Not for the first time, this week was all about the quickening battle for leadership in artificial intelligence, especially the generative variety.

That was abundantly clear at Amazon Web Services Inc.’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, which SiliconANGLE and its livestreaming video studio theCUBE, as well as our newly constituted market research arm theCUBE Research, covered closely in our most intense editorial coverage since we first attended it more than a decade ago. The AI imperative was also apparent across the pond at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s annual Discover conference in Barcelona, HPE outlined a hybrid cloud vision for enterprises.

For more this weekend, check out theCUBE Research Principal Analyst Dave Vellante’s latest, not-to-be-missed deep-dive Breaking Analysis, this one analyzing the upshot of re:Invent: AWS’ new simplicity mandate.

Here’s this week’s news and analysis:

Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy

First catch up on our special report and get the full story list so far, with more to come in the coming days and weeks from our Supercloud 5 event. Among the many highlights, mostly from AWS re:Invent, is this sampling of our coverage:

It’s no longer OpenAI and everyone else. Suddenly the game is wide open: Breaking Analysis: The OpenAI meltdown: Winners and losers in the battle for AI supremacy and Who will win the battle for AI in the cloud? Maybe everyone

Amazon left no doubt it has no intention of being an also-ran in generative AI: Re:Invent exclusive: AWS CEO Adam Selipsky to reveal a new generative AI stack

The full exclusive Q&A with Adam Selipsky (pictured): Ahead of re:Invent, AWS chief Adam Selipsky lays out a broad AI strategy

We had the news first on a bold gambit by AWS: AWS debuts Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client device for virtual desktop access

John Furrier reads between the lines on Selipsky’s plans for leading the battle for AI supremacy: Inside AWS re:Invent: Adam Selipsky’s keynote and the battle for AI supremacy

Dave Vellante’s and George Gilbert’s great analysis of essential re:Invent takeaways and AWS’ essential challenge in the generative AI era: AWS has its work cut out to turn software that has been developed with a primary objective of making infrastructure run better to developing software that is composable and ultimately drives user productivity: Breaking Analysis: re:Invent 2023 underscores a new simplicity mandate for AWS

AWS’ AI chip design expertise is still underestimated: AWS debuts next-generation Graviton4 and Trainium2 chips for cloud and AI workloads

AWS rolls out new customization and management tools in its Bedrock AI service

Amazon Q looks very promising, but AWS has a lot of work to do to make it real across so many use cases: AWS previews Amazon Q: an AI-powered business assistant coming first to IT pros and developers and AWS re:Invent up close: A deep dive on Amazon Q And not to mention, Q apparently doesn’t escape the hallucination problems of other chatbots.

In his re:Invent keynote, AWS’ CEO tells the world how the company is building an entire generative AI stack, from chips to applications: Rethinking IT at re:Invent: AWS bets the stack on generative AI

Amazon AI aims to catch up in multimodal: AWS rolls out new Titan AI models for image and text generation

Intellyx’s Jason Bloomberg calls out some expo hall highlights: Not all generative AI: Highlights from AWS re:Invent

Amazon Bedrock receives new AI evaluation tool and more foundation models

AWS unveils new tools and services for ‘supernova’ of generative AI

New Amazon SageMaker HyperPod can train AI models across thousands of chips

Amazon expands its palm-reading One services for enterprise identity management

Challenges and opportunities in generative AI for enterprise applications

Salesforce and AWS expand partnership with raft of new product integrations

Greylock Partners’ Jerry Chen weighs in on what comes next for AI cloud

In his usual entertaining keynote, Vogels laid out a broader view of the AI opportunity — it’s not just gen AI — but mostly emphasized the need for a continuing focus on architectural and engineering frugality and how it’s also crucial for sustainable IT going forward: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels architects a more frugal future for the enterprise cloud

Tech firm uses a brace of generative AI tools to slash content production times

In other AI news

From HPE Discover: HPE, Nvidia partner on AI-optimized platforms and services

Sam Altman is now back officially as CEO, but we don’t know much more about why he was canned in the first place, and things still sound unsettled. OpenAI reinstates Altman as CEO with changes to the governing board

This will have to change: Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone

Nvidia unveils generative AI microservice for accurate answers with enterprise data

Microsoft invests £2.5B in UK with a focus on artificial intelligence economy

Another generative AI startup, Together AI, secures $100M+ in funding

PhysicsX nabs $32M for its AI-powered engineering software

In the enterprise and the cloud

Earnings galore

Still a slowdown in mainstream tech: Hardware sales trough sends Dell’s sales down for the fifth straight quarter

Chipmaker Marvell’s stock falls on weak revenue forecast

Zscaler shares drop over spending concerns despite solid earnings and outlook

Despite earnings and outlook beats, CrowdStrike shares drop slightly

But others are doing just fine: Shares of UiPath spike 27% on strong earnings and revenue beat, upbeat forecast

Shares of Salesforce surge on strong earnings beat

Workday shares surge on solid earnings and revenue beats

Snowflake crushes Wall Street’s expectations amid ‘stabilizing’ economy

Strong Nutanix earnings contrast with weak forecast from Pure Storage

HPE’s earnings edge past Wall Street’s estimates, driven by upsurge in AI

Synopsys shares rise on strong-than-expected earnings and record revenue

PagerDuty shares rise on better-than-expected earnings results

Elastic shares jump in late-trading on solid earnings and revenue beat

Demand for AI sparks increase in data center server spending, even as shipments fall

Mark Albertson gets an exclusive interview with the founder who sued his former company alleging fraud: Cloudbrink’s co-founder takes his company to court over allegations of financial fraud

I suppose no surprise: Broadcom to let go 1,800+ VMware employees amid push for increased profitability

Big-data analytics unicorn Dataminr to shed 20% of its workforce

Apple to become largest customer of new $2B chip packaging facility in Arizona

Hedge Fund Anson Builds Stake in Twilio, Pushes for Sale (from The Information)

Elsewhere around tech

Google reportedly asks UK’s CMA to take antitrust action against Microsoft

Superconducting quantum chip startup OQC raises $100M in fresh funding

Blockchain messaging protocol Wormhole raises $225M at $2.5B valuation

You’ve got to be kidding dept.

Big names like Kelsey Hightower pull out of the DevTernity conference after allegations its founder made fake profiles of female speakers to boost diversity

🙄 Apple and Google avoid naming ChatGPT as their ‘app of the year,’ picking AllTrails and Imprint instead (from TechCrunch)

Cyber beat

Okta shares drop on new breach details despite strong earnings

Cross-government cybersecurity best practices announced for safer AI development

Alleged GE hack raises concerns about US national security

Europol-led operation results in arrest of alleged ransomware gang in Ukraine

BlueVoyant acquires cyber defense company Conquest Cyber, raises $140M

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE