UPDATED 14:14 EDT / OCTOBER 11 2024

AI

AMD doubles down on AI, Google faces possible breakup and ‘causal AI’ is coming

Concerns are mounting over when and how all this investment in artificial intelligence will pay off — even at AI leader OpenAI, which reportedly predicts it will lose $14 billion in 2026 on $100 billion in revenue and won’t make a profit until 2030.

Still, the money keeps pouring into AI companies, from $250 million for Abridge to $100 million into former AWS exec Dave Clark’s supply chain startup Auger to a $650 million credit line for CoreWeave to … well, check ’em all out below.

Just when we thought agentic AI is the next big AI thing, now there’s “causal AI,” as theCUBE Research analyst Scott Hebner explains. Meantime, AI is even nabbing Nobel Prizes, this year for two groups of researchers — one of them now AI doomer Geoff Hinton.

Advanced Micro Devices is making an even bigger push to capture AI workloads with several new processors, data processing units and network interface cards unveiled this week, along with a concerted push for developers — whom it will badly need to really take on AI accelerator leader Nvidia.

Google is under heavy antitrust fire, as the Justice Department may seek a breakup of the company and a court ordered it to open up its Play Store to other app marketplaces. But both will take years to play out, probably too late to matter much, least of all to the consumers who seem to like the tradeoffs for getting its free services. Amazon suffered an antitrust defeat to the FTC as well.

Next week is the Open Compute Project Summit in San Jose. We’ll have news from it and I plan to go for a day or two. We’ll also get a read on chip gear and manufacturing from TSMC and ASML earnings.

TheCUBE Research analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante discuss this and other news in more detail on this week’s theCUBE Pod, out later today on YouTube. Vellante’s weekly deep dive, Breaking Analysis, will arrive next week, but you can catch up on last week’s installment.

Here’s all the top news and newsy topics this past week from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

AI and data

Headline news and analysis

Breaking Analysis: Desperately seeking AI ROI as IT budgets tighten

Hoo boy, I guess we’ll find out if this comes to pass, but that is a big loss… two and a half years down the road: OpenAI projections imply losses tripling to $14B in 2026, 3X 2024, on $100B revenue (per The Information)

TheCUBE Research’s Scott Hebner charts out the next AI trend: Welcome to the Causal AI marketplace

Intellyx’s Jason Bloomberg thinks AI conferences will be very short-lived: Artificial intelligence’s brief day in the sun

AI wins Nobel Prizes: AI pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton win Nobel Prize in physics And the next day: Google DeepMind scientists, biochemist share Nobel Prize in chemistry

More money matters

A lot of money, as usual…

Healthcare AI startup Abridge reportedly raising $250M at $2.5B valuation

Former Amazon executive Dave Clark raises $100M for new supply chain startup Auger

AI startup Basecamp raises $60M to scale research of proteins for ‘programmable’ next-gen meds

AMD-based AI cloud platform TensorWave raises $43M to increase data center capacity

Legal document AI startup EvenUp raises $135M at $1B valuation

Suki raises $70M for its healthcare-focused AI assistant

Relyance AI raises $32M to make AI data governance more transparent

AI accounting software startup Numeric raises $28M

Distributional raises $19M to enhance reliability of AI testing for enterprises

Open-source BI startup Lightdash raises $11M and launches its first AI data analyst

ApertureData raises $8.5M for multimodal AI database

Generative AI code testing startup Early bags $5M to catch software bugs before they cause havoc

AI startup Driver raises $8M to drive productivity gains by simplifying technical documentation

RAG data preparation startup Vectorize launches with $3.6M in seed funding

New models, products and services

Meta debuts new generative AI tools for creating video-based ads

Google Cloud brings Gemini models to Looker to create conversational AI agents using private data

Hugging Face makes AI development easier than ever with Gradio 5 release

Amazon details new AI-powered package management system

Seattle Seahawks tap Amazon Web Services for digital media processing

SAP upgrades its Joule AI assistant and developer tools with new automation features

Inflection AI partners with Intel on new LLM appliance

Big-data company dbt labs’ new AI copilot to simplify data analytics lifecycles

PagerDuty debuts new AI features for its incident response platform

Atlassian announces general availability for Rovo generative AI assistant

Writer releases Palmyra X 004 next-gen generative AI model with tool calling capability

Autonomous AI-powered software testing tool TestSprite announces early access

Smartsheet overhauls user experience and expands project management capacity

There’s more AI and big data news on SiliconANGLE

Around the enterprise

CEO Lisa Su (pictured) is pushing AMD hard to counter Nvidia’s dominance of AI chips: AMD attacks AI workloads with next-generation Instinct MI325X accelerator and networking chips

And a few tidbits from a press briefing with Su and Forrest Norrod, EVP and GM of AMD’s Data Center Solutions Business Group:

* AMD pushed back on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s insistence that data centers should become GPU machines. “You really need to have a mix of compute,” Su said. “You need the right compute for the right application.” Or as Norrod put it more pithily: “It’s like saying you only need a hammer.”

