One of America's absolute biggest consumer facing brands and companies that everyone knows and uses is now embracing GPT technology and that is Walmart. So in a recent interview with Venture Beat, the vice president of emerging technology at Walmart, his name is Desiré Gosby, he was talking and he said that for them at Walmart, GPT-4 is gonna be as big a shift as mobile in terms of how their customers are going to expect to interact with them. So this is really interesting coming from such a big company, right? A lot of times when we see these big companies, especially when you think of Walmart, you don't necessarily think of a tech company, you more think of like, you know, they've got all these big stores, maybe more logistics and that kind of stuff.
But Walmart has been pretty forthcoming on tech and I think that they understand that if they're not right there on the cutting edge of tech, they have big companies like Amazon who are going to absolutely eat their lunch. So I think Walmart is putting a really big focus on this. I've seen a bunch of friends that work in tech at Walmart and I've seen this for quite a long time, quite a number of years they actually have been putting a focus on this. What's interesting is they're about to start implementing a lot of this GPT technology, but they've done similar stuff in the past and as it is right now, they have over 20 different AI experiences integrated into Walmart from logistics to inventory tracking and a whole bunch of other different things that we may not see on the front end.
But now from a user's perspective, I believe Walmart just revamped all of their website and app design and now they're about to get into GPT4. So one of the biggest reasons they're doing this and one of the biggest things they're planning on doing this is so that it can boost their existing offerings such as text to shop, which essentially allows customers to add Walmart products to their cart by texting or speaking the names of the items that they need. Obviously GPT4 is just such a powerful technology for this. So specifically what Gauseby said is that we've had a platform that has allowed teams across Walmart to build conversational experiences for about five years.
So this is nothing new for Walmart, but they did say that we focus on building a natural language, understanding capability that is retail specific. So kind of like how I recently on podcast talked about Bloomberg going specifically to finance with Bloomberg GPT, it looks like Walmart is going to be going into a retail specific style of GPT. And what's interesting is Walmart is, I believe partnered with OpenAI for GPT4 and integrating that, but they have also expressed, they've expressed that they do have a lot of their own data and that they're able to incorporate and fine tune existing models with their own data in a way that is powerful and proprietary to that. A lot of their competitors will not have such a vast amount of data.
Walmart is such a massive company. And I think what a lot of people don't know is that these big huge retailers, they do track what types of inventory sell, what types of years, what times of data, there's so much data that they have collected over the years that it's actually going to make for a really, really powerful fine tune of these AI models. So getting into exactly what this looks like, I think Walmart has close to two dozen different experiences using GPT4 for natural language understanding capabilities right now that they've built out. And that's including a chatbot that around a million Walmart associates interact with for customer support.
So obviously a lot of the companies have integrated stuff for customer support, that's pretty big. But I do think it is a big step for them, considering they're just such a massive company. And I think that it's going to be pretty interesting, large, these models like GPT3 and 4 are starting to allow Walmart now to go beyond just task-based chatbots. So adding a product to your shopping cart or whatever that they've done in the past, to actually problem-based chatbots.
So allowing that people, users to express what they need in natural language. And I think the Holy Grail or whatever for Walmart that comes to conversational AI is going to be if Walmart can really leverage chat GPT-like experiences or models to anticipate what customers are looking for. And they've actually said this. So Gauseby literally said, he admitted that it's borderline creepy, but they want to be able to predict what customers want before they want it or what they're going to need before they need it.
And he said that if they can figure out how to implement the idea safely and responsibly, and he gave an example, if we know that your son's going off to camp this summer and that he has allergies, we can add allergy medications to their cart. Or here are the things that they would recommend to prepare him for camp, et cetera. It's going to be pretty interesting if they can do that. A lot of people, I mean, in my opinion, it almost sounds dystopian, right?
Because it's not just like the recommendations one. But Gauseby literally said, if they know that he's going to summer camp, they're going to add those things to your cart. Not just recommend, but add them to your cart. And in my opinion, that seems a little, I wonder if there's a line there, if things are added to your cart, because what if you add a bunch of things to your cart?
