AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #325

Welcome to the Saturday weekly AI summary here on ‘AI: Reset to Zero’. 

1. Google Cloud’s ‘Next’ focuses on a ‘Grounded’ AI strategy: Google Cloud CEO Tom Kurian’s keynote address in front of 30,000 enterprise customers and partners at its ‘Next’ conference, had echoes of Nvidia founder/CEO Jensen Huang’s recent GTC Developer conference. Google unveiled its AI driven cloud strategy that focused on ‘grounding’ the company’s AI offerings in Google Search and other core products and services. Industry reaction seemed generally positive, with customers still ‘kicking the tires’ on the various AI products and services being rolled out. Deeper dive here.

   

2. Amazon CEO’s Annual shareholder letter underlines AI strategy: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy continued the Bezos’ tradition of an annual letter to shareholders, with this year of course focusing on its AI Strategy. Particularly at its industry leading Cloud data center unit AWS. There was expected focus on the company’s investments in LLM AI company Anthropic, and how it potentially broadens Amazon AWS offerings for its enterprise customers. Media reaction was relatively muted. More discussion here.

3. AI industry cutting corners on Data collection: The WSJ focuses on the AI industry’s data acquisition strategies, with a focus on OpenAI potentially training its next generation LLM and Sora models on Google YouTube data. That of course got a reaction from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. Although the near-term challenges around data remain high, longer term, there continue to vast areas of future data sources. Further discussion here.

4. OpenAI’s deluge of legal headwinds: Washington Post chronicles OpenAI’s series of legal challenges, especially in the context of the company being the leading ‘target’ of parties suing for copyright infringements, to a plethora of regulatory matters. Also a discussion of the company investing in substantial in-house legal and regulatory senior representatives in its 1000+ strong workforce. Piece highlights particularly how early OpenAI’s regulatory concerns have arisen relative to other tech waves like the PC, Internet, and others. Further examination here.

5. Investors focusing a more nuanced eye on AI metrics: With next week seeing big tech again reporting their upcoming quarter results, the focus again will likely be on AI traction amongst customers. Both public and private investors are starting to ask discerning questions on separating the ‘experimental’ vs ‘sustainable’ buying of AI products and services given high relative costs and prices. This trend will likely continue even in the midst of a continuing AI investment wave by the companies. Some more details here.

Other AI Readings for weekend:

1. WIth Power for AI data centers being the next growing input concern, a new approach on ‘advanced reconducting’ gets a closer look.

1. Mistral gets another feature close-up as ‘Europe’s AI’ answer to the US.

Thanks for joining this Saturday with your beverage of choice. 

Up next, the Sunday ‘The Bigger Picture’ tomorrow. Stay tuned. 

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)