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☆ AI startup Writer, currently fundraising at a $1.9 billion valuation, launches new model to compete with OpenAI
▼ + stars: | 2024-10-09 | by ( Hayden Field | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

San Francisco-based AI startup Writer debuted a large artificial intelligence model Wednesday to compete with enterprise offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic and others. The company cuts costs using synthetic data, or data created by AI. Waseem Alshikh, Writer's co-founder and CTO, told CNBC that Writer has been working on its synthetic data pipeline for years. The generative AI market is poised to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. To date in 2024, investors have pumped $26.8 billion into 498 generative AI deals, according to PitchBook, and companies in the sector raised $25.9 billion in 2023, up more than 200% from 2022.

Persons: May Habib, That's, It's, Waseem, Writer's, Alshikh Organizations: Work Summit, Porsche, Raffles London, CNBC, Meta, Microsoft, Accenture, Uber, L'Oreal, Vanguard Locations: London, England, San Francisco, OpenAI, Anthropic

☆ Amazon decision to deprioritize 7 cloud services caught customers and even some salespeople by surprise
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-01 | by ( Eugene Kim | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Read previewAmazon's recent decision to stop accepting new users for several cloud services caught some customers, partners and even a few employees by surprise. No new customers, no new featuresFor a business as important as AWS, deprioritizing services is a tricky balancing act. However, at the scale of AWS, this still means that thousands of developers and other customers likely still rely on these cloud tools. "We will continue to support our customers, whether they continue to use these services, or they migrate to other AWS offerings or alternative third-party solutions." Consider Amazon Q, Amazon Connect, Amazon Bedrock, AWS Marketplace, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon QuickSight, and many other offerings that have had significant success with customers," he wrote in an email.

Persons: —, Jeff Barr, Patrick Neighorn, Neighorn, Randall Hunt, Horovits Organizations: Service, Business, Web Services, AWS, Data Pipeline, Barr's, Amazon Connect

☆ Meta poised for another breakout, according to the charts
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-18 | by ( Todd Gordon | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Meta (META) is about 5% from all-time highs and technically set up for a move to break to a new record. Since then during its 'year of efficiency' free cash flow has been built back to about $11-$13 billion per quarter for a yearly cash flow of about $50 billion. Meta is already making significant progress as its AI-generated content recommendation systems on Instagram Reels has made sharing among users increasingly popular. Analysts are expecting Meta to grow earnings by 14% for the next two years and revenues by about 12%. -Todd Gordon, founder of Inside Edge Capital, LLC DISCLOSURES: (Gordon owns META personally and in his wealth management company Inside Edge Capital Management, LLC Charts.)

Persons: we've, Todd Gordon, Gordon Organizations: Inside Edge, Reality Labs, Meta, Nvidia, Apple, Alpha, Inside Edge Capital Management

☆ AI researcher Joy Buolamwini cautions that if AI systems fail people of color, they fail humanity
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-08 | by ( Monica Melton | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +17 min

We’re growing some teeth as to what can be done with AI, but we also see where there’s progress, there’s attack. One of the things I like to point out with AI systems is that if your AI systems fail on people of color, you don’t have a robust system. If your AI doesn’t work on the global majority, if your AI doesn’t work for women, if your AI doesn’t work for people with disabilities, once you start expanding all of the areas we’re talking about, it comes to your AI doesn’t work for humanity. To me, that’s a proactive approach of saying, how do we build consumer AI technology in a way that’s more ethical? I was talking to Sam Altman about the climate impact of AI, especially these large language models and generative AI systems.

Persons: Joe Biden, Joy Buolamwini, Buolamwini, It’s, ”, we’ve, it’s, I’ve, there’s, We’ve, you’re, aren’t, Simone Biles, Biden, Sam Altman, Olay, we’re, There’s, We’re, that’s Organizations: Service, League, Business, Federal Trade Commission, Procter, Gamble, Big Tech Locations: Davos

A panel displays the Hang Seng Index during afternoon trading, in Hong Kong, China May 4, 2020. Other economic and policy highlights across the continent this week include preliminary Japanese third-quarter GDP, Indian inflation, and a policy decision from the Philippine central bank on Thursday. Some, like the China and aggregate emerging market indexes, last week fell to their lowest in three months. Perhaps the most interesting of all Goldman's FCIs is its Japanese index. Citi's economic surprises index for Japan turned negative last week and is now the lowest since June.