Don't look what's already in there and you check it out. So I'm not sure how far that will go if they really will add things to your cart, or if they're just going to make a recommendation. So that will definitely be an interesting area to watch. But she did point out that Walmart isn't only using GPT-4.
They have other large language models as well. And actually, the Walmart began working on this quite a while ago, and they were originally using Google's Burt models, which were released back in 2018. But she did say that the space is changing so rapidly that they don't really want to unnecessarily lock themselves in. So this is actually, I think, one of the biggest items of this whole story here is the fact that Walmart, right?
They're trying to be on the cutting edge. They're trying to push the needle as much as possible. They were originally using Google back in 2018. And Google kind of was the leader back then.
And then all of a sudden, we have Chad Jibiti and OpenAI, who kind of just snuck out from the sidelines and completely usurped them. And now these massive companies are saying, look, we don't want to be locked in. I'm sure Google really wanted to keep them. But all of a sudden, when these way more powerful technologies come out, the big players, the Walmart's and the Amazon's, and everyone else are going to move somewhere else.
If they don't already have their own technology in-house, like probably Amazon does, then they're going to go other places. So this is going to be really interesting to see if Google starts to take their Burt model more seriously, if they start to up their game and try to claw back and keep Walmart in the fold. But this is something that we're seeing a lot of places. OpenAI really is disrupting.
And if people like Google and other big tech giants that previously had kind of a lead in some of these areas, if they don't really step up their game, they're going to lose a lot of market share and a lot of money in this space. And a lot of people might be like, oh, whatever. It's not a big deal, right? Google makes 85% of their money from search.
This is not that big of a deal for them. But if you look at where the market's going, this is going to be a massive area in the future. And so if they're not taking it seriously now, I think they're setting themselves up for some pretty massive failures. So it's been pretty interesting.
What they did say was that having that foundation to be able to build on, a.k.a. having the work they did with Google in the past, to build on is very exciting. It's about putting these tools in hands of the teams that are building these experiences. And she said that I don't think it's going to be hard to leak.
It's going to be hard to leak for our customers once they start seeing what's possible. So I mean, that is a pretty optimistic statement there. Essentially, they're saying once people see how powerful this technology is, and maybe how convenient it is, and how much time it saves them, they're going to love it. And as someone who in our house, we do all of our shopping on Walmart, we Walmart delivery.
So my wife, she'll plan out what we're eating this week, and the meals, and then she'll go and find it all on the Walmart app, and it gets delivered to us. And that already saves us a ton of time. I personally hate going into Walmart with a giant grocery list and trying to find where everything is. It's one of my least favorite experiences.
But that being said, if you go from the previous experience to find it all on the app, you still got to search for it. But what if I just had my shopping list and all my stuff, and I open up the app and I say, hey, Walmart, add three cans of corn, two cans of black beans, five bags of tomatoes, or five tomatoes, blah, blah. You just say the whole thing and they add all to your cart. Oh my gosh, that's way faster than sitting there, having to type it individually, find and search.
Now, some people are going to be like, well, which tomato are they going to add to your cart? Is it going to be the most expensive one? Is it going to be the organic one? The one that's on sale, are they going to try to squeeze a little bit of money?
Because, for example, our cart might experience is Walmart does a thing called Substitutions. So if they order a product on the app and they don't have it in that specific store, they'll substitute it for something different. Now, in the past, we ordered a specific organic bag of oatmeal and if they didn't have it, they would swap it for a bigger or more expensive one and they would just charge you the same price as before. Now, they started charging you for the substitutions.
And sometimes my wife gets really annoyed because she'll order something really specific and they come up with a completely different brand or completely different type. She really wanted these whole wee tortillas and then they give her the white tortillas and she ordered like 25 of them because we're having people over and they gave her 10 of them. I don't know, there's just different things that it kind of defeats the purpose of what you're doing. Sometimes, and so it's going to be interesting to see if AI kind of exacerbates that problem and if people are going to get upset because they won't get the specific choice.
