It was difficult this week to focus on much more than the war in Israel, given the horrific attacks and deadly counteroffensive, but with a heavy heart, we plod ahead on reporting what’s happening in the enterprise.

One of those developments is the rapid escalation of cyber warfare on both sides of the conflict, with still-to-be-determined impacts, according to David Strom’s analysis.

There were also a lot of threads this week related to the hype of generative AI giving way — a bit — to the realities of making it work, especially in enterprises where the stakes are much higher than among consumers trying out ChatGPT and the rest of the chatbots out there.

Hear more about this and other news in theCUBE Pod, John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s weekly podcast, out now on YouTube, in which they explore, among other things, the implications of the democratization of AI and the just-approved Microsoft-ActivisionBlizzard deal. And don’t miss Vellante’s weekly Breaking Analysis, this one a deep dive into what we’re calling intelligent data apps, coming over the weekend.

AI, meet reality

Someone’s going to have to pay for generative AI’s real cost, and that eventually will be all of us… unless infrastructure companies manage to optimize the entire AI stack, which won’t happen instantly: Report: Big tech firms still struggling to make money from generative AI services

In case you didn’t know just how much more compute and storage generative AI requires: Standard Power details plan for data centers powered by miniaturized nuclear reactors

Reliability and safety, notable issues for AI models, become a big opportunity for startups: Lakera and Deasie raise funding to make large language models more reliable

If you thought actors are too paranoid about generative AI, check this out. That second row will give me nightmares.

Shining some light into the black box that is AI: Anthropic announces key breakthrough in understanding the behavior of artificial neural networks

And a study shows fine-tuning LLMs can backfire in terms of safety. 

The big-tech coding copilots may have less of a moat than it appears: Kubiya debuts enhanced ChatGPT-like assistant for DevOps processes and TabbyML raises $3.2M for its open-source AI coding assistant One startup is even going after Microsoft’s Visual Basic integrated development environment.

In other AI news:

In automation pioneer jumps into generative AI in a big way: UiPath launches Autopilot, an AI assistant for every business worker And we had some good interviews and analysis from the company’s annual FORWARD event in Las Vegas: Humility is a framework for better AI solutions, says UiPath founder Daniel Dines and Keynote analysis: Grappling with AI’s biggest questions at UiPath FORWARD VI The big question going forward: Can it leverage gen AI on its platform in a bigger way, not just in the back office but throughout the enterprise, before gen AI companies eat their lunch.

Google keeps plugging away in gen AI: Google debuts AI search features for the healthcare and life sciences sectors and Google adds image and text generation features to its SGE search service

AMD steadily adds pieces to compete better with Nvidia in GPUs: AMD acquires open-source AI software developer Nod.ai

Adobe previews upcoming AI technologies for photos and video

Alation debuts AI copilot and analytics cloud to help enterprises wrangle data

Cloud data moves

This kind of simplicity in storage may become more important as generative AI requires huge amounts of all kinds of data from all over the place: Hitachi debuts unified data control plane spanning cloud, block, file and object storage

And Pure Storage is right there too: Pure Storage beefs up Evergreen subscription service with cost and data resiliency guarantees Zeus Kerravala’s analysis: Pure Storage pays the freight for storage-as-a-service and aims to simplify data resilience

Google tweaks AWS: Google makes its Cloud Spanner database service faster and more cost-efficient

Cybersecurity beat

This was inevitable: The Hamas-Israeli war is also being fought in cyberspace

You know it’s bad when the SEC has to step in: As Michigan bank becomes latest victim, SEC opens probe into MOVEit vulnerability

DNA profiles stolen from 23andMe advertised for sale on BreachForums, though it’s not clear what can be done with them

Get used to it, passkeys are here: Google to start prompting users to set up passkeys by default

Political leaders beware: The Predator Files describe another nefarious global spyware campaign

Distributed denial-of-service attacks are growing bigger and more lethal

Consolidation continues: Arctic Wolf acquires venture-backed cybersecurity provider Revelstoke

And a security hole that finally needs to be filled: It’s time to put an end to the NTLM network authentication protocol

Around tech

Layoff watch:  

Juniper to lay off 440 employees at a cost of $59M

Flexport confirms second round of layoffs, with 20% of its staff to go

Qualcomm says it will lay off more than 1,200 staff in California

Antitrust watch: Microsoft finally closes its $68.7B acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Even for Microsoft, that’s a big bill: Microsoft vows to fight after IRS slaps it with $29B tax bill

Elon Musk manages to make X even more toxic at the worst possible time and the EU doesn’t wait long to bring the hammer down: EU opens investigation into X over alleged Israel-Hamas war disinformation The EU warns Meta too: EU now tells Meta to keep platform free of misinformation during Israel-Gaza conflict

And the EU declines to give telcos a Christmas gift after all

Perhaps M&A outside cybersecurity is starting to revive? Atlassian plans to acquire video-messaging platform startup Loom

But not venture capital, by CB Insights’ reckoning

Very short green shoots in semiconductors: Samsung forecasts 78% drop in profit, but its stock rises as investors see signs of recovery

TSMC receives temporary US approval to send advanced chipmaking gear to its China fab Because if TSMC can’t make advanced chips, a lot of tech companies in the U.S. around the world can’t make their stuff.

Comings and goings: Unity replaces CEO with former IBM President and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst

What’s next

Third-quarter earnings reports kick off next week with Netflix, TSMC and ASML.

Supercloud 4, Oct. 24-25, live virtual event. Our own free editorial event, the latest in a regular series, will look at how generative AI is changing every industry, including tech itself. We’re adding new guests every day to a roster that already includes AI21 Labs co-founder and co-CEO Ori Goshen, Google Cloud AI chief June Yang, Salesforce Executive Vice President Alice Steinglass, Neeva co-founder Sridhar Ramaswamy, Monte Carlo co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Lior Gavish, Dell’s new Chief AI Officer Jeff Boudreau, Walmart Senior Vice President David Glick and more. Register here.

And to prime the pump for the event, starting Monday we’ll be running a special report on generative AI with a series of features: how it’s starting to move the center of computing from the cloud back toward on-premises data centers, how companies are scrambling to protect their data from large language models, and how gen AI is changing programming forever. Those are just of few of the topics we’ll discuss with our guests in a couple of weeks.

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