Persons: Tyrone Siu, Jamie McGeever, Wall, Goldman, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Diane Craft Organizations: REUTERS, Nasdaq, Bank of Japan, Mizuho, Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo, Economic Cooperation, China's, Tencent Holdings, Alibaba, Lenovo, APEC, Thomson, Reuters Locations: Hong Kong, China, U.S, Philippine, Asia, Japan, San Francisco, India

☆ Instacart's IPO filing sparked an online spat between cloud rivals Snowflake and Databricks
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-02 | by ( Ari Levy | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

One of Instacart's board members is Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake , a publicly traded company that helps businesses store and manage hefty workloads in the cloud. Slootman joined Instacart's board in 2021 and, because of that relationship, the company has to disclose its business ties to Snowflake. In May, the company published a blog post titled "How Instacart Ads Modularized Data Pipelines With Lakehouse Architecture and Spark." The post, which described software underpinning Instacart's ads infrastructure, included discussion of a migration to Databricks' Lakehouse technology and the cost savings that followed. Representatives from Instacart, Snowflake and Databricks declined to to comment.

Persons: Frank Slootman, Slootman, Instacart, Snowflake, Databricks pounced, Databricks, You've Organizations: Inc, New York Stock Exchange, Employees, Twitter Locations: Snowflake, Instacart

☆ How self-service data analytics can deliver better business insights more quickly
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Bob Violino | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

That's exactly what self-service analytics is designed to do. Self-service analytics tools allow business users who are not trained in analytics or data science to perform queries and generate reports on their own, with minimal or no need of support from the IT department. Unfortunately, even with all the advances in products, analytics has not penetrated enterprises as much as it could, Menninger said. Two technical advances are helping improve self-service analytics, Menninger said. "With self-service analytics, we can consume and analyze multiple years of data, compared to previous spreadsheet-based data-wrangling methods that were limited to just 90 days of data."

☆ Apple job listings suggest the company is building a metaverse of its own for its long-rumored headset
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-14 | by ( Britney Nguyen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Apple is looking for engineers who can develop a 3D mixed-reality world for its coming headset. Tim Cook and another Apple executives have previously said they avoid using the word "metaverse." The company's development of a virtual and augmented reality headset was reported in early 2021, and trademark filings from August show that Apple may call the headset "Reality One" or "Reality Pro." Apple CEO Tim Cook previously told Dutch media outlet Bright that he avoids using the word "metaverse." Apple is expected to release its first mixed-reality headset in 2023, Bloomberg reported.

☆ Dbt Labs, the startup that's quietly become a big-data juggernaut, is launching new tools to cement its place in a future where companies run their operations on Snowflake and Databricks
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-18 | by ( Matthew Lynley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Dbt Labs is launching a new tool for analysts to streamline the way they review company data. $4.2 billion startup Dbt Labs has quietly become one of the data world's most influential companies. $4.2 billion startup Dbt Labs has quietly become one of the key catalysts of rebuilding the way companies analyze their data using tools like Snowflake and Databricks. Dbt's Semantic Layer creates a central repository for metric definitions that a company needs to track the performance of its business. "Nobody wants to use a semantic layer that isn't tightly coupled with the business intelligence experience," Handy said.

☆ Salesforce's next big thing is a major push to keep its data at the center of a market increasingly dominated by firms like Snowflake
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-22 | by ( Matthew Lynley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

But many tools, like Snowflake, have emerged to make Salesforce data points one of many in analytics. And Salesforce on Tuesday said it is launching a direct integration with Amazon's machine learning tool SageMaker to support custom machine learning models. At its Tableau keynote, Salesforce emphasized the company's Einstein integrations with Snowflake, with the presentation working with Snowflake data. And with these moves, Salesforce is ensuring the analysis and usage of Salesforce data and its results can remain inside Salesforce's sphere of influence. It enables organizations to connect other data lake tools and operate Salesforce data.

☆ The quiet success of Tecton, a $900 million startup, has turned rivals Snowflake and Databricks into co-investors — and fanned a fierce debate over the future of AI
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-20 | by ( Matthew Lynley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Tecton, which specializes in a technology called feature stores, was a more divisive subject among industry insiders. Both Databricks and Snowflake have invested heavily in real-time data pipelines, including in Tecton's latest funding round. But it was hardly alone among machine-learning startups in commanding a high valuation with nominal revenue. Many investors wondered whether Tecton's feature stores were "a feature, not a product," as Steve Jobs famously called Dropbox. That skepticism remains, and some insiders expect a roll-up of overvalued machine-learning startups that attack one piece of the workflow, including Tecton.

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