Databricks makes its play for AI agents, Meta plays catch-up, and Chime’s IPO shines – News

The artificial intelligence era won’t be decided only by providers of large language models such as OpenAI. Databricks made a big play at its annual Data+AI Summit in San Francisco this week to lead the way to AI agents, the next big thing in AI, using its data platform as a springboard.

It also announced a database, called Lakebase, which looks more aimed at agents than humans, and other features intended to democratize data analytics to include mere mortals. CEO Ali Ghodsi concedes that broadly useful, capable agents may be a ways off, but he made progress setting up Databricks to profit when they do — though with Snowflake aiming to do something similar, it’s going to be an interesting battle.

A glitch in Google Cloud caused widespread disruptions of internet service Thursday, and though it appeared to be cleared up by evening, it’s still not clear what caused it.

Mark Zuckerberg is tired of Meta’s also-ran AI status, so he bought almost half of Scale AI for more than $14 billion — and in the process, stole its CEO Alexandr Wang to head a “superintelligence lab.” Zuck’s on the warpath, but will it be enough to contend with OpenAI (which reached $10 billion in annualized recurring revenue), Microsoft, Google and others? TBD.

Chime went public, raising $700 million (and some investors’ hopes for more IPOs) as shares rocketed on the first day of trading.

Oracle’s stock got a boost when it reported solid earnings and issued bullish guidance, citing strong cloud demand. Adobe did fine too but not fine enough to thrill investors, while GitLab tanked on a disappointed revenue outlook.

At its signature Cisco Live event this week, the networking giant unleashed a product blitz to make networks more AI-friendly. Dave Vellante thinks it made a good case but still has to prove it can execute, and soon.

At Amazon Web Services’ Summit this week in Washington, D.C., John Furrier made the case that all this spending on data centers signals that cloud computing remains a national priority in the AI era.

Apple introduced a new design scheme but was criticized for continued delays in rolling out AI in Siri and all its other products. 

Cybersecurity remains pretty hot with investors, as Cyera raised $540 billion at a $6 billion valuation and Horizon3.ai raised $100 million.

Here’s all the news this week from News and beyond:

AI and data: Databricks zeroes in on AI agents

Data Wars Part Two: Coverage from Databricks Data+AI Summit:

All the news: New Databricks tools aim to cut costs and complexity in AI agent deployment

Following Neon acquisition, Databricks launches serverless Lakebase database

Databricks brings data insights to every business worker with AI-powered BI

Databricks launches free tool to streamline enterprise data warehouse migrations

Some analytical context:

Iceberg and the future of data intelligence

Building for a new era: Databricks takes on pain points of complexity, lock-in and cost for enterprise AI

From lakehouse to live code: Databricks bets on integrated AI experiences — theCUBE analysis

Inside Databricks’ AI revolution: 10 key takeaways from the Data + AI Summit

And a few further thoughts:

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of data formats and tables and catalogs at conferences such as last week’s Snowflake Summit and this week’s Databricks Data+AI Summit. I had a few things to say about the first one last week, so this week I’ll try to move forward with a few observations from this week’s:

* Databricks has come a long way fast, a signal of how important wrangling data has become as data-hungry AI has taken off. This year’s Data+AI Summit had some 23,000 attendees, up from 5,000 just three years ago — and apparently more than Snowflake Summit drew at a stated 20,000, though I sensed more exhibitors at Snowflake. Either way, the future of AI depends on these two companies more than just about any except maybe the model builders.

* A big theme was “democratization” of data analytics using AI — a goal that Snowflake also articulated last week. So a lot of announcements were about making data easier to access and analyze for mere mortals. But that’s certainly a work in progress for the whole industry.

