As artificial intelligence matures, the security guardrails — and the computer system itself — are changing.

This week, the conversation centered around agents going rogue. Better guardrails are needed, many argue, but that hasn’t slowed down the roll out of new AI models from the biggest players in the game.

Looking further ahead,  John Furrier (pictured left), executive analyst for theCUBE Research, sees AI precipitating a fundamental shift in how enterprises build computer systems.

“The semiconductor activity has really shifted,” he said. “The game has changed. The GPU era is over. Now we’re in the systems era … but what’s interesting is all the hubbub about sovereign AI is not just about the countries, France, Canada, that want to have their sovereignty in their nations with data centers. The AI factory, as [Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang] said, is producing not just tokens and revenue; it’s producing intelligence.” 

On the latest episode of theCUBE Pod, Furrier and Dave Vellante (pictured, right), chief analyst for theCUBE Research, discussed how agents are reshaping the traditional practices around information technology. They also looked at CoreWeave Inc.’s upcoming event and whether new agents, such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Muse, are really secure.

CoreWeave is in a promising but tenuous position

Ahead of CoreWeave’s upcoming event, Fully Connected, theCUBE took a look at the prospects of the rising neocloud — although the term may be AI cloud now. CoreWeave made waves when it completed the industry’s first bring-up and validation of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 system, but there are concerns about whether its financing is sustainable.

“At [Dell Inc.], they’re getting a massive return on their best AI investments,” Vellante said. “But the mainstream enterprises aren’t. Look at CoreWeave’s big customers. It’s a rumor; they disclosed that 70% of their customers or their revenue came from the top three customers. I think it’s [OpenAI PBC], [Microsoft Corp.] and Meta. Those guys will spend like crazy with CoreWeave. Obviously, those guys can monetize, but can the end customer?”

While the market has typically been deflationary — with technology getting cheaper over time — right now, it’s inflationary. That means CoreWeave is currently being kept afloat by the scarcity of GPUs. However, Vellante said its long-term success will depend on the company expanding its portfolio the same way that Amazon Web Services did.

Furrier is optimistic: “The model isn’t disappearing in the cloud; it’s just being disaggregated,” he said. “Hybrid cloud is essentially distributed computing but now you have distributed hyperscale capabilities. The neoclouds, in my opinion, represent a new infrastructure layer that’s essentially saying this is going to be distributed computing. They’re the customer specialty. They’re called neoclouds today. They’ll be AI clouds tomorrow.”

Buzzy agents provoke concerns over security

Dell’s earnings continue to be strong, reflecting the opportunity for infrastructure companies in the growing AI industry. Software-as-a-service companies, on the other hand, continue to provoke concern. Salesforce Inc. is in bed with the AI giants now: Some think it could be a death knell, while others see it as a necessary move for SaaS’s survival.

“Infrastructure is the place to be,” Vellante said. “It’s not about just chips anymore. It’s about the system and the value chain across the system. The question is, when’s it going to hit software? Software’s had kind of a bounce back. Is that a dead cat bounce before the real SaaSpocalypse kicks in? A lot of people think that Benioff letting Anthropic in is letting the fox in the henhouse.”

Last week, Meta made a splash in the AI pool with its new agent, Muse, which is capable of automating digital tasks while “living” inside a secure cloud environment. Considering Facebook’s past data privacy scandals, Vellante has his doubts, while Furrier touts a different AI agent: Instinct, an invite-only AI assistant, has gone viral among Silicon Valley insiders.

“You have to give it credentials,” Furrier said, noting that Instinct is less secure than Google Workspace. “There’s some trust involved. It does a lot of good tasks for me. It’s essentially a chief of staff. You could give it credentials to, say, your travel apps like United, Delta, and log in on your behalf essentially say … ‘Find me an aisle seat.’ It just stays on it while you’re doing other things.”

Amid those concerns about the traditional SaaS industry, Furrier sees potential for tech products to be “100% secure” by design. Vellante is skeptical of that happening anytime — if ever. With agents linked to OpenAI reportedly attempting to brute-force a United Nations statistics site and an OpenAI agent gaining unauthorized access to an Australian government website, there appears to be a long way to go before AI can be fully reined in.

“We used to draw the stack and security was a layer,” Vellante said. “It’s not a layer anymore. It has to be something that’s orthogonal. I think that the attackers are always going to have an advantage. You know the old saying, they only have to be right once. And there’s always going to be seams. Every time infrastructure changes, you’re going to have to do a patch. That patch can’t happen instantaneously.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock
Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD
Liz Claman, television host
Bob Picciano, member of the advisory board from SolarWinds Worldwide
Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom
Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM
Tony Kim, head of BlackRock Fundamental Equities Global Technology
Amit Eyal Govrin, founder and CEO of Kubiya
John Roese, global chief technology officer of products and operations at Dell
Ihab Tarazi, SVP and CTO of Dell
Matt Baker, managing director at Deloitte Digital
Bill Scannell, president of Global Sales and Customer Operations at Dell
David Goulden, former president of Dell EMC
Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel
Dave Donatelli, CEO of Riverbed Technology
Joe Tucci, chairman and co-founder at Big Growth Partners
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell
Jeff Clarke, COO and vice chairman of Dell
Erik Woodring, managing director and head of U.S. Technology Hardware Equity Research at Morgan Stanley
David Floyer, analyst emeritus at theCUBE Research
Brian J. Baumann, founder of NYSE Wired and director of capital markets, technology at NYSE
Jim McNiel, chief growth officer of TAE Technogies Inc.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms
Teresa Carlson, president and chief commercial officer of Flexport
Jean English, global chief marketing officer of Juniper Networks

Here’s the full episode of this week’s theCUBE Pod:

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Photo: SiliconANGLE