To their credit, artificial intelligence companies and researchers are looking more deeply at the unintended consequences of generative AI.

This week, Anthropic showed how AI can be taught to deceive, though it didn’t offer a solution to that alarming possibility. OpenAI did announce tools to reduce the potential for AI to produce election-influencing misinformation, though it’s not clear why they will be any more successful than Meta Platforms efforts to rein in the problems with social media.

At the same time, investors continue to pour more money into the market and companies keep pushing ahead — including toward the Holy Grail of artificial general intelligence — as OpenAI and Meta and others aim to get to human-level AI, for better or worse.

Meantime, the tech industry as a whole seems to be in a holding pattern, as some companies such as Google continue to lay off workers in the face of what they view as macroeconomic uncertainty. But by most accounts, the economy is surprisingly steady and even improving on metrics such as inflation and, of course, the stock market, and new consumer confidence numbers back up the better vibes. Gartner even anticipates surprisingly strong growth this year, though as theCUBE Research analyst Dave Vellante will note in his weekly Breaking Analysis this weekend, a cautious outlook remains before sentiment improves for the second half of the year.

Antitrust continues to be a trend into the new year, as Apple ran into a buzzsaw over its Watch and Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot looks all but dead.

But Apple is moving on, and today you can finally pre-order its Vision Pro “spatial computing” headset if you have a few thousand bucks to spare.

This and other news will be discussed in John Furrier’s and Vellante’s weekly podcast theCUBE Pod, out this afternoon on YouTube. And don’t miss Vellante’s weekly deep dive Breaking Analysis, this week on the outlook for tech spending this year.

Here’s a sampling of this week’s news:

The ups and downs of AI

There’s more work and research on the unintended (or worse, intended) consequences of AI:

Anthropic researchers show AI systems can be taught to engage in deceptive behavior

OpenAI announces steps to prevent its generative AI tools from being used to manipulate elections

IMF: AI will affect 40% of jobs and could worsen inequality

New nonprofit to certify AI models that only use copyrighted training data with permission

As generative AI takes over the cloud, 2024 will be a pivotal year

But that’s scarcely stopping any investment. Wow, that’s a lot of AI horsepower: Meta plans to buy 350K Nvidia GPUs to build artificial general intelligence

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly seeking to raise billions for chip fab venture

Report: OpenAI rival Cohere could raise up to $1B in fresh funding

Pecan AI taps generative AI to help anyone create predictive models

Sakana AI raises $30M to develop small, collaborative AI models

Databricks targets telcos with its newest industry analytics platform

Pinecone’s vector database goes serverless

DigitalOcean debuts Nvidia H100 GPU instances to expand access to advanced computing for AI workloads

JFrog-Amazon SageMaker integration aims to streamline machine learning workflows

Samsung debuts AI-equipped Galaxy S24 smartphones and Galaxy Ring

Samsung S24 Galaxy phone to integrate Google’s Gemini AI models

Google’s DeepMind builds hybrid AI system to solve complex geometry problems

Hmmm… Arizona State University to use OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise to enhance learning

In the cloud and enterprise

An awfully big deal to get so little attention: Synopsys to buy Ansys for $35B in engineering software megadeal

Seems a bit optimistic? Gartner sees healthy 6.8% growth in 2024 IT spending

Intel and Nvidia shine in Gartner’s latest global semiconductor revenue rankings

Samsung, SK hynix to build $471B chip hub in South Korea

TSMC’s $40B fab construction project in Arizona expected to face additional delays

AWS will invest $15B+ in Japan to expand its local data center footprint

A cloud case study by Paul Gillin: Dow’s customer experience overhaul yields tripling of online sales

SoftwareOne rebuffs $3.5B takeover offer from Bain Capital

Quantum seems to be getting more interest lately: Quantum computer developer Quantinuum raises $300M at $5B pre-money valuation

Digital assets firm HashKey raises $100M at over $1.2B valuation

Leantime overhauls project management platform with neurodiversity in mind

Seagate introduces nanophotonic hard drive architecture for data centers

Hardware-as-a-service startup Xyte raises $30M in early-stage funding round

Low-code software integration startup Prismatic raises $17M in Series B funding

What an awful disaster of an IT project: Japanese IT firm says it has a ‘moral duty’ to compensate those hurt in Britain’s Post Office scandal

Cyber beat

TheCUBE Research’s new analyst Shelly Kramer offers her predictions for what’s coming or needs to come in network and application security: Five network security predictions for 2024

Snyk expands security portfolio with acquisition of runtime data application startup Helios

Security access solutions startup Oleria raises $32.9M

Vicarius nabs $30M for its AI-powered vulnerability remediation platform

Kusari’s mission to secure software supply chains bolstered by $8M investment

Google disrupts malware campaign run by Russia-linked hacking group

Researchers disclose vulnerability in GPUs from AMD, Apple and Qualcomm

Major security flaws found in popular UEFI firmware impact top tech companies

Protect AI finds vulnerabilities in open-source AI and machine learning tools

New solution from Venafi reduces the attack surface and hardens enterprise security

Have I Been Pwned adds 71M compromised credentials from the ‘Naz.API’ data set

Elsewhere around tech

Still seems like a lot of friction here: price, configuration choices, must have an iPhone or iPad even to order, heavy… and what’s the killer app? If this is the next iPhone, there’s a lot of iteration to come: Apple opens pre-orders for the Vision Pro mixed reality headset

Signs of life — a bit — in startupland: Venture capitalists show renewed interest in startups, marking positive shift in late 2023

I wouldn’t point to this as a sign of IPOs returning just yet: Two years after filing IPO paperwork, Reddit reportedly preparing to go public in March

And you can be sure Google isn’t alone here. If nothing else, big tech is using the doldrums as an convenient reason to get rid of people they didn’t really want: Google announces yet more layoffs, this time affecting its advertising business units And there’s more to come: Google CEO Sundar Pichai warns more job cuts will be necessary to achieve ‘ambitious goals’ this year

Size matters, and not in a good way, in antitrust:

Big antitrust messes for Apple: Apple proposes Apple Watch redesign to avoid import ban

A loss for Epic, costly for Apple: Supreme Court refuses to review antitrust case

Apple revises App Store terms to let apps link to external payment methods, but for a hefty fee

Apple told once again to stop selling patent-infringing smartwatches after appeals court ruling

Shares of iRobot plunge as report claims EC set to block $1.7B Amazon takeover Though as The Information’s Martin Peers noted, a cost-cutting Amazon may actually be fine with losing a company whose business has plummeted anyway.

Though in other ways, size doesn’t hurt: IDC: Apple sold more smartphones than Samsung for the first time in 2023

Alphabet’s Wing unveils new drone that can carry heavier payloads

Former Meta Platforms/Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is now stepping off Meta’s board to become an informal adviser (from the Wall Street Journal).

Nineteen-year Amazon veteran John Felton is Amazon Web Services’ new chief financial officer, reporting to Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky.

Ashish Dhawan, formerly AWS’ managing director and worldwide head of enterprise workload sales, is new senior vice president of NetApp’s global cloud sales (from CRN).

DigitalOcean appoints Paddy Srinivasan its new CEO, replacing Yancey Spruill.

Intel hires a former McAfee and Trellix executive Brett Hannath as its new chief marketing officer (from CRN).

What’s coming next

Coming next week: After Netflix kicks off tech earnings season Tuesday, IBM follows Wednesday and Intel comes Thursday. 

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