California is having a gold rush again and Bret Taylor is going to find it.
Salesforce’s former crown prince is set to replace co-founder Marc Benioff as head of the cloud software giant, instead of going into business for himself. Taylor has announced that he and a partner will launch a company to use artificial intelligence, the latest to sweep Silicon Valley, to “solve some of the most pressing problems” facing businesses.
“Rarely do you come across a new technology so powerful that it will inevitably change the course of every industry,” he said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday. “I have a sense of excitement and inevitability about modern AI, especially given recent advances in large language models.”
Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot became the fastest consumer app in history since its launch in late November, the community has been grappling with the huge implications of intuitive machine intelligence at the touch of a button.
No new technology trend is garnering much headlines as all knowledge-based professions may be on the chopping block, with OpenAI products successfully passing certification exams ranging from business to medicine and law.
Cathie Wood’s research team at ARK Invest believes deep neural nets like ChatGPT that can mimic human learning at exponential speeds sit at the nexus of all major technology trends by revolutionizing productivity.
OpenAI’s advanced chatbot stole so much thunder from Google that CEO Sundar Pichai quickly outed its rival, nicknamed Bard, to avoid the appearance that its AI activities were lagging behind.
However, the Google CEO suffered an embarrassing fiasco that wiped $100 billion off his stock’s market cap, when a promotional video showed Bard answering a question incorrectly.
Salesforce exec enlists help from Google veteran
Taylor, whose recent exit from Salesforce shocked the industry, now wants to get in on the ground floor of AI—and he’s recruiting an old friend from the beginning at Google to help.
After 18 years at the tech giant, most recently as vice president of startup incubator Labs, Clay Bavor said he left Google to join Taylor because he shared an “obsession” with new advances in AI
“Bret and I have known each other since the beginning at Google, and I have always admired his product sense and entrepreneurial spirit, technical engineering and, most importantly, his character and integrity,” Bavor wrote on Wednesday.
It won’t be the first company Taylor has founded, or even the second. In 2007 he jumped on the social media bandwagon creating FriendFeed, before selling it in August 2009 to Facebook for $50 million. (It was then closed.)
After serving as chief technology officer for Mark Zuckerberg’s company, Taylor left in 2012 to found a collaborative business software provider called Quip. Just five years later, Taylor convinced Salesforce to buy him for $750 million and he joined Benioff at the company, where Taylor rose to become co-CEO.
The Stanford graduate plays to win when necessary and doesn’t shy away from picking fights with powerful rivals, as evidenced by his brief stint as chairman of the Twitter board.
Taylor took on the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, successfully forcing him in October to buy the social media company for an eye-watering price of $ 44 billion just at a time when the valuation of the technology company was plunging.
Learn how to navigate and strengthen trust in your business with The Trust Factor, a weekly newsletter that examines what leaders need to succeed. Log in here.