Image by Suzanne Calkins
Wheelin’ and dealin’
- Accounting tech firm Sage, which serves SMBs, has partnered with AWS to build a domain-specific large language model using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Lex. What I really want is a collaboration with Sage that has them making things with SageMaker so we can say Sage is a maker of SageMaker stuff. And then Sage can turn around and do a big deal with McCormick spices, specifically in their sage-making department, so Sage can sell SageMaker to the world’s No. 1 sage maker.
- AWS, Accenture, and Anthropic have formed a partnership to help businesses in regulated sectors, such as finance and healthcare, access advanced AI models using Bedrock from AWS and Claude 3 from Anthropic. Accenture will train its engineers to use these tools so they can offer implementation support.
- This is part of the AWS plan to run the world’s “biggest AI playground,” starting with Bedrock.
- There’s a leadership shakeup at Microsoft, starting with its hire of Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection, who is now EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI. The company has also hired Karén Simonyan, another Inflection co-founder, as chief scientist. Pavan Davuluri is the new head of Windows and Surface. And it’s unclear if Mikhail Parakhin, who was the head of advertising and web, is staying with Microsoft or not. Microsoft also promoted Azure VP Girish Bablani to president.
- After peeling off Inflection’s top two people, Microsoft agreed to pay the company $650M in cash to bring its AI models to Azure—and use most of its staff. So, basically this is what Mustafa’s new browsing history looks like.
- Inflection and OpenAI have to share the spotlight with others. Microsoft invested $16M in Mistral, a French AI company, to bring Mistral’s newest AI model to Azure. Geez, Azure is getting more models than NYC Fashion Week (I get one dad joke per newsletter).
- This is part of Microsoft’s strategy to partner with many different AI companies. Microsoft will rely on these partners to enhance AI offerings while it focuses on building AI-essential infrastructure.
- ALSO having entered a partnership with Microsoft, Mistral AI is providing AWS with its foundation models for tasks like code completion and text summarization.
- And it’s wasting no time! Microsoft and OpenAI have plans to launch a $100B data center by 2028, which will include an AI supercomputer dubbed “Stargate.” Microsoft is largely footing the bill, which is about 100 times more than some of the biggest data centers, or about the same as my new health insurance deductible.
- After entering a major partnership with Microsoft, NVIDIA is now partnered with AWS to bring its Blackwell GPU platform to the cloud provider, which will offer it with EC2 instances. The goal is to accelerate generative AI capabilities. Chuckin’ chips to all the big clouds…NVIDIA has major rizz and serious player energy and I am here for it.
- E tu, Granicus? The “government experience” software and services provider is partnering with AWS to offer “engagement solutions” to the public sector. This will help the public sector do things like “customize citizen interactions.” In other words, it will help the government capture and correlate billions of our digital interactions. Should be fantastic, can’t wait.
World domination
- Kries from the Kremlin? In step with Amazon and Google, Microsoft has limited or removed access to more than 50 of its cloud products in Russia. Many Russian companies will find their keys for Dynamics 365, Azure, and other major platforms invalid. (However, this doesn’t address the Russian companies that had used foreign accounts to bypass any future restrictions.) While it seems like the private sector’s version of sanctions, these tech companies may be doing the Russian government a favor—the dictator, I mean president, wants to steer Russian businesses toward domestic solutions. I dunno, though…have you ever been on a Russian elevator?
- Meanwhile, Chinese officials are telling government departments to stop using Intel, AMD, and Microsoft; they also want to drive domestic software and hardware production. They should make a TikTok about it…
- AWS will launch an Infrastructure Region in Saudi Arabia by 2026. As part of its long-term commitment to the Kingdom, AWS will invest $5.3B there—a measly one-third of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s net worth. “Why don’t you take me to dinner first before you insult me,” I imagine Talal saying to Jeff Bezos. “Take me out on your quaint little sailboat Jeff and tell me about this cheap infrastructure plan, it amuses me,” he’d say.
