UPDATED 10:41 EST / MARCH 15 2024

AI

Insights from AI innovators: Data is driving infrastructure – but the data needs to be better

THIS WEEK IN ENTERPRISE by Robert Hof

It was all AI all the time this week, as so many weeks these days seem to be.

Supercloud 6: AI Innovators, SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s signature event series, surfaced a lot of insights about where AI and generative AI are heading, and one upshot was that data is increasingly driving infrastructure architecture. But it’s not yet clear what that architecture will look like and especially who will build it. Check out all the insights below.

Meantime, in the usual yin-yang of late, investors keep piling more money into AI startups — and even established companies are benefiting, as Oracle, UiPath and Foxconn all beat estimates thanks to AI spending — but meantime, governments seem determined to rein it all in.

In fact, they seem inclined to rein in a wide variety of tech companies, led by the House’s bill that could lead to TikTok getting sold or even banned — though the Senate seems less enamored of the idea.

One more thing: Despite some signs of uncertainty lately, some companies in the other perennially hot market — cybersecurity — some companies are managing to keep pulling ahead, including CrowdStrike, Wiz and Zscaler.

Late-breaking Friday: It looks like HashiCorp may be up for sale, Bloomberg reported. More below.

Some of this and other news are topics of discussion in another installment of John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s theCUBE Pod, available now on YouTube. And catch Vellante’s weekly deep tech dive, Breaking Analysis, coming out this weekend.

Here’s the top news this week:

The lowdown on AI and data

The latest in SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s editorial event series, Supercloud 6: AI Innovators, highlighted a wide range of startups at the leading edge of AI and data management, along with companies such as Uber and Walmart that are deep into implementing the technologies. A few takeaways:

  • 2024 is the year of implementing the experiments of 2023. “They’re starting to think about, OK, well, if I’m using this model as part of my application, what is the long-term cost going to be of this model? And how am I going to deal with that from a budget perspective?” said Suraj Patel, head of MongoDB Ventures. Companies such as Uber and Walmart are showing the way.
  • The current resource-hogging generative AI technologies could run into a wall, prompting many companies to look for more efficient compute. Some are on the bleeding edge: See the “food for thought” item below. But others are already well underway on a number of fronts, such as Multiverse Computing, which is using quantum computing-inspired software for AI model training, as well as Efficient Compute, Neural Magic, Taalas and, not least, Groq, the current hot thing in chatbots thanks to its ultrafast language-optimized custom processor.
  • Democratization of AI: It’s speeding up as organizations such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation help integrate it into cloud-native environments and companies such as Uber and Walmart make AI tools more available inside their organizations. “You’ll see the CNCF community probably take charge of the generative AI, because as we’ve been saying, the democratization of the data side is not going to be by the data scientist. It’s going to be by the AI itself,” said Furrier. The result, said Alessya Visnjic, co-founder and chief executive officer of WhyLabs Inc.: “The power of creating AI applications is now in the hands of any developer.”
  • Data is driving infrastructure architecture in the AI Age, since it’s too costly to move data at the edge to the cloud for AI processing, so AI compute will be coming to the data instead. That has huge implications for how networks need to be designed, in particular driving more AI, especially inference, into on-premises data centers. “Gen AI applications created a new category of applications that required a new data architecture,” said Venkat Venkataramani, co-founder and CEO at Rockset. Vellante noted Meta has suggested half of Llama deployments will be on-prem, illustrating how AI could lift the fortunes of a lot of infrastructure companies. When it comes to AI going forward, Furrier added, “Infrastructure is where it’s at.”
  • More than ever, you can’t have good AI without good data, so there’s lots more focus on ensuring that — a topic we covered in our recent and ongoing special report, AI’s Next Frontier: Data. For example, says CalypsoAI CEO Neil Serebryany, “We actually have a feature that allows enterprises to, as they get responses from generative AI models, verify if a response is true or not true and build their own internal taxonomy of trustworthy information on the generative AI side of the house.” A corollary: Governance is all the more important to avoid privacy and corporate data protection issues.
  • To support that trend, new data architectures will be needed — something we’ll cover in much more detail at the next Supercloud event in July. But the essence, Vellante says, is that there will need to be unified data sources for AI applications to work well, not just the stovepipes that exist today in multiple databases, data warehouses and data lakes. “Everyone’s trying to build better data structures… that can be ready for AI applications,” said Kyle Weller, director of product at Onehouse.ai.
  • You’ve heard of shadow IT? “Shadow AI is going to become more and more menacing in organizations,” said Zscaler Chief Security Officer Deepen Desai, meaning unsanctioned AI models. “Security professionals will have to leverage AI to fight AI.”

