

With so many events and big news this week, I wish I could have cloned myself, but instead I shuttled between events in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and tried to keep up with all the news on my phone.
The headline stories: Arm finally went public and its stock rocketed, auguring well for more IPOs coming next week. Dreamforce focused a lot on the issue of trust in the generative AI era. And gen AI looks to blow up how computing gets done all the way from the chip to applications to how data gets wrangled. Oh, and Google’s big antitrust trial began, the first days of what will be a long slog in coming weeks (and months).
You can get more analysis of this and other news from the new theCUBE Pod podcast from SiliconANGLE analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. And don’t miss Vellante’s weekly Breaking Analysis Saturday for a deep dive on CrowdStrike ahead of its Fal.con event next week.
In this year’s biggest IPO, Arm stock closes up 25% as chip designer raises $4.87B
And another couple of IPOs are on the way: Instacart seeking to raise up to $616M in IPO at $9.3B valuation And then there’s Klayvio.
As generative AI takes off, promising to bring the power of AI to everyone, it’s becoming clear that every company from chip startups to software giants to cloud providers is having to change how it does business to keep up with the computing demands of the revolutionary technology.
That trend was on full display at the AI Hardware & Edge Summit, a small but information-rich conference in Santa Clara this past week where a lot of interesting new products debuted as well. We’ll be exploring the implications a lot in coming months, but for now, a few tidbits:
There will be much more discussion of these trends at our upcoming Supercloud 4: Generative AI Transforms Every Industry. We’re lining up some great guests that we’ll let you know about soon, but meantime, register for the free virtual event and we’ll keep you informed.
Regulation is coming, even if no one knows in what form: Musk says AI could ‘kill us all’ as tech luminaries attend closed-door session at Congress
A startup has an ambitious plan to create explainable AI: Howso launches fully auditable and explainable open-source AI engine
It’s not just energy that gen AI is hogging: Report: Data centers guzzling enormous amounts of water to cool generative AI servers
Meta’s determined not to be left behind after years of AI research: Meta Platforms reportedly building open-source generative AI system to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Given how much gen AI is going to require changes in how and where computing is done, this startup looks like a company worth watching closely: Enfabrica raises $125M to scale GPUs, memory and storage for distributed AI workloads
And this one too, as AI increasingly gets done at the network edge: Machine learning chipmaker SiMa.ai enables low-code AI model development at the edge
And even more AI at the edge: Edge AI chip startup Axelera debuts Metis AI Platform
Best not to forget China’s fully in the AI game too: Alibaba opens Tongyi Qianwen AI model to the public to drive adoption
SAS ups AI features in its analytics and CRM platforms
Amazon launches generative AI tool for sellers to create product listing information
Say what you will about Mark Benioff, but the man knows how to put on a show, again taking over a few blocks of San Francisco around Moscone Center this week for the company’s Dreamforce conference and entertaining 40,000 people with cuddly characters and a whole lot of trucked-in greenery.
Benioff also knows which way the wind’s blowing, and as generative AI scares the pants off a lot of people, his company has settled on a key message to underlie the flurry of new gen AI-powered services it introduced this week: trust.
Benioff acknowledged the problems with the current obsession with generative AI. “These things are good but they’re not great,” he said during his keynote. “They have a lot of answers that aren’t exactly true. We call them hallucinations. I call them lies. These LLMs are very convincing liars.… They can turn very toxic very quickly.”
Although something as amorphous as trust should be looked at with skepticism when corporations stake a claim to the term, many folks seem to acknowledge that Salesforce is doing more than “trust washing.” It has a chief trust officer, Vikram Rao, plus Kathy Baxter, principal architect for responsible AI and tech.
Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih noted an “AI trust gap” between AI being the No. priority for CEOs while 52% of consumers don’t believe it’s safe and secure. That was the genesis of a “Trust Layer” that underlies” Salesforce’s platform and applications, covering principles such as data masking, grounding of models in customer data (not the broad internet) and a zero-retention policy for prompts to generative AI applications, as well as toxicity detection and an audit trail.
That resonates with one Salesforce customer I talked to, Kyall Mai, chief innovation officer at Esquire Bank. said the Trust Layer is key for the bank’s customer base of contingent law firms. Likewise, Ian Kahn, head of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Salesforce practice, said the zero-retention policy is important to the customers he works with.
“The AI revolution is a trust revolution,” Benioff noted at his keynote. We’ll see whether his company walks the walk as generative AI busts into every industry.
Benioff saved perhaps the best news for last: Salesforce to hire 3,300 workers after raising revenue guidance
David Strom analyzes why It’s the end of the line for outdated internet encryption protocols and what companies should do about that
Chrome, Firefox and other browsers affected by critical WebP vulnerability
And MGM Grand is still down: ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group linked to attack on MGM Resorts
But Caesar’s paid up, and big: Data breach at Caesars Entertainment compromises customer information
Strom researches the rise of deepfake cyberattacks and how to prevent them: Deepfake cyberthreats keep rising. Here’s how to prevent them
California stays ahead on state privacy protection and is already influencing other states, says Strom
The first salvos in a long antitrust case that may well be appealed anyway: In antitrust case, Google insists its dominance of internet search is lawful
And Microsoft is in the crosshairs too: Microsoft Facing Formal EU Complaint Over Teams Video App
“The enemy of AWS is my friend”: Oracle to colocate in Azure data centers under expanded Microsoft partnership
Oracle Cloud may be rising but overall the company needs to start growing faster: Oracle’s revenue comes up short of expectations and its stock slides the most in many years.
Big data is still getting big funding: Finally that Databricks funding happens; doesn’t an IPO have to be next? Databricks raises $500M in new funding at mammoth $43B valuation; also: Data management provider Denodo raises $336M from TPG
Apple’s new phones, like clockwork every September — this time with a cutting-edge chip: Apple’s ‘Wonderlust’ event reveals iPhone 15, Apple Watch 9 and new A17 Pro silicon France doesn’t like older iPhones so much because, um, radiation? Guess that opens up a market for the new ones: As France warns Apple it might have to recall the iPhone 12, Apple tries to dampen radiation fears But it looks like Apple will fix it with a software update: Apple moves to update iPhone 12 in France to address radiation issue
Rob Strechay gets the lowdown from DataWorks co-founder Alex Hutchins: The state of building modern data teams
Even GPUs can’t do everything, but they can simulate the next or the next-next era of computing: Nvidia and Xanadu power quantum computing simulations with GPUs and Zeus Kerravala’s analysis: Nvidia’s cuQuantum software development kit sings PennyLane’s song
AI isn’t always a magic wand for stocks: AI helps Adobe beats expectations and boosts its operating margins, but its stock falls anyway
Not sure whose fault a 70% drop in sales is, but it’s certainly understandable why former Flexport CEO Dave Clark is gone.
CrowdStrike Fal.Con Sept. 18-21 in Las Vegas, the heart of which will be covered by theCUBE Sept. 19-20. Vellante will be there.
mWISE from Google’s Mandiant threat intelligence unit, Sept. 18-20 in Washington, D.C. Furrier will be there.
Oracle Cloud World Sept. 18-21 in Las Vegas and virtual: We’ll be watching from afar this time, but we’ll have all the news as it happens.
Intel Innovation event Sept. 19-20 in San Jose and online, with CEO Pat Gelsinger and others keynoting, and we’ll be reporting the news.
TechCrunch Disrupt Sept. 19-21: We’ll be there for all the enterprise and AI news and interviews.
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