- More in our neck of the woods, AWS plunked down $650M to buy Talen Energy’s 1,200-acre data center campus in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Um, more interesting than that are the local news stories, forever my favorite. What’s going on in Luzerne County, you ask? A few things, like the installation of a toilet drop box for your ballots, an unruly hospital patient pulling the fire alarm, a drunken man kicking a state trooper, and a talent show!!! The data center will fit right in.
- AWS will also open a new Direct Connect location in Hawaii, allowing businesses to establish a private, physical network connection between AWS and their data centers or offices.
- Government agencies in the U.S. West region can use AWS Wickr, an encrypted communications service, following its FedRAMP authorization. Is there, like, a reason why the U.S. East can’t use it? Or will it just be approved in three hours because of the time difference?
Gossip (for nerds)
- AWS laid off hundreds of people, primarily in sales, marketing, and store technology teams. This is sad news for us over at 2A, and we hope to see those people we’ve enjoyed working with do big things wherever they go.
- Microsoft will have to change how it markets its Teams and Office products following antitrust pressure from the European Union. The company has agreed to unbundle the two solutions, which makes Slack very happy. In the last decade, Microsoft has paid more than $2B in EU antitrust fines.
New stuff
- There is now an AWS Generative AI competency that businesses can earn, and the cloud giant claims it is the first to offer such a competency to partners.
- Generative AI data company DataStax has achieved the new, totally hot and totally coveted Generative AI Competency. Crayon, an IT services company, has also colored itself competent. And so did Loka, a full-stack consultancy.
- Microsoft designed a new safety feature that can better detect when AI is hallucinating and block malicious prompts. Prompts Shield will (try to) protect against indirect and direct attacks, in which users manipulate the AI to do something or use it to carry out a malicious attack, respectively. Here are some other safety tools.
- This didn’t stop a self-described whistleblower at Microsoft from sounding the alarm on the harmful imagery Microsoft’s Copilot Designer can, and does, produce—even from benign requests.
- Teams update: Microsoft has improved the AI features in Teams to offer message generation and smarter meeting summaries.
- Businesses can move their data to other cloud providers for free, says AWS—and don’t think it’s out of the goodness of AWS’ heart. The company had to do this to comply with the European Data Act.
- New capabilities are out for Amazon Connect, including a self-service, drag-and-drop tool to create Live Chats, along with some new plug-ins.
- Copilot Pro is now available worldwide. Customers can use it to build their own copilots and embed them in Office apps.
- Copilot is also ready for cybersecurity prime time, says the company that’s always getting hacked.
- And Microsoft is developing a specialized strategy for bringing Copilot to finance teams, but its success depends on how customers use their data sources to generate results.
Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security
- To get even less work done, congressional staff are no longer allowed to use the Microsoft Copilot chatbot because of security concerns. This comes after limitations on ChatGPT usage.
- YOINK! AWS has won Gee Rittenhouse away from his position of CEO at Skyhigh Security, after only two years there. Rittenhouse will join AWS as VP of enterprise security.
Best Friends Forever
- Box has integrated Azure OpenAI Service with its selection of AI tools, but remains committed to its terrible user experience.
- Veeam, a data backup and restore software company, is adding Microsoft Copilot and AI services to offerings.
- Cognizant is going to work more closely with Azure by creating a special platform for Azure.
- Tidal, a SaaS platform that helps with cloud migration and application management, is now part of Microsoft’s Azure Landing Zone Accelerator program.
- Philips and AWS are collaborating to bring better diagnostic capabilities, including improved digital pathology, to healthcare companies.
- Leidos, a company that—and I quote—“addresses the world’s most vexing challenges,” has entered a multi-year strategic agreement with AWS to solve famine…oh wait, no, to accelerate innovation in the commercial market. My bad. The world is pretty short on innovation, though…
- Danske Bank, which is Danish but not like the kind you have for breakfast, I mean like the country, is migrating all its stuff to AWS.
- Cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf has made its entire portfolio available in AWS Marketplace.
- Keeper Security, a cloud-based zero-trust software provider, has joined the AWS Partner Network.