It’s time to get ready for Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference, starting Monday in Las Vegas — the biggest cloud computing conference of the year.
To prepare, check out our new Special Report: AI and the Cloud, with exclusive features, interviews and analysis, and all the important news starting next week. We take a deep dive into AWS’ Annapurna Labs chip operation, and also analyze the prospects for AI’s hottest new thing: agents, as well as the considerable challenges to their roll-out.
In addition, theCUBE Research analyst John Furrier interviewed top AWS executives ahead of re:Invent, including AI and data chief Swami Sivasubramanian, enterprise solutions head Colleen Aubrey, developer experience VP Deepak Singh, and Dilip Kumar, head of Q for Business.
We’ll have all the news next week from re:Invent keynotes and interviews, along with analysis from theCUBE Research and interviews on theCUBE.
In other news this past week, big money continued to roll into cybersecurity as Halcyon raised $100 million and N-able acquired Adlumin for $266 million.
TheCUBE Research Chief Analyst Dave Vellante assessed his 2024 predictions. ChatGPT gave him an A-, but he gave himself a B.
This week saw a mixed bag of earnings reports ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, but some significant guidance disappointments from Dell, HP, CrowdStrike and Workday weighed on stocks. Meantime, Pony AI’s IPO disappointed as well.
Lots of earnings reports are coming next week too, among them Hewlett Packard Enterprise, UiPath, Salesforce and Zscaler.
Here’s the news and analysis this week from News and beyond:
AI and data: All AIs on AWS at re:Invent
Check out our newest special report on the intersection of cloud and AI, ahead of AWS’ annual re:Invent conference Dec. 2-6 in Las Vegas. As at just about every tech conference these days, AI will be the star. We’ll have all the news from re:Invent, plus exclusive interviews from theCUBE and analysis from theCUBE Research.
Special Report: AI and the Cloud
First up is our deep dive into Annapurna Labs, Amazon’s accelerator chip operation in Austin, Texas: Amazon’s secretive AI weapon: An exclusive look inside AWS’ Annapurna Labs chip operation
We took a deep dive into the promises and perils of agentic AI, which will be a prime topic at re:Invent — and just about every tech conference after that: Safety and reliability concerns temper agentic AI mania And a closer look at the challenges underneath the hype: AI agents are practical. Reliability is another matter
John Furrier also interviewed the exec driving AWS into enterprise applications: Colleen Aubrey: Leading AWS’ bold path into enterprise solutions as well as VP of AI and Data Swami Sivasubramanian: Inside the AI revolution: Swami Sivasubramanian on generative AI, agentic systems and AWS’ vision. He also interviewed Deepak Singh, VP of Next Generation Developer Experience at AWS: Revolutionizing software development: Deepak Singh on gen AI, AWS Q Developer and the future of coding and Q chief Dilip Kumar on the coming golden age of business productivity: Transforming how business works: Dilip Kumar on Q for Business, gen AI and AWS’ vision for productivity
Furrier will have more posts on his exclusive interviews with AWS execs ahead of re:Invent, in particular Sunday evening with AWS CEO Matt Garman.
Worth a read
Dave Vellante did pretty well on his 2024 predictions, many of which not surprisingly involved AI: Breaking Analysis: Grading our 2024 enterprise technology predictions
A customarily provocative post from Gary Marcus asks if generative AI scaling is hitting a wall: A new AI scaling law shell game?
Some good advice on AI prompting from Ethan Mollick: Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting
New models and services
IBM brings its most powerful Granite AI models to Amazon’s cloud
Anthropic open-sources protocol for connecting AI models to datasets and tools
Amazon reportedly develops new multimodal language model
Report: xAI developing new consumer chatbot and AI model
Nvidia’s new music generation model Fugatto creates ‘never before heard sounds’
Ritual and FLock.io collaborate on decentralized AI model development
Luma AI updates Dream Machine with new Photon image generation model and more
Artists briefly leak access to OpenAI’s Sora video generator
Perplexity mulls getting into hardware
Ai2 releases new language models competitive with Meta’s Llama
Money matters
Inflection AI acquires automation startups BoostKPI and Jelled.ai
AI-driven protein discovery platform Cradle raises $73M
Eon raises another $70M at $1.4B valuation for its cloud backup platform
New startup named /dev/agents led by Ex-Google, Meta tech leaders raises $56M for AI agents
AI voice startup PlayAI raises $21M to power a new generation of more humanlike AI agents
Pyramid Analytics secures $50M in financing from BlackRock
There’s more AI and big data news on News
Around the enterprise: Muted outlooks tank enterprise stocks
Policy
FTC reportedly launches antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s cloud, AI and cybersecurity practices
Canada’s Competition Bureau seeks to force Google to divest ad tech tools in antitrust suit
Money matters
Dell’s stock falls on weak guidance, as more customers hold off for next-gen AI servers
HP’s stock sinks on lower guidance, despite optimism in the PC market
Strong renewals propel Nutanix past Wall Street estimates
Workday’s guidance falls just short of analysts’ expectations, stock gets hammered
Despite threat of cuts, Intel secures up to $7.86B in CHIPS Act funding for fab projects
Software testing provider Tricentis raises $1.33B at $4.5B valuation
Operating margin concerns push Autodesk stock down 9% after strong earnings results
PagerDuty exceeds forecasts with strong revenue growth and customer expansion
Zoom struggles to grow beyond a crawl and its stock dips
Wherobots raises $21.5M to expand Spatial Intelligence Cloud platform
Cloud management platform Emma raises $17M to scale infrastructure with demand
Developer tooling startup Tempest launches with $3.2M in funding
New product and services
Report: Meta to spend $10B+ on 25,000-mile submarine internet cable
Multicloud GPU compute-as-a-service startup Kinesis Network goes fully serverless
Akhetonics nabs €6M to build a general-purpose optical processor
We have more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps
Cyber beat: Big deals keep rolling
Attack & response
Ransomware attack on Panasonic’s Blue Yonder disrupts supply chains in UK and US
Aqua Security uncovers massive denial-of-service campaign targeting 35M devices
Knostic research unveils timing-based vulnerabilities in large language models
Netcraft highlights growing role of AI models in Black Friday fake store scams
Money matters
N-able acquires cybersecurity provider Adlumin in $266M deal
Halcyon nabs $100M to block ransomware with capsule neural networks
CrowdStrike shares fall 5% after fourth-quarter outlook misses expectations
More cybersecurity news here
Elsewhere in tech: A disappointing IPO
Pony AI raises $413M in Nasdaq IPO as shares close below initial listing price
European Commission flags Bluesky for breaching transparency rules
X claims ownership of all X accounts in battle for The Onion to acquire Alex Jones’ Infowars
TikTok to block beauty filters over mental health concerns among the young
Australian Senate bill means under 16s will be banned from using social media
Varjo launches Teleport, allowing users to capture any scene in VR with an iPhone
And check out more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy
Comings and goings
Samsung Electronics appoints co-CEO in leadership shuffle focused on chip divisions, shares drop
What’s next
Events
Dec. 2-6: AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas and virtual. All hands on deck for news from News, where I and others will be in attendance, as well as theCUBE and analysts from theCUBE Research. They might need to rename it re:AInvent.
Earnings
Dec. 2: Zscaler
Dec. 3: Salesforce, Pure Storage, Box, Couchbase, Marvell and Okta
Dec. 4: Synopsys and SentinelOne
Dec. 5: HPE, UiPath, Rubrik, GitLab, Asana, Smartsheet, HashiCorp and Docusign
Photo: Robert Hof/ News
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