PlusOne: how Naspers is aggregating AI tools internally

PlusOne, the Naspers-owned generative artificial intelligence tool that acts as an aggregator of several third-party AI models, will remain internal to Naspers and subsidiary Prosus.

“Only three companies in the group have announced products related to generative AI — that is their choice. Others are using PlusOne,” said Naspers and Prosus group head of AI and data science Euro Beinat.

PlusOne is the outgrowth of a 2017 decision by Prosus, the European-listed Naspers spinoff, to create a group of AI and machine learning experts to support companies across the group. The team is now 25 people strong and is headquartered in Amsterdam.

The vast majority of generative AI tools are based on one particular model. For instances, the transformer model powers the popular GPT series of AI tools, while general adversarial models have been used in health care to identify discrepancies in magnetic resonance imaging scans.

PlusOne acts like a planner and coordinator by having more than 10 AI models available to it and choosing the correct one for a given problem. PlusOne can also detect when a model produces erroneous output, flag the issue for the development team to address and reroute the query to other models.

“PlusOne uses intelligent routing to choose which underlying model should generate a response. Many of these models have a tendency to be really eager to answer your questions, then they produce incorrect output. These are called ‘hallucinations’. We have built-in tools to help us identify when and where the models behave erroneously,” said Paul van der Boor, senior director of data science at Prosus.

PlusOne

Van der Boor said there is a flurry of AI tools coming, Microsoft’s Co-pilot for Windows and Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365). What makes PlusOne stand out, he said, is its ability to integrate with various other solutions.

“There are a lot of different tools coming into the market with different value propositions. The ability to choose what’s best for your tool and your integration is something unique to plus one,” said Van der Boor.

Read: Naspers-owned Prosus launches generative AI tool

Some Naspers businesses like OLX are far along their AI journey. Media24, Takealot and Mr D Food have also “begun experimenting” with the capabilities PlusOne brings to their operations, Beinat added.  – © 2023 NewsCentral Media

Get breaking news alerts from TechCentral on WhatsApp