*Most of AMD’s GPU sales are to the cloud providers, not so much to enterprises — but Su views that as a big opportunity going forward.

*Asked if the incredible spending on AI infrastructure can continue, Su was resolute: “We are still very early in the cycle,” she said. “We’re still not anywhere near saturation.”

* With Taiwan under threat from China, would AMD consider diversifying from its manufacturing partner Taiwan Semiconductor to Samsung or even — ahem — Intel, which is trying to build a bigger foundry business? “We would love to use more capacity outside of Taiwan,” Su said carefully. But Intel? “We’ll see how things go,” she said. But for now, “we don’t have plans today to use anyone outside TSMC.”

Dell introduces AMD-based AI servers and tightens Hugging Face ties

Intel debuts Core Ultra 200S desktop processors with up to 24 cores

Samsung posts disappointing profit guidance as it grapples with AI chips (per CNBC)

Satellite ambitions could bring Amazon profits down to Earth (per the Wall Street Journal)

Fintech startup Monzo valued at $5.9B in secondary sale

Zeta Global to acquire LiveIntent for $250M to expand AI-powered marketing capabilities

Apollo bridges the gap between GraphQL and REST APIs

Miro launches AI-powered Innovation Workspace to streamline team collaboration

Qualcomm debuts AI-optimized A7 Elite chip for powering Wi-Fi systems

Broadcom debuts new 50G PON chips for internet provider networks

KKR-owned BMC to split into two separate companies

We have more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat

Attack & response

The CrowdStrike bug and the risk of cascading failures

Internet Archive experiences outages after DDoS attacks, data breach

Fidelity Investments suffers data breach affecting nearly 80,000 customers

American Water Works hit by cyberattack, customer portal and billing systems taken offline

Sonatype report: Open-source software reaches 6.6T requests and security risks escalate

Microsoft highlights escalating cyber risks in education: 2,507 attacks per week

Money matters

Human Security raises $50M+ to expand digital protection platform

CrashPlan acquires Parablu to strengthen cloud backup and data resilience offerings

OpenGradient secures $8.5M to advance decentralized AI infrastructure

Prime Security launches with AI-powered design stage security platform and $6M in funding

New services

New Google-led Global Signal Exchange aims to centralize fraud detection across platforms

Snyk enhances platform with AI-powered tools for risk-based application security

How Commvault is transforming cloud-first cyber resilience

Aryaka expands Unified SASE offering with new cloud service broker and Menlo Security integration

NinjaOne introduces AI-driven Patch Sentiment feature for enhanced security

Trulioo introduces fraud intelligence feature to enhance global risk profiling for businesses

Clutch Security introduces NHI Index to address rising nonhuman identity security challenges

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere around tech

Google’s under heavy antitrust fire, even if these cases will take a long while to sort out:

Justice Department could seek to break up Google following antitrust ruling and Court orders Google to open the Play Store to rival app marketplaces

Amazon suffers a defeat as judge allows FTC antitrust case to move forward

Venture capitalists blame antitrust pressure for discouraging new deal activity, but Axios’ Dan Primack notes that they mostly created their own problems.

Tesla shares drop following Cybercab, Robovan autonomous vehicle reveal

Coalition of US attorneys general goes after TikTok for ‘wreaking havoc’ on children’s mental health

US and UK join forces in ‘historic agreement’ to tackle child safety online

Metaverse platform Infinite Reality acquires extended reality firm Zappar for $45M

Russian rampage against US tech continues with ban of Discord

Uniswap Labs announces Unichain, a layer 2 blockchain for scaling decentralized finance

And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy

Comings and goings

Prominent Amazon Web Services executive Matt Wood is leaving after 15 years (per CRN).

Amazon‘s team in charge of Just Walk Out loses three execs, gains one (per TechCrunch).

Pilar Schenk, formerly Cisco’s COO of strategy, planning and operations for global specialists, is now AWS’ VP of global sales operations (per CRN).

Former ServiceNow President and Chief Operating Officer CJ Desai is Cloudflare’s new president of product & engineering.

Google’s EMEA boss Matt Brittin to leave after a decade in the post (per Reuters).

Dave Guzzi is Intel’s new VP of global partners, succeeding Trevor Vickers, who has been moved to a new, undisclosed role within the company (per CRN).

AI inference infrastructure startup NeuReality appointed former GlobalFoundries and Intel Capital exec Hiren Majmudar president.

What’s next

Events

Open Compute Project Summit, San Jose: Oct. 15-17: I’ll be there and we’ll have as much of the news as we can fit.

Earnings

Wednesday, Oct. 16: ASML

Thursday, Oct. 17: TSMC

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE

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