* Many of these data services may actually prove to be more for AI agents than for people. As Benn Stancil wrote recently: “The data stack isn’t for analysts; it’s for agents. Whereas Snowflake used to talk up how they were using AI to make a better analytical database, the focus has mostly inverted, and Snowflake is now a tool to make better AIs.” And that could be just as true for Databricks. Its recent acquisition of Neon, as well as Snowflake’s acquisition of Crunchy Data last week, he added, “seem to be explicitly for that purpose: They are databases designed to be created by AI agents and power AI apps…. It’s not a rewrite of the data stack, but a new purpose for it.” Ghodsi said its new database entry, Lakebase, could serve this purpose, as agents spin up these databases by the hundreds on the fly as needed. Already, agents are creating 70% of Neon databases, up from 30% last year.

* As even Ghodsi said (and as we’ve said for a long time now), however, it’s really early for agents. “The industry is not yet where we want it to be,” he said in talking about Agent Bricks, a new service to create agents specific to tasks in each enterprise, and then generate a series of large language model “judges” to determine that agent’s reliability.

* Indeed, Stackpane’s Sarbjeet Johal draws a line from “DLL Hell” back in the 1990s through the “integration hell” of application programming interfaces to agents today: There are myriad challenges in organizing and making sense of data from seemingly ever-growing sources that need to be wrestled into a form all those analytical tools can use. “The hardest part is the data. It’s not the AI,” JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon, who knows a little about wrangling data, said in a keynote interview with Ghodsi. “Getting the data in the form that it’s usable is a hard thing to crack.” Although he politely credited Databricks with accomplishing that, he and everyone knows there’s a lot further to go.

* Another challenge is to find more ways to keep humans in the loop without slowing down the potential efficiencies of AI in general and agents in particular. Many companies hawking agents talk about how it bypasses humans, but Ghodsi said, “It’s going to be extremely hard to get humans out of the loop. In society we want someone to be responsible. We all become supervisors.” Oh joy, that’s what I want to be.

Other new models and services

Meta releases J-VEPA 2 AI model that understands the world through video

OpenAI’s newest reasoning model o3-pro surpasses rivals on multiple benchmarks, but it’s not very fast

Google develops AI model for forecasting tropical cyclones

Mistral AI debuts new Magistral series of reasoning LLMs

Nvidia debuts new AI models and tools for robotics, smart cities and autonomous vehicles

Data Poem launches AI ‘large causal model’ to help businesses drive mission-critical operations

Uniphore maneuvers to become the foundation of enterprise AI

Zencoder accelerates vibe coding with instant, AI-powered software verification

Amperity brings vibe coding to data engineers with its first AI agent

Freshworks debuts upgraded Freddy Agentic AI Platform at Refresh event

Zilliz launches Milvus 2.6 to reduce AI infrastructure costs

Amplitude launches AI Agents to speed up product decision-making

Lemony launches on-premises AI solution for local model deployment

Talkdesk leans into AI for customer experience automation

Money matters

Report: Meta holding talks on $10B investment in data labeling startup Scale AI and Meta reportedly forming superintelligence lab amid Llama 4 Behemoth delays And it’s all confirmed late Thursday: Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang departs to join Meta after securing multibillion-dollar investment

OpenAI reaches $10B in annual recurring revenue as ChatGPT adoption accelerates

Multiverse Computing bags $215M for its quantum-inspired AI model compression tech

Glean nabs $150M in funding at $7.2B valuation

Time intelligence startup Laurel gets $100M to turbocharge worker productivity

Pactum raises $54M for its procurement automation platform

Yupp launches with $33M to build crypto-incentivized AI evaluation platform

Landbase raises $30M to expand AI platform for go-to-market automation

Bolo AI raises $8.1M to build an AI-driven ‘operating system’ for heavy industries

Hirundo raises $8M to try to make AI forget the bad data causing its hallucinations

Visual real-time business intelligence platform Row64 raises $4M in seed funding

Policy

Disney and NBC Universal take ‘copyright free-rider’ Midjourney to court over alleged plagiarism

Meta files lawsuit against AI firm behind fake nonconsensual nude images

Users of new Meta AI app unknowingly make chatbot logs public

Thought leadership

Where AI and blockchain converge, intelligence will permeate business transactions