Now, that being said, if you are in a rush and you want to get something done quick, I can see this being, you blast through your list of everything you want and boom, it adds it. Then you go search through it. Then you see that it added something specific you didn't want and you go and swap out a couple things. I mean, that already saves you 50% of the time.
So when you see something like this, that's a lot simpler, a lot more convenient and saves you time. I don't see how this wouldn't be pretty popular with a vast, probably majority of their customers using the Walmart app. And so if that's the case, this is kind of a no-brainer for Walmart to really influence stuff like this. So something else interesting that they did mention they were looking at, right?
Because obviously, this is one interesting use case, but they want to integrate AI into everything they're doing. This whole area isn't just text to large language models that are understanding text. They actually said things like generative AI for imagery that they can use to generate 3D versions of their products would be really crazy. And they said, even if it can't do the whole thing completely, if it just kind of gets them part of the way there removes a lot of manual process, as is one really popular common way for people to get three images of products right now and probably the most common way is that, essentially, you have a special kind of camera.
You have a special kind of setup, usually in a studio where you'll take a product, like let's say it's a shoe, and you'll stick it on. There's a couple different ways to do it. Sometimes it's just a clear platform. Sometimes it's literally pins.
It's like a pin on the bottom and a pin on the top. And either the camera or the product itself will spin around in a perfect circle. And for these cameras, they do all the way around. It gets more intense.
So it's usually just taking millions of photos sometimes of every single angle. And the product doesn't move. And then you get this 3D view. So that's one way to do it.
But they're saying, why do that when we can take a picture of the product, throw it into mid-journey or another tool. I guess not mid-journey for the 3D, making it 3D, but throw it into another tool that takes that image of the product and literally renders a 3D version. So that's going to be pretty insane. And that's not just Walmart.
That's Amazon. That's every single e-commerce person is going to be wanting to take advantage of that kind of capability. They did say that Walmart's obviously going to have to be pretty careful around copyright issues with that sort of thing when they're doing generative images. But the advantage is that Walmart has a lot of their own data that they can use to help them train and get them to a place where they can start to leverage a lot of those models without having to be so concerned about the copyright.
They already have a lot of these images. They're not just pulling it from online. They already have a lot of 3D image products. So they're going to be able to build some powerful models or build on top ones that exist.
So when asked if Walmart was going to create a JMP plugin, this is something a lot of people have talked about. They said that the company is certainly not taking anything off the table. But it's kind of about enabling the right kind of experiences and executing in the right way. So I think what they're saying by that is they don't really want to come up with some sort of product and then people call it gimmicky or not useful and being like, why would I just use the Walmart app or go to the Walmart website where you have sort of a more in-depth experience.
And they said at the end of the day, they're going to let their customers guide them on what it is they want. And if it benefits them, it's going to be good for Walmart. So I think at the end of the day, if enough people start asking for something, they're going to build it out. They've done a good job of really focusing and building out a solid tech team.
It's going to be really incredible to see how Walmart plays into this. They seem to be embracing AI wholeheartedly. And the reason why this is so interesting is because it's going to force a lot of the other players Amazon, in particular, to embrace AI more in what they're doing. As we've kind of seen AI or Amazon itself on their platform kind of shy away from AI.
It's not such a big thing. Obviously, AWS is integrating with hugging faces to host a lot of AI models. So they're making AI plays. And Amazon, Jenna, now they're going to invest in 25 generative AI companies.
Well, actually, they said they're not investing. They're going to give them $300,000 of credits for AWS. So I mean, anyone would do that. I mean, Microsoft, that's a massive part of their investment to open AI.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens if Amazon starts taking this more seriously and a lot of other e-commerce people Spotify and a lot of the other players and see how they integrate AI in the future of e-commerce.