Check out the free event on-demand, check out all the coverage here and below, or dip into the individual interviews written up so far (and stay tuned, we’ll be adding more guest segments over the next week):

In other AI news

Big brothers are watching: European lawmakers pass world’s first major regulation for AI

Google errs on the side of caution with its Gemini chatbot and global election information

Report: Automakers might be secretly selling your driving data to insurance companies

Gartner has some advice: How executive leaders can manage the impacts of the US executive order on AI

Still plenty of new AI funding:

Vehicle simulation startup Applied Intuition raises $250M at $6B valuation

Together AI closes on another bumper funding round and its value soars to $1.25B

Databricks is the latest investor in red-hot generative AI startup Mistral AI 

AI-focused big data startup Unstructured raises $40M to make raw data LLM-ready

Ocient closes on $49.4M funding round to streamline always-on data analytics

And plenty of new AI infrastructure, models and features:

Meta unveils two new 24K GPU clusters it’s using to develop more advanced generative AI And maybe to take on AWS for AI infrastructure?

Cerebras Systems debuts wafer-scale AI training chip with 4T transistors

Anthropic releases affordable, high-speed Claude 3 Haiku model

Cognition launches Devin, a generative AI-powered coding engineer

Google DeepMind’s SIMA AI agent can play video games its never seen before

Vast Data unveils new AI infrastructure with Nvidia and Supermicro partnerships

Elon Musk’s xAI to open-source its Grok language model

Covariant develops video-generating AI model for powering warehouse robots

Report: Apple quietly acquired AI-powered quality assurance startup DarwinAI

Google Cloud rolls out new AI tools for healthcare and life sciences

Oracle boosts gen AI support in its Fusion Cloud suite

Pretty interesting for Intel and Arm and its partners if they’re right: Akamai and Neural Magic team up to accelerate AI workloads on edge CPU servers

Creatio’s no-code development platform gets generative AI copilot

MinIO expands its enterprise object storage offering to handle AI workloads

AI startup Axion Ray raises $17.5M to enhance technical issue detection for manufacturers

C1 launches C1 Elly, the ‘one intelligent virtual assistant to rule them all’

Food for thought: The road map to AI’s next level could be nature Axios takes a look at Verses, a company that claims to be trying to emulate natural systems with Genius, a system of self-organizing distributed intelligence that it says could upend the resource-heavy approach of today’s generative AI and machine learning methods. It’s something I and others have been thinking needs to happen eventually given the untenable energy requirements for even approaching intelligence digitally, and given that our little three-pound brains and even half-ounce bird brains manage to outdo even the most advanced AI models in learning from relatively sparse inputs and with many orders of magnitude less power.

Women in Tech

TheCUBE covered the Women in Data Science annual event last Friday at Stanford, with plenty of editorial interviews full of insights on data-driven trends:

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of the Women in Data Science Worldwide Conference 2024

Women in tech help shape the future of AI and cybersecurity

From insights to impact: Building inclusive solutions for data science and sustainability

Empowering women in data science: Insights from Pinterest’s Hannah Pham

Starfish Space tackles space debris and charts new goals in space exploration

Data-driven justice: Latest trends in data science helping to combat human trafficking

Around the cloud and enterprise

Earnings

In other news

Late-breaking Friday: HashiCorp shares jump on report that company is considering a sale Perhaps not a big surprise, since revenue growth slowed in its latest quarter to 15%, from 41% a year earlier. “We are behind where we wanted the company to be at this point in our growth cycle, and we have work to do,” CEO David McJannet told analysts last week. Founder Mitchell Hashimoto left in December.

