AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #576

Dec 21, 2024

OpenAI completes ‘12 days of Shipmas’ with DevDay: OpenAI’s second DevDay is wrapping up its ‘12 days of AI Shipmas’ today with version o3 of its next gen AI Reasoning model. There’s been a long and deep flow of technical innovations and offerings for its 2 plus million developers worldwide. The company has built one of the largest API businesses in four years, complementing its multi-billion dollar direct business with premium ChatGPT subscriptions. Developer reactions have been mostly positive, with a lot more reactions to come post the holidays and into the new year. Highlights included the wider release of its text to video Sora models, as well as enterprise grade AI reasoning and agentic tools and services. More here and here.

Nvidia’s opportunities in AI Data Centers: Nvidia is not sitting still while their best customers are planning proprietary AI GPUs as they buy Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in size. The company continues to think through its opportunities and strategies to grow its AI data center business. Both in partnership with the big hyperscalers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google and Oracle Cloud, with its DGX data center offerings, AND its nascent direct data center business for enterprises. That business is already at a $2 billion plus run rate. The ‘Coopetition/Frenemies’ approach continues with Nvidia and its top customers. More here.

More big tech hardware companies in AI limelight: Dell and Broadcom both got additional focus from public investors this week on their AI augmented revenue opportunities. Dell is getting noted for its opportunities in ramping AI data centers, that need ever larger amounts of its AI servers and storage solutions. And notable is the company’s partnership with Nvidia, and the long-time relationship between the two founders, Michael Dell, and Jensen Huang. Broadcom got visibility this week for its relationship with big Nvidia AI chip customers Meta, Google, Bytedance (TikTok), and Apple, for proprietary AI XPU chip solutions. Markets are focused on alternatives to Nvidia beyond AMD, ARM and others. Broadcom became the 8th US tech company worth over a trillion dollars. The only two non-US trillion+ companies are Aramco in Saudi Arabia, and TSMC in Taiwan. More here and here.

Salesforce pushes aggressively into AI Agents Enterprise market: Salesforce is moving aggressively into the AI Agentic Enterprise market, releasing Agentforce 2.