AI: Weekly Summary

Oct 28, 2023

Welcome to the Saturday weekly AI summary here on ‘AI: Reset to Zero’.

Here are some highlights from this week:

Amazon leans in on AWS AI messaging: CEO Andy Jassy highlighted the company’s AI focus in the quarterly earnings call, covering everything from the Anthropic investment and partnership, to the range of AI products and services being ramped for enterprise customers. That, and solid results on the retail side, helped make for a relatively positive response by the street, relative to the lukewarm reaction on Google and Meta results. I did a deeper take on the results of five of the key big tech ‘Magnificent Seven’ company quarterly results as viewed through investor eyes through their AI expectations. Apple reports November 2nd next week, and Nvidia on November 21st.

Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud: It was almost a tale of two data center companies (‘best of times, worst of times’), judging by investor reactions to the earnings results of Microsoft and Google. And it seemed to come down to AI products and monetization, especially in their respective cloud data center businesses. Investors liked Microsoft’s momentum both on the Azure cloud business with AI products being leveraged and resold via its OpenAI/GPT-4/ChatGPT partnership. But investors didn’t seem to like waiting for Google Cloud to ramp up their AI businesses, which remains a work in progress. Will see how this evolves once Google has its next gen, multimodal Gemini LLM AI out, which is said to be more on par with OpenAI’s GPT-4.

OpenAI/MSFT Enterprise sales competition: Along with Microsoft’s AI momentum in the quarter, reports also surfaced that OpenAI is losing ground to Microsoft in some Enterprise sales, where customers want the broader array of cloud services that OpenAI does not provide. Also, the pricing seems to be better there, and separately, some businesses are opting to use more open source or alternative LLM AI models for their enterprise applications. We’ll see if OpenAI’s developer day on November 6 bolsters their offerings on the enterprise side, especially with more developer focused tools and services.

Meta quarterly earnings: Meta’s quarterly results got a mixed reception, with continued enthusiasm on the AI pipeline, but questions on the Reels monetization and overall ongoing investments on the metaverse side. The company focused on its ‘year of efficiency’, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg of course highlighting the recent AI announcements and investments that the company is counting on to stay ahead in AI applications and services. They also highlighted running at around 100 million users for their newly launched Threads app and service, vs the on-going issues over at X/Twitter, now a year after closing its sale to Elon Musk.

Google Gemini Creator tools: Google seems to be planning to augment the multimodal and next gen LLM AI capabilities of Gemini with creator and developer focused tools called Makersuite and Stubbs. Not much is known about both, but the excitement on the leak is around their ability to help build AI apps visually with no code required. If true, this would help developers work with Gemini easier to build apps and services vs OpenAI’s APIs to GPT-4 and earlier models. At the very least, the news highlights that Google will need to make sure Gemini is at least as developer friendly as competitors from OpenAI, and other foundation LLM AI models companies.

AI: Reset to Zero