Robert Hof – SiliconANGLE

Beyond OpenAI: The rise of not-too-large language models

Robert Hof — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 19:46:35 +0000

A flurry of new artificial intelligence models this week illustrated what’s coming next in AI: smaller language models targeted at vertical industries and functions. Both Nvidia and Microsoft debuted smaller large language models too. Also supporting the notion of more customized models — call them VLMs — OpenAI made its GPT-4o fine-tuning generally available. As […]

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Regulators tighten their fingers around Big Tech’s neck, but they’re not slowing down AI

Robert Hof — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 16:15:07 +0000

Regulators are circling ever closer to big tech companies — the latest being Google, which the Federal Trade Commission more than hinted this week should be broken up. It’s not at all certain that will happen, since it’s up to the judge in the Google v. Epic Games case, but it’s clear that Big Tech is headed for […]

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At Black Hat, cybersecurity faces an AI conundrum amid a glut of defensive weapons

Robert Hof — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 18:33:45 +0000

Ahead of the annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, we warned that defensive tool sprawl is only likely to get worse. Onsite, the talk was about, of course, the impact of AI. So far, so good, but defenders are bracing for more sophisticated artificial intelligence-driven attacks. Meantime, lots of cybersecurity providers are doing well, if earnings and new fundings are […]

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Dell lays off thousands of workers in sales reorganization

Robert Hof — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 19:22:26 +0000

Updated: Dell Technologies Inc. is laying off an unspecified number of employees in a reorganization of sales and marketing teams, according to sources. According to Bloomberg today, the reorganization includes a new group focused on artificial intelligence services. Update: One source close to the matter had told SiliconANGLE that 12,500 layoffs, or about 10% of […]

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Wait, will generative AI really pay off? Inquiring investors want to know

Robert Hof — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 18:10:54 +0000

Amid a glut of funding for artificial intelligence companies, there’s understandably increasing concern among investors this past week, apparent in disappointment in the earnings results of a number of technology companies, whether all this will pay off. We’re at the point in the investment cycle where it’s hard to tell, though to my eyes, it […]

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New AI models flood the market even as AI takes fire from regulators, actors and researchers

Robert Hof — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 19:44:25 +0000

Vice President Kamala Harris’ presumed ascension to the Democratic presidential nomination following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal scrambled this week certainly scrambled the race, but it also set everyone in tech wondering what a Harris administration might mean. Bottom line: Nobody knows — and of course there’s no guarantee she will win the election come November, […]

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CrowdStrike breaks the internet and generative AI gets the side eye

Robert Hof — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 19:10:34 +0000

CrowdStrike Holdings ended the week with a bang, or more like a whimper from system administrators around the world, as it sort of broke the internet by issuing an update to its software with a defect that took down Windows computers everywhere. The cybersecurity company issued a workaround, but the incident, which affected banks, airlines and […]

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AWS aims its AI push at enterprises, and the chip industry dreams of an AI boom

Robert Hof — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 17:48:26 +0000

Despite the seeming dominance of OpenAI and Microsoft in generative artificial intelligence, it’s becoming clear that the other cloud providers, not to mention AI startups, will make this anything but a winner-take-all business. Amazon Web Services made it latest bid to be a major player at its summit in New York this week, aiming to […]

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The AI money train keeps rolling, but the environmental toll keeps growing too

Robert Hof — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 18:59:30 +0000

Investors are still betting big on artificial intelligence, as this past week alone they put $450 million in Runway AI, $200 million into Magic AI and $100 million in Harvey, among others. AI also helped Samsung rock its preliminary earnings reported this week. Meantime, SK Hynix is investing a stunning $75B in its AI chipmaking business. But […]

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Generative AI’s big copyright battle commences, and chip upstarts target AI workloads

Robert Hof — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 17:37:31 +0000

It’s perhaps the biggest signal yet that generative artificial intelligence model providers aren’t going to get a free content ride: Record labels this week sued two AI music generators, and this one may prove to be the big battle over AI and copyright. Meantime, the European Union is putting more heat on Microsoft, and it’s clear those […]

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AI models keep getting smarter — but how smart can they get?

