Image by Suzanne Calkins
Gossip (for nerds)
- Trazillionaire Elon Musk has upped the ante on his lawsuit with OpenAI, because he apparently has nothing better to do before he starts running our government so deep into the ground that it touches the Earth’s lava core. He claims that both Microsoft and OpenAI have prevented competition from surviving in the market—in addition to prioritizing profits over the public good. Kind of like…releasing self-driving cars that burst into flames and run people over…BUT I DIGRESS.
- The principal just walked in and asked Microsoft to step outside—the US Federal Trade Commission has its sights set on the technology company’s anticompetitive practices, which include Azure’s restrictive licensing. In a couple months, I’m sure the Department of Government Efficiency will be thrilled to help.
- Remember all those AWS employees who were “so excited” about the return to the office (RTO)? Well, they might be surprised to hear that a bunch of “distraught” employees wrote an open letter to CEO Matt Garman being like, WTF, dude. The RTO deadline is in January, which is also when the TikTok ban starts, so I hope you like misery.
- Between January and August of this year, Amazon cut its US advertising budget by 20%. Including its AWS arm, Amazon’s budget for all types of promotional costs has decreased by millions.
- Increased spending on AI will slow Microsoft’s growth this quarter. Financially, the company can’t address its AI capacity constraints until the second quarter.
- It hasn’t been announced yet, but Microsoft will use HarperCollins books to train a mysterious AI model. Authors can opt in for the low, low price of one human soul.
Wheelin’ and dealin’
- Amazon doubled its investment in AI startup Anthropic with another $4B in funding. Moving forward, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
- This is just in time to give US intelligence the power of generative AI, along with Palantir. The press release can’t actually tell us what the CIA will do with this technology, so hats off to the author, who somehow managed to craft six paragraphs of absolutely nothing but filler text.
- On the other side of the spectrum, the press release about the expanded partnership between AWS and MongoDB tells you waaaay more than you want to know.
- Nokia will provide routers and switches for Azure datacenters in an extended agreement between the two companies. This is funny because Amazon sued Nokia a few months ago for patent grabbing. Which happened a year after Nokia sued Amazon for patent infringement—and blogged about it! Let’s all just sue each other back and forth forever until we die.
- AWS announced a Generative AI Partner Innovation Alliance that will help customers build their own AI solutions. It’s launching with nine partners, one of them being a government intelligence and weapons systems contractor, which makes complete sense because we are the worst.
- Cognizant is partnering with AWS to deliver smart manufacturing capabilities for the industrial sector. Maybe they can smartly manufacture a way for me to get out of this country.
- Technology and communications company Lumen will supply AWS with its fiber network to improve datacenter connectivity. In turn, Lumen will use AWS solutions, including those for generative AI, to modernize its systems.
- Outbrain has agreed to improve its advertising platform by scaling its operations on Azure and enhancing its services with generative AI solutions from Microsoft.
- Money launderers, we just wanna get to know ya. Is green your favorite color? AWS is partnering with Binance to help the crypto platform better screen customers using an AI integration. This comes after a shakeup in Nigeria, where one Binance exec escaped detention and left the country while another was thrown in prison for “suspicious cash flows.” But, please, focus on the customers.
- Europeans want a more compliant cloud. They’ll get one by the end of 2025, when the AWS Europe Sovereign Cloud launches, complete with regulatory-friendly partner solutions in its Marketplace.
- It’s now easier for AWS customers to extend their on-premises Nutanix environment to the cloud. Thank you, Nutanix!!!!!
- A collaboration between Microsoft and Kyndryl makes it easier for customers to extend their on-premises environment to Azure.
World domination
- Microsoft ran out of places to shove Copilot, so it has expanded to a larger market—the limitless universe. In partnership with NASA, “Earth Copilot” will help us collect petabytes of data from observation satellites and make it easier for the general public to access it.
- If you Google news out of Sunbury, Ohio, you’ll mostly find obituaries and an inordinate number of animal-hoarding instances (What? Why? How?). Aside from that, you’ll learn that AWS is going to open a $2B datacenter there, which will be finished in 2028.
- AWS is giving away $110M in free computing power to researchers so long as they use Trainium AI chips.
Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security
- I need to learn how to code or something for Microsoft’s bug bounty program, which is awarding $4M to those who uncover security flaws. Look, if I win this thing and go on vacation and return to work suddenly looking a decade younger, I did NOT get a facelift, I just rested…with whoever Lindsay Lohan has been resting with. And if I DID get a facelift…no I didn’t.
- As I write this, millions of personal data points are up for grabs, thanks to developers who used Power Pages to build a website without implementing proper access controls.
New stuff
- It was a party at Ignite, starting with Microsoft’s unveiling of a custom AMD processor for virtual machine instances and two Microsoft-made chips, which is very demure and mindful of them.
- Azure AI Student has been packaged with other services and rebranded as Azure AI Foundry.
- Azure Local is a new cloud computing platform that allows companies to extend Azure to their on-premises and edge environments.
- Microsoft launched not one, but two infrastructure chips, meant to accelerate AI adoption and increase security.
- Leaving no stone unturned and no career unthreatened, Microsoft is building AI agents for lots of specific tasks, from real-time translations using your voice to processing invoice approvals and customer returns. Does Microsoft know that we, uh, need to like, buy food and stuff? To live? Pretty please, may we?
- It also introduced new AI models for industry. It has been building these pre-trained, fine-tuned models with big partners such as Siemens and Bayer.
- Fabric Databases, an addition to Microsoft Fabric, provisions autonomous databases in seconds.
- Redis can now be fully managed by Azure.
- Not on my 2024 bingo card (then again, neither was the CEO of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation becoming the head of education), but AWS will make it possible for Amazon Q to integrate with Microsoft Office 365.
- AWS App Studio is now generally available. It uses generative AI to build enterprise-grade apps.
Professional Pivots
AWS has hired Julia White (who killed Mr. Body in the library with the candlestick) as the company’s new chief marketing officer and VP. She previously spent 20 years at Microsoft and several years at SAP.
Best Friends Forever
- Splunk’s security observability and security platform is now available on Azure.
- AI governance company Saidot can now integrate with Azure AI.
New to Azure Marketplace
- IBM subsidiary Apptio’s Targetprocess solution, which helps finance teams plan and manage budgets
- DataChant’s BI Pixie, which sounds like a little booster for Power BI
- Awardco, for employee recognition and rewards
- Shift Technology offers several products for property and casualty insurers
- Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux AI, a foundation model platform
- Cribl, which is too close to an offensive term for my comfort, is a data engine for IT and security
- IntelePeer’s SmartAgent and SmartOffice, which offer AI-powered communications automation