There’s even more AI and big data news on News

Around the enterprise: Cisco pushes deeper into AI

Coverage from Cisco Live:

Cisco product blitz aimed at making networks more AI-friendly

And some analysis: A new Cisco for the agentic AI era: Ambition, innovation and the burden of proof at Cisco Live 2025

Views from Amazon Web Services’ DC Summit this week:

AWS DC Summit 2025: The cloud becomes strategic national infrastructure for the AI era

Public sector AI demands more than technology: theCUBE’s in-depth analysis

The cybersecurity workforce is shifting — AI agents are leading the charge

Inside the AI shift in government: 11 perspectives on public sector ops transformation

Disruptions

Identity and access management failure in Google Cloud causes widespread internet service disruptions

New products and services

AMD debuts new flagship MI350 data center graphics cards with 185B transistors

At InfoComm 2025, HP partners with Google for more lifelike meetings

Harness scales up its Internal Delivery Platform to accelerate software delivery

Money matters

Chime jumps 37% in Nasdaq debut after raising $700M in IPO

Qualcomm acquires chip designer Alphawave for $2.4B

AWS will spend $20B on data center and AI infrastructure in Pennsylvania

Automattic acquires relationship manager Clay to add an identity layer to online tools

Sam Altman-backed network infrastructure startup Meter raises $170M

Atlassian competitor Linear raises $82M to expand developer tools and target enterprise adoption

Earnings:

Oracle beats expectations on ‘insatiable’ cloud demand, sending its stock higher

Adobe posts solid earnings beat and raises its full-year guidance, but investors yawn

GitLab’s revenue outlook comes up short and its stock gets hammered

SailPoint shares jump 14%+ on strong first-quarter earnings

We have lots more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: Big fundings, more M&A

Money matters

AI-native data security firm Cyera raises $540M at $6B valuation

Horizon3.ai secures $100M to expand partner reach and federal adoption

Securonix acquires threat intelligence startup ThreatQuotient

Guardz collects $56M to bring enterprise-grade cybersecurity to smaller businesses

Swimlane raises $45M to expand AI-powered security automation platform

ZeroRISC raises $10M to expand open-source silicon security platform

Attack & response

Aim Security details first known AI zero-click exploit targeting Microsoft 365 Copilot

Cloudflare sees massive rise in attacks targeting media, nonprofits and human rights groups

New services

Vanta launches AI Agent to automate compliance workflows

Commvault expands post-quantum cryptography with support for HQC algorithm

New AuthZed tools enforce permissions in RAG and agentic AI systems

Veza tackles AI credential surge with new nonhuman identity protections

Ontinue brings agentic AI to Microsoft-focused MXDR investigations

Digital.ai launches Quick Protect Agent for rapid no-code mobile app security

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere around tech: Quantum consolidation

Apple debuts elegant glass-like user design experience and powerful new OS capabilities

IonQ to buy Oxford Ionics in $1B+ quantum hardware acquisition

IBM reveals roadmap to world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer in 2029

Anne Wojcicki wins bidding for 23andMe

Flying taxi developer Archer Aviation raises $850M more in funding

Stripe acquires crypto wallet infrastructure provider Privy

Gecko Robotics raises $125M to inspect and monitor critical infrastructure

Uber will bring robotaxis to London in 2026

After cars destroyed in protests, Waymo suspends operations in parts of LA and San Francisco

Lumus showcases upgraded Z-30 and high-performance Z-50 AR engines at AWE 2025

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

Comings and goings

Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google DeepMind’s chief technology officer, will become the company’s chief AI architect, a new senior vice president role reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai (per Semafor).

Meanwhile, Google extended employee buyout offers in a push to raise AI spending (per Wall Street Journal).

Former Alteryx SVP and chief digital and information officer Trevor Schulze joined cloud contact center provider Genesys as chief information officer.

Cloud security platform Upwind appointed cybersecurity veteran Rinki Sethi chief security officer.

Photo: Databricks/livestream