AI agents are the new hot craze in generative AI.
On Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, the company introduced a new tool to help companies build AI agents.
“Vertex AI Agent Builder allows people to very easily and quickly build conversational agents,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said.
In this case, it’s relying on Google Search (which in reality could or could not be accurate).
“We’re now bringing you grounding in Google Search, bringing the power of the world’s knowledge that Google Search offers through our grounding service to models.
Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion.
Based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.
To be fair, though, Microsoft only announced its Cobalt Arm chips late last year, too, and those chips aren’t yet available to customers, either.
In a press briefing ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, Google stressed that since Axion is built on an open foundation, Google Cloud customers will be able to bring their existing Arm workloads to Google Cloud without any modifications.
“Through this collaboration, we’re accessing a broad ecosystem of cloud customers who have already deployed ARM-based workloads across hundreds of ISVs and open-source projects.”More later this year.
The Indian government has finally resolved a years-long cybersecurity issue that exposed reams of sensitive data about its citizens.
At fault was the Indian government’s cloud service, dubbed S3WaaS, which is billed as a “secure and scalable” system for building and hosting Indian government websites.
With evidence of ongoing exposures of private data, Majumder asked TechCrunch for help getting the remaining data secured.
Majumder said that some citizens’ sensitive data began spilling online long after he first disclosed the misconfiguration in 2022.
The exposed data, Majumder said, potentially puts citizens at risk of identity thefts and scams.
Using Deadline Cloud, customers in media and entertainment as well as architecture and engineering can leverage AWS compute to render content for TV shows, movies, ads, video games and digital blueprints, said AWS GM of creative tools Antony Passemard.
Deadline Cloud then provisions Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances and manages the network and compute infrastructure.
And — for customers with on-premises compute — Deadline Cloud integrates with this compute and uses it to execute rendering jobs.
With Deadline Cloud, customers can link their own third-party software licenses with the service or leverage usage-based licensing for rendering with existing rendering tools (e.g.
As Passemard alluded to, the rise of generative AI has fueled the demand for rendering hardware, too, and led to the creation of entirely new cloud-based, GPU-accelerated providers.
The funding climate for AI chip startups, once as sunny as a mid-July day, is beginning to cloud over as Nvidia asserts its dominance.
AI chip company Mythic ran out of cash in 2022 and was nearly forced to halt operations, while Graphcore, a once-well-capitalized rival, now faces mounting losses.
But one startup appears to have found success in the ultra-competitive — and increasingly crowded — AI chip space.
“I co-founded Hailo with the mission to make high-performance AI available at scale outside the realm of data centers,” Danon told TechCrunch.
“In recent years, we’ve seen a surge in demand for edge AI applications in most industries ranging from airport security to food packaging,” he said.
The Linux Foundation last week announced that it will host Valkey, a fork of the Redis in-memory data store.
Valkey is backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson and Snap.
AWS and Google Cloud rarely back an open-source fork together.
At the time, Redis said that despite this change for the modules, “the license for open-source Redis was never changed.
This fork originated at AWS, where longtime Redis maintainer Madelyn Olson initially started the project in her own GitHub account.
In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor.
“In the original cloud world, the three major cloud vendors were really fighting to try to build what felt like walled gardens, and as long as you built on top of them, everything was great.
Cloud customers looking to switch providers will need to be retained through innovative and accessible features now that the punishment of egress fees is being phased out,” Seseri said.
David Linthicum, a longtime cloud consultant, says that while these recent announcements are a pleasant PR move, he warns folks to review their bills carefully because egress fees aren’t the only problem.
What are we paying for the networking fees, the egress fees, all the other hidden fees that come along with what people call junk fees that come from the cloud vendors?”But this may not affect startups as much as larger enterprise customers.
But that’s how things are at Microsoft now: everything needs to have a Copilot angle — even its most straightforward hardware events.
“Windows 11 and Windows 365 promise a new era of AI productivity,” Melissa Grant, Microsoft’s senior director for Windows Enterprise said.
Microsoft is also betting on cloud PCs delivered through Windows 365 as a surface for the Copilot.
Microsoft says that Windows App usage has now reached over 3 million active hours since it entered preview at the Microsoft Ignite 2023 in November.
And those Windows 365 cloud PCs?
Suleyman — also a co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought in 2014 to bolster its own AI efforts — will run Microsoft’s newly formed consumer AI unit, called Microsoft AI, whereas Simonyan is joining the company as a chief scientist in the same new group.
Mustafa, whose official title at Microsoft is EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI, will report to chief executive Nadella.
“Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Mustafa and Karén at Microsoft,” Nadella wrote in a blog post.
In a blog post, Inflection AI said that it will shift its focus to the AI studio business, where it builds and tests customer generative AI models.
“This renewed emphasis on our API also comes with some important changes in the company,” wrote Inflection AI.
Microsoft has revealed that it too will allow business customers to transfer data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no so-called “egress fees” attached, following hot on the heels of similar moves by cloud rivals AWS and Google.
The latter of these announced it was ditching egress fees in January, followed by AWS earlier this month.
Similar to rivals including AWS, Microsoft did already allow customers to transfer 100GB of data out of Azure each month for free.
This is notable, because a lot of companies will want to use some Azure services, without having to go all-in on it.
So data transfers from other Azure services, such as the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), will still include the standard charges.
