

Those days already seem like ancient history compared to what is possible with today’s ultra-large language models and generative A.I., van der Boor says. Prosus also created its own “Fin BERT,” which could be used to do sentiment analysis of financial texts. The Prosus communications team experimented with the tool to analyze past earnings results materials and gauge their overall sentiment. And once Food BERT created this “food knowledge graph,” Prosus could use it to power a recommendation engine that would suggest restaurants-or additional menu items-to customers based on what kind of food they were in the mood for.

The magic of Food BERT is that it could arrive at accurate classifications without having to rely on keywords, and it could do so seamlessly across multiple languages, Paul van der Boor, Prosus’s senior director of data science, says. They created a “Food BERT” that helped categorize tens of millions of menu items-were they vegetarian? Indian or Japanese? Spicey or sweet?-from all of the restaurants served by Prosus’s various food delivery startups. team realized they had enough data across its portfolio companies to train several bespoke versions.
READ FIRE FORCE FREE SOFTWARE
When Google made its Transformer-based language model BERT-which is a small language model compared to the behemoths that power ChatGPT-available as open-source software in late 2018, Prosus’s A.I. If a challenger beats the incumbent on the KPI target, it replaces the production system and so on, Beinat says, creating a cycle of continuous process improvement. model it currently has in production against challenger models-often built using different designs. And the company is constantly pitting the A.I. Prosus has a systematic process for deciding which models it will deploy in production, based around a key business KPI for the model. expertise in 2018, recognizing that the technology could provide benefits across its global portfolio of companies, which ranges from food delivery startups to edtech firms.Īt first, the team of roughly 15 machine learning researchers and engineers focused on developing tools for fraud detection and recommendation engines, Euro Beinat, who heads the team, tells me.

The company, which is majority owned by South African media company Naspers and is publicly listed on Euronext with a $147 billion market cap, is not an A.I. while being smart about minimizing the dangers (which range from “hallucinations” to potential copyright infringement). Prosus, an Amsterdam-based tech and media investor and operator that I met with recently, is a good example of how a business can deploy generative A.I.
