Even as new funding of artificial intelligence companies keeps on coming, new guardrails on the behavior of generative AI models are getting put in place as well, as we saw moves this week both by companies and by governments.

What’s more, the open-source community is weighing in with the contention that AI models will be safer, more effective and more private if companies use open-source version, not just the ones from OpenAI and the big cloud providers. That sets up a potential battle in 2024, and well beyond, over which models prevail — one that may echo the decades-long march of open-source software.

Meantime, Big Tech was put on notice this week when Google lost a big antitrust case brought by Epic Games — one that more or less came out the opposite way from Epic’s suit against Apple earlier this year. Expect Google to appeal, but the foundations of the lucrative app store duopoly are creaking.

You can hear more about all this and other news in John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s theCUBE Podcast, due out this afternoon.

And now that things may finally slow down for a bit, sit back and check out more coverage of the AI market from our latest editorial event Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy. We’re continuing to post more summary writeups of our dozens of interviews with experts and executives in our accompanying special report.

AI dollars and dampers

AI funding keeps rolling: Open-source generative AI startup Mistral AI raises $415M in funding and Nvidia, AMD back $56.5M round for Essential AI Labs, led by Transformer architecture co-inventors

Guardrails are getting built… or mandated:

EU reaches provisional agreement on landmark legislation to regulate AI

OpenAI details automated approach to supervising AI models

Tesla rolls out Autopilot update to 2M+ vehicles after NHTSA safety investigation

Big tech’s AI leaders team up with the Cloud Security Alliance in comprehensive safety initiative

It might appear the big battle in generative AI is among the big AI mode providers such as OpenAI and the big cloud providers. Not so fast. “The future of AI is open source,” Charles Srisuwananukorn, founding vice president of engineering at generative AI startup Together, said at the AI.dev and Cassandra Summit in San Jose this week. “There won’t be one model to rule them all.”

Why? Several reasons: Enterprises want transparency in what data a model was trained on and what method was used. They want control over the behavior of the model, which they can fine-tune more easily on their own model. And they and their customers want privacy, which is easier to maintain using one’s own infrastructure for more control of the data.

Here’s more from the conference: As enterprises adopt AI, open-source leaders worry about regulatory and proprietary issues

And lots of new AI services keep flowing:

Atlassian announces wide availability of generative AI capabilities across its products

Lightning AI, creator of PyTorch Lightning framework, debuts platform for building and deploying AI apps

Cohere adds support for custom data connectors to its flagship LLM

Google Cloud launches coding AI assistant with Duet AI for Developers

Google unleashes Gemini Pro for enterprises and developers to build on

Microsoft debuts 2.7B parameter Phi-2 model that outperforms many larger language models

Google’s DeepMind creates generative AI model with fact checker to crack unsolvable math problem

OpenAI inks content licensing deal with Axel Springer

Salesforce announces updated unstructured data capabilities for its AI and CRM platform

All around the enterprise and cloud

A very big antitrust blow to big tech: 

Epic Games wins historic antitrust case against Google

Intel debuts AI-accelerated Core Ultra and 5th Gen Xeon chips to enable AI to run in any location And CEO Pat Gelsinger throws down the gauntlet to Nvidia, challenging its CUDA programming platform — which only goes to how how entrenched Nvidia is in both hardware and software.

Even Microsoft’s cloud doesn’t have enough juice for its own company to migrate everything over? Hmm. Runtime mentions that LinkedIn has long been a leader in new technologies, perhaps making it difficult to move all its cutting-edge infrastructure to the cloud, but I also wonder if perhaps the AI boom is constricting Azure capacity? LinkedIn shelved planned move to Microsoft Azure, opting to keep physical data centers (from CNBC)

Breaking today: Electronic signature provider DocuSign reportedly exploring a sale

Oracle’s stock slides as revenue and guidance come up short

Adobe’s stock falls on soft guidance and news of FTC investigation

New York state, IBM, Micron and others partner on cutting-edge $10B chip research lab

Docker buys AtomicJar, the startup behind the popular open-source Testcontainers project

How the maturing ‘infrastructure-as-code’ market has changed the path of software development

Broadcom accelerates VMware transformation by killing off perpetual software licenses

MariaDB spins out SkySQL as an independent, database-as-a-service company

EU agrees to rules that will give gig workers employee rights

Amazon’s Project Kuiper successfully tests laser-based space communications tech

And in cryptoland: LINE NEXT raises $140M to fuel global NFT marketplace expansion

Politics and the Future: Andreessen Horowitz will get overtly political. Ben Horowitz writes: “We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.” If only it were that easy.

Cyber beat

Zeus Kerravala asks some hard questions: What’s behind Microsoft’s big security shakeup – and what needs to come next

Microsoft disrupts cybercrime group that created 750M+ fake accounts

Microsoft details three OAuth-focused hacking campaigns

Deadline time: New SEC cybersecurity incident disclosure requirements go into force in coming days

Alleged Chinese cyberattacks target US power and water systems

True Anomaly raises $100M for enhanced space security solutions

Israeli cybersecurity startup Zero Networks raises $20M

Data breaches at an all-time high, according to a new report from MIT

Love that name: Four indicted in multimillion-dollar ‘pig butchering’ crypto scam

Coming and goings

BlackBerry appoints John Giamatteo as CEO and scraps IPO plans for IoT business

Former Salesforce marketing chief Sarah Franklin has joined Lattice (the performance management software company, not the chipmaker) as CEO.

HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto is leaving to “dabble in new areas” and tend to his family’s first child.

GM’s Cruise autonomous vehicle unit lets go 900 employees, plus nine execs

Image: Bing Image Creator