based on information already stored in Salesforce. Agents can edit the automatically generated response or hit the send button.

Salesforce, which has come under pressure of late by activist investors to become more profitable, hasn’t finalized the pricing or the timing for the new features. Executives first want to see how things go with organizations enrolled in Salesforce’s pilot program.

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Salesforce has taken various steps to keep Einstein GPT’s capabilities from misinforming people. In addition to the involvement of the human agent, the company has narrowed the field of data that can influence the answer.

Both Salesforce and Microsoft are showing off services that can write marketing emails. Microsoft calls the new AI parts of its Dynamics applications Copilot.

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“It’s not Autopilot,” said Charles Lamanna, a corporate vice president at Microsoft. “It gives me options, but I am the editor. I choose the option that goes into the campaign.”

Salesforce is also touting a new ChatGPT app for Slack that can display information derived from Salesforce. OpenAI built the app and has been using it for the past few months, Shih said during a Monday media briefing. People can sign up to join a waiting list for the Slack app, a Salesforce spokesperson said.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is in on the hype. He mentioned AI 14 times on the company’s earnings call last week.

“In combination with our Data Cloud and deeply integrated with Customer 360, including Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack, Einstein GPT will open the door to the next level of intelligence and drive digital transformations in our new AI world,” Benioff said in a statement about the new offering.

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Shih said Salesforce started working with OpenAI’s language models over a year ago, but the excitement in the space sped up the timeline for giving early access of the new features to customers.

WATCH: Nobody was expecting a 27% margin guide from Salesforce, says Mizuho’s Greg Moskowitz

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Apple launches its Pay Later service

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Apple CEO Tim Cook visits the Fifth Avenue Apple Store on September 16, 2022 in New York City.
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Apple on Tuesday introduced Apple Pay Later, which will allow users to split purchases into four payments spread over the course of six weeks.
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Affirm dropped 4% on the news.

Apple Pay Later users will be able to manage, track and repay their loans in their Apple Wallet, the company said in a release Tuesday. Individuals can apply for Apple Pay Later loans between $50 and $1,000 and use them for in-app and online purchases made through merchants that accept Apple Pay. Payments have no interest and no fees.

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Users can apply for a loan within the Apple Wallet app without it impacting their credit score, Apple said. Once they select the amount they would like to withdraw, a soft credit pull will be conducted to make sure they are in “a good financial position” to take on a loan, according to the release.

Apple will invite select people to access a prelease version of Apple Pay Later Tuesday, and the company said it plans to expand access to all eligible users in the coming months.

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Approved users will see a “Pay Later” option while using Apple Pay to check out online and in apps on iPhones and iPads. They will also be able to apply for a loan right at checkout. Apple said purchases using the software will be authenticated using Face ID, Touch ID or a passcode.

The company said users can see the amount due for their existing loans, as well as the total amount due in the next 30 days, in Apple Wallet. Users will be asked to link a debit card as their loan repayment method. Credit cards won’t be accepted.

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This story is developing. Please check back for updates.



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Microsoft introduces an A.I. chatbot for cybersecurity experts

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Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the Windows 10 Devices event in New York on Oct. 6, 2015. Microsoft Corp. introduced its first-ever laptop, three Lumia phones and a Surface Pro 4 tablet, the first indication of the company’s revamped hardware strategy three months after saying it would scale back plans to make its own smartphones.
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Microsoft on Tuesday announced a chatbot designed to help cybersecurity professionals understand critical issues and find ways to fix them.
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The company has been busy bolstering its software with artificial intelligence models from startup OpenAI after OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot captured the public imagination following its November debut.

The resulting generative AI software can at times be “usefully wrong,” as Microsoft put it earlier this month when talking up new features in Word and other productivity apps. But Microsoft is proceeding nevertheless, as it seeks to keep growing a cybersecurity business that fetched more than $20 billion in 2022 revenue.

