With its new AI model Gemini, Google this week cracked open the generative AI race even wider — as we said would happen following that pre-Thanksgiving OpenAI debacle.

Gemini, which Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised way back in May at its I/O conference (pictured) would be coming this year, is still only partially available in the wild. And like other AI models, it’s getting mixed reviews so far. Also like most of the other combatants, which now also include Elon Musk’s Grok, it’s promising a lot more… later. This will only get more interesting in the new year.

In other news this week, it was a mixed bag of enterprise earnings, as some such MongoDB rocked but didn’t get much investor love, while others such as Broadcom, Box and C3.ai are still struggling with sluggish enterprise demand. That hoped-for generative AI boost hasn’t quite arrived at either the cloud giants or enterprise software and hardware leaders.

You can hear more about all this and other news in John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s theCUBE Podcast, now live. Don’t miss the insights on the next data platform, around 18 minutes in. Also, check out Dave Vellante’s latest weekly technology deep dive Breaking Analysis. It’s a deep dive with Vast Data into the emerging new data platform, a must-read for what’s coming next in management of data.

And check out coverage of the fast-evolving 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.

The AI battle quickens

Google debuts first Gemini generative AI model, with advanced reasoning and native multiple modes Not surprisingly, Google’s long-awaited, long-delayed introduction of its new, more capable gen AI model drew reactions all over the map. It may well be the real start of the gen AI boom — or so investors are betting as they raised Alphabet’s stock 5% the next day — but no one should be surprised that it has lots of flaws a few days out of the box. I mean, no chatbot is even close to flawless and arguably they may never be, at least if they’re trained on the whole hairy internet.

Google also took a lot of liberties in its widely viewed video of Gemini’s capabilities, which Bloomberg first noted was at the least heavily edited and perhaps, as TechCrunch put it, essentially faked. My take: Though I recall a Google exec in the press briefing providing some caveats in response to a question, this video is indeed going to be misleading to many people. The company doesn’t need to try this hard, it just needs to deliver. But it’s clear that Google at least is now in the game, and that game, as we’ve said in recent weeks, is wide open — as you can see from a sampling of our many other AI stories this week:

Microsoft Copilot to receive new coding and multimodal search capabilities

Late-breaking Friday: Microsoft-OpenAI partnership draws antitrust scrutiny in the UK and US So regulators there want to look into … the most competitive market in the entire universe? One that has companies such as Google and Meta that regulators have been targeting intensely for years scrambling to… compete? OK. Antitrust is a weird business.

Elon Musk’s xAI, maker of controversial chatbot Grok, seeks to raise $1B

Meta debuts new generative AI features for consumers

This is all about AI: Data management startup Vast Data valued at $9.1B after $118M funding round

Speaking of Elon: Tesla whistleblower says Autopilot not ready, contradicting Elon Musk’s ‘best’ AI remark

CoreWeave secures minority investment led by Fidelity on $7B valuation

IBM, Meta and others team up with academia and advocacy groups on open AI development initiative And more of Dave Vellante’s and Rob Strechay’s analysis: The rise of the AI Alliance and its implications for the tech industry

Extropic raises $14.1M to build ‘physics-based computing’ hardware for generative AI

AssemblyAI raises $50M for its cloud-based AI speech models

Nexusflow’s latest AI model outperforms GPT-4 in software tool usage

Arthur Chat, a tool for generative AI chatbots, launches to leverage proprietary data and any AI model

Liquid AI raises $37.6M to build ‘liquid’ neural networks

Meta announces Purple Llama initiative to promote responsible and safe generative AI development

Lutra AI launches to make building automated AI workflows easy

Quote of the week: “An LLM is 100% dreaming and has the hallucination problem. A search engine is 0% dreaming and has the creativity problem.” Andre Karpathy, OpenAI, on X

Enterprise and next-gen computing

AMD’s highly anticipated MI300X AI chips hit general availability along with new Ryzen 8040 CPUs Apparently Intel isn’t too impressed, but there’s seemingly unlimited demand for AI-accelerating chips that Nvidia just can’t fill

A lot of AI is going to get done in data centers, not just the big clouds: Dell debuts new PowerScale storage systems and AI-focused software upgrades

Quantum computing may be years away, but if IBM sticks with it, it has a chance to catch the next next computing wave: IBM unveils next-gen 133-qubit Heron quantum processor and its first modular quantum computer

Maybe this is the next-next-next computing wave: Biomemory debuts what it says is the world’s first commercially available DNA storage product

Gecko Robotics raises $100M to maintain critical infrastructure with AI-powered robots

An enterprise software VC in Boston shuts down, according to The Information. More to come as interest rates continue to bite? And startups could be soon to follow.

Earnings: a mixed bag

MongoDB crushes Wall Street’s targets, but its stock falls after-hours

Broadcom offers weak annual forecast, citing lower enterprise spending And it appears the Carbon security and the end-user computing units are on the way out, as CEO Hock Tan suggested earlier.

GitLab beats expectations, delivers first-ever profit, and its stock jumps

Fiscal challenges for Box as earnings, revenue and outlook fall short of projections

SentinelOne shares surge on strong quarterly results and upbeat forecast

Asana’s financial wins dimmed by warnings of economic challenges ahead

Couchbase posts strong earnings and revenue beat, but investors are unimpressed

AI software firm C3.ai delivers mixed results and soft guidance, sending its stock lower

DocuSign exceeds expectations in third quarter, forecasts higher fourth-quarter revenue

Smartsheet’s third quarter shows robust financial health with increased earnings

HashiCorp beats expectations but cautious guidance sends its stock way down

Cyber beat

Microsoft announces major security leadership reshuffle, appoints new CISO

Microsoft: Russian disinformation campaign used celebrity videos bought via Cameo

Akamai discovers Active Directory DNS spoofing exploit

UK reveals years-long Russian cyber-espionage activities

Messenger gets end-to-end encryption privacy enabled by default

Wiz acquires Raftt to increase its cloud security capabilities

Cisco unveils AI assistant for enhanced cybersecurity in Security Cloud platform And Zeus Kerravala’s instant analysis: Analysis: Cisco brings AI capabilities to its revamped security portfolio

Application security startup ArmorCode raises $40M to help companies ship secure software

23andMe SEC filing unveils extent of October data breach impacting genetic information

One person’s quest to fix Ukraine’s electric power grid

Critical Bluetooth security flaw discovered in Google, Apple and Linux devices

Comings and goings

Former Proofpoint CEO Ashan Willy joined New Relic as CEO after the cloud observability firm was taken private.

Scott Jones joined data platform Fivetran as chief revenue officer, following a stint as CEO of Incorta and other positions at SAP, Tableau and Alteryx.

What’s next

Earnings: Oracle Dec. 11, Adobe Dec. 13

Intel‘s AI Everywhere event, Dec. 14

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE