distributed

“State Your Success: Restate Secures $7M in Funding for Revolutionary Workflows-As-Code Solution”

Founders
The promise of Restate is that it is so fast and lightweight that it will allow developers to use it where traditional workflow systems would’ve been too slow and resource-intensive. The open-source platform Temporal, for example, offers a somewhat similar feature set, though the Restate team would likely argue that its system is faster and more lightweight. Virtually every modern application today consists of chains of workflows that are handled by a distributed set of services that have to reliably talk to each other. He believes this will make the service usable in situations where you’d not classically use a workflow engine — think e-commerce shopping carts, for example. “[Restate] does the classical workflows code things, just on an extremely lightweight foundation — and it goes a little further than just standard workflow use cases.

“Empowering Women in AI: Meet Krystal Kauffman, Research Fellow at the Distributed AI Research Institute”

Women In Ai Kauffman
We’ll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Krystal Kauffman worked as an organizer on political and issue campaigns for a decade before pursuing a degree in geology. For the next two years, I was able to support myself doing data work in which I completed tasks that helped program AI, build LLMs and so on. What are some issues AI users should be aware of? Similarly, the creation of AI legislation has to involve data workers.

“Revolutionary AI Offerings Unveiled by Google Cloud for Retail Innovations”

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To coincide with the National Retailer Association’s annual conference in NYC, Google Cloud today unveiled new gen AI products designed to help retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and streamline their back-office operations. But the slew of announcements show, if nothing else, how aggressively Google is attempting to court gen AI customers. (Google’s long offered Distributed Cloud Edge as a service, but it’s now targeting retailers more directly.) My question after being pre-briefed on all this was, frankly, are retailers really clamoring for gen AI? But considering some of the rocky rollouts of gen AI in retail recently (see: Amazon’s review summaries exaggerating negative feedback), I can’t say I’m convinced that the retail industry will rush to adopt gen AI en masse — from Google Cloud or any other provider.