Robert Hof — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 18:02:11 +0000

As Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company this week, if only for a few days, it’s apparent that the race to develop even better generative artificial intelligence models isn’t slowing down. This week we saw Anthropic provide a leap in its Claude large language model, along with news that OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup […]

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AI everywhere: Apple finally makes a splash, the data wars intensify and the big bucks still keep rolling in

Robert Hof — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:15:55 +0000

It wasn’t exactly on the scale of the introduction of the iPhone or even the iPod, but Apple this week managed to make a credible splash in artificial intelligence. Much of Apple Intelligence is on the come, and you’ll need a newer iPhone to get the features, but as usual Apple managed to make an […]

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Jensanity! Nvidia valuation tops $3T — until regulators and naysayers weigh in

Robert Hof — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 19:53:58 +0000

Have we reached peak AI? This was a week in which CEO Jensen Huang’s Nvidia hit $3 trillion in market capitalization, only to fall back below that mark on reports of an antitrust probe by the Justice Department. Easy come, easy go. Meantime, some people are questioning if generative AI will catch on quickly enough to justify all […]

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Look out below: AI’s double-edged sword slashes Dell, MongoDB, Salesforce and more

Robert Hof — Fri, 31 May 2024 19:05:00 +0000

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the artificial intelligence boom was never going to be unalloyed good for every enterprise technology provider looking to leverage AI. But this week, investors got a taste of the downside and they didn’t like it, sending stocks of Dell Technologies, MongoDB, Salesforce, UiPath Nutanix, Workday and more […]

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AI dominates every tech event, but Nvidia remains the biggest winner

Robert Hof — Fri, 24 May 2024 19:00:45 +0000

Artificial intelligence bubble or boom, there’s no company riding it better than Nvidia, whose earnings report this week managed to outpace sky-high forecasts thanks to its providing the most popular chips in the known universe. AI also dominated the announcements and conversations at a raft of industry events this past week, from Dell Technologies World […]

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Google roars back in AI, AWS has a new CEO, and big money keeps flowing into enterprise software

Robert Hof — Fri, 17 May 2024 18:40:38 +0000

If anyone thought Google was going to continue to lose ground to Microsoft and OpenAI in the artificial intelligence era, its I/O conference this week in Mountain View proved that perception is premature at best. The company introduced a raft of new features, including some coming shortly, such as an industry-leading 2 million-token context window […]

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All in a week’s events: The AI juggernaut hits cybersecurity, open source and IT infrastructure

Robert Hof — Fri, 10 May 2024 21:09:49 +0000

As the spring conference season gets into full swing, we’re getting broad insights into key areas of enterprise technology. This past week, it was cybersecurity (and artificial intelligence’s impact on it) from the RSA Conference in San Francisco, open source (and AI’s impact on it) from Red Hat Summit in Denver, and information technology architecture […]

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Enterprise tech leaders profit from the picks-and-shovels era of AI — but investors want even more

Robert Hof — Fri, 03 May 2024 20:16:18 +0000

Another spate of earnings this week proved once again that artificial intelligence is driving a lot of upside among enterprise technology providers. Amazon, Qualcomm, Super Micro and others saw earnings improve as companies continue to invest at least in experimenting broadly with generative AI models. But others such as Advanced Micro Devices, and even AI […]

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AI drives cloud growth and cloud growth drives earnings upside — for some

Robert Hof — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 19:18:59 +0000

Artificial intelligence drove higher cloud spending this past quarter, and that in turn drove earnings upside for the likes of Google, Microsoft and SAP. Less so, however, for Intel, IBM, ServiceNow and Meta, which haven’t yet seen the AI bump they hope to get or, in Meta’s case, are spending big on it well ahead […]

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AI model creators play an endless game of leapfrog as the rest of us worry what’s next

Robert Hof — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 17:07:40 +0000

The game of large language model leapfrog looks to be speeding up, if that’s even possible, as Meta Platforms, Elon Musk’s xAI, Microsoft, Stability AI and of course OpenAI all weighed in this week with new models of various kinds. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the potential negative impacts of this race are worrying more people, […]

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At Next, Google makes a smarter case for leading the generative AI era

Robert Hof — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 23:20:20 +0000

With Google’s Cloud Next ’24 conference this past week in Las Vegas now in the books, it looks like the search giant is finally poised to leverage its longtime work in artificial intelligence and its serious technical infrastructure to provide a boost to its third-place cloud computing unit. The Mandalay Bay conference center hosted some […]

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Critics assail the many downsides of AI, but will they have any impact?