Microsoft joins Google and Amazon Web Services in ditching data breakup fees, though again it does nothing for more common egress fees for the many enterprises moving data among multiple clouds.

Luminary Cloud launches with $115M funding for cloud CAE platform meant to dust desktop competitors

DBOS nabs $8.5M to challenge Linux with a database-powered operating system

Polar Signals reels in $6.8M to ease application performance analysis

Samsung expected to win $6B+ in CHIPS Act funding

Alice & Bob selected for France’s PROQCIMA $548M quantum computing initiative

Intel’s new Core i9-14900KS ‘Special Edition’ chip breaks records with fastest desktop speed

Alphabet spinoff Sidewalk launches new venture to build battery-supported data centers

Grafana Labs debuts new features and integrations to enhance Kubernetes observability

Arm reveals most advanced automotive chip designs yet, plus virtual prototypes to speed app development

IO River raises $5.4M to help internet companies use multiple CDNs with ease

New CodeOps methodology seeks to streamline application development through code reuse

CircleCI launches new service to automate release orchestration for developers

Cyber beat

New funding continues apace:

Israeli cloud security startup Wiz reportedly in talks to raise $800M on $10B valuation Oh, and a few days later, Wiz bought Gem Security

IoT security startup Nozomi Networks closes $100M funding round

Dutch cybersecurity firm Eye Security raises $39M for European expansion

Zscaler acquires cybersecurity data processing startup Avalor for reported $350M

And new services:

Google Chrome enhances user security with real-time Safe Browsing update

Google introduces Security Command Center Enterprise, the first multicloud risk management solution fusing AI-powered SecOps with cloud security

Perception Point launches GPT-4 powered AI model to boost cybersecurity threat detection

Tenable enhances attack path analysis and mitigation guidance with generative AI

Aryaka’s new service merges security and network performance in a single platform

Nightfall AI targets modern enterprises with new data security solutions

BlackBerry: Global financial sector faces ‘death by a million cuts’ through malware attacks

Salt Security identifies critical flaws in ChatGPT plugins that risk third-party data breaches

Resonance launches ‘full-spectrum’ cybersecurity platform for Web3 projects

Opaque Systems announces new product for enhanced AI deployment security

Elsewhere around tech

TikTok … boom!: House of Representatives passes bill that could lead to TikTok ban or sale

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin assembling consortium to buy TikTok

Apple eases App Store software distribution rules in the EU

On the World Wide Web’s 35th birthday, inventor Tim Berners-Lee is not happy with what the web has become. He wants to fix it.

Comings and goings

Despite raising $95 million in funding, remote driving startup Phantom Auto will shut down after seven years in operation.

Google Cloud Go-to-Market President Adaire Fox-Martin will become president and CEO of data center operator Equinix late in the second quarter. Current President and CEO Charles Meyers will become executive chairman, and current Executive Chairman Peter Van Camp will become a special adviser to the board.

Intel appointed Stacy Smith, executive chairman of Kioxia, formerly Toshiba Memory, and chair of Autodesk Inc., to its board. He called out the importance of Intel’s new chip foundry strategy.

Opal Security appointed former Slack exec Garrin Wong VP of engineering, former Snyk exec Ravi Maira VP of marketing and former Aqua Security exec Ryan Peterson VP of sales.

What’s next

Nvidia GTC in San Jose: Now one of the hottest AI conferences, from the hottest company on the planet. We’ll have all the big news, and I’ll be there covering the keynotes, talking to AI executives and more.

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe in Paris: TheCUBE will be there with live coverage.

Down the road, just announced: The annual Google I/O developer conference will be May 14-15 near the Googleplex in Mountain View.

Earnings next week: Wednesday, March 20: Micron

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Image Creator

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