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The Microsoft Security Copilot draws on GPT-4, the latest large language model from OpenAI — in which Microsoft has invested billions — and a security-specific model Microsoft built using daily activity data it gathers. The system also knows a given customer’s security environment, but that data won’t be used to train models.

The chatbot can compose PowerPoint slides summarizing security incidents, describe exposure to an active vulnerability or specify the accounts involved in an exploit in response to a text prompt that a person types in.

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A user can hit a button to confirm an answer if it’s right or select an “off-target” button to signal a mistake. That sort of input will help the service learn, Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of security, compliance, identity, management and privacy at Microsoft, told CNBC in an interview.

Engineers inside Microsoft have been using the Security Copilot to do their jobs. “It can process 1,000 alerts and give you the two incidents that matter in seconds,” Jakkal said. The tool also reverse-engineered a piece of malicious code for an analyst who didn’t know how to do that, she said.

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That type of assistance can make a difference for companies that run into trouble hiring experts and end up hiring employees who are inexperienced in some areas. “There’s a learning curve, and it takes time,” Jakkal said. “And now Security Copilot with the skills built in can augment you. So it is going to help you do more with less.”

Microsoft isn’t talking about how much Security Copilot will cost when it becomes more widely available.

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Jakkal said the hope is that many workers inside a given company will use it, rather than just a handful of executives. That means over time Microsoft wants to make the tool capable of holding discussions in a wider variety of domains.

The service will work with Microsoft security products such as Sentinel for tracking threats. Microsoft will determine if it should add support for third-party tools such as Splunk based on input from early users in the next few months, Jakkal said.

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If Microsoft were to require customers to use Sentinel or other Microsoft products if they want to turn on the Security Copilot, that could very well influence the purchasing decisions, said Frank Dickson, group vice president for security and trust at technology industry researcher IDC.

“For me, I was like, ‘Wow, this may be the single biggest announcement in security this calendar year,’” he said.

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There’s nothing stopping Microsoft’s security rivals, such as Palo Alto Networks, from releasing chatbots of their own, but getting out first means Microsoft will have a head start, Dickson said.

Security Copilot will be available to a small set of Microsoft clients in a private preview before wider release at a later date.

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WATCH: Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search tools

Microsoft threatens to restrict data from rival AI search tools



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Sam Bankman-Fried paid over $40 million to bribe at least one official in China, DOJ alleges in new indictment

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Former FTX Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who faces fraud charges over the collapse of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, arrives on the day of a hearing at Manhattan federal court in New York City, January 3, 2023.
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David Dee Delgado | Reuters

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried paid out tens of millions of dollars worth of bribes to at least one Chinese government official, federal prosecutors alleged in a new indictment Tuesday.
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The indictment said accounts belonging to Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research, were the target of a freezing order from Chinese police “in or around” November 2021.

The indictment alleges that Bankman-Fried and others “directed and caused the transfer” of at least $40 million in cryptocurrency “intended for the benefit of one or more Chinese government officials in order to influence and induce them” to unfreeze some of these accounts.

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Bankman-Fried and his associates considered and tried “numerous methods” to unfreeze the accounts, which contained around $1 billion worth of cryptocurrency, prosecutors allege. Ultimately, after both legal and personal efforts failed, Bankman-Fried agreed to and directed a multimillion-dollar bribe to have the frozen accounts unlocked, prosecutors alleged.

Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund used the unfrozen assets to continue to fund Alameda’s loss-generating trades, continuing on what the government says was a fraud upon customers and investors for another year. FTX and Alameda imploded in November 2022 after concerns about their balance sheet turned into a veritable bank run. Bankman-Fried now faces a federal indictment and civil charges from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

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The charges indicate that new evidence has been obtained by the federal government about Bankman-Fried’s international dealings, and come one day after U.S. regulators slapped crypto exchange Binance with allegations of facilitating terrorist financing and violations of U.S. derivatives law.

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried’s collapsed FTX remains mired in Delaware bankruptcy court proceedings.

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A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.



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