Robert Hof — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 22:32:12 +0000

Has the trough of disillusionment arrived for generative artificial intelligence? Maybe it’s a bit early given continuing outright hype and breathtaking funding — but there’s certainly rising worry and criticism of actual and potential impacts, even sometimes from the AI model builders themselves. We saw a lot of that this week, from accusations that Israel […]

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Big bucks keep streaming into generative AI. How long can this last?

Robert Hof — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 20:01:26 +0000

Big money keeps pouring into generative artificial intelligence, a sign of both the enthusiasm about its potential and the high costs of creating all those mega AI models. This week’s hauls included $2.75 billion for Anthropic from Amazon, and both Scale AI and Cohere reportedly are getting hundreds of millions of dollars apiece. That’s on […]

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At GTC, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang kicks off the next era of artificial intelligence

Robert Hof — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 04:41:17 +0000

AI continued to dominate the news this week, no more so than at Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in San Jose, which arguably kicked off the real start of the next era of artificial intelligence. “The conference for the Era of AI,” as the company called it, was jam-packed — so much so that CEO Jensen […]

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Insights from AI innovators: Data is driving infrastructure – but the data needs to be better

Robert Hof — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 14:41:50 +0000

It was all AI all the time this week, as so many weeks these days seem to be. Supercloud 6: AI Innovators, SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s signature event series, surfaced a lot of insights about where AI and generative AI are heading, and one upshot was that data is increasingly driving infrastructure architecture. But it’s not […]

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The OpenAI-Elon Musk battle intensifies and AI trust sinks, but investors don’t seem to care

Robert Hof — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 19:56:02 +0000

The escalation of the fight between OpenAI and Elon Musk over what kind of artificial intelligence company the phenom should be is creating even more uncertainty over who’s going to lead the generative AI era. At the same time, more AI researchers, including one whistleblower on Microsoft — as well as the public — are getting […]

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The AI funding race continues unabated, even as challenges grow – especially for OpenAI

Robert Hof — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 06:20:07 +0000

It was a bit of a turbulent week, as investors continued pouring money into artificial intelligence companies such as Glean even as it’s not yet apparent when the AI money gusher will arrive — assuming it will. Just Friday, Elon Musk threw in a haymaker, suing OpenAI for — get this — trying too hard […]

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Intel pitches ‘systems foundry for the AI era,’ but Nvidia steals its thunder

Robert Hof — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 15:18:46 +0000

Artificial intelligence once again dominated the news this week, but not so much in the software as the hardware. Despite investor worries about Nvidia’s already high stock price, the AI chipmaker knocked its earnings out of the park Wednesday, sending its stock up 16% and dragging the Nasdaq up 3%. The same day, Intel announced […]

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More money, more new models for AI, while weak guidance plagues enterprise earnings

Robert Hof — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 04:43:54 +0000

This week saw even more money pouring into artificial intelligence-related companies, including some perhaps lesser-known ones such as Lambda and Together that are providing much-needed and very lucrative access to data centers full of Nvidia’s graphics processing units critical to AI training. Speaking of Nvidia, its market cap passed both Amazon’s and Alphabet’s this week […]

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AI content comes under the magnifying glass amid runaway deepfakes

Robert Hof — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:02:51 +0000

Efforts to rein in artificial intelligence, especially rogue content such as deepfake video and audio, are accelerating, both from the government and AI companies themselves. No surprise there, given that one guy got fooled into paying scammers who deepfaked his company’s executives $25 million. Yikes. On a more positive note, somewhat, enterprise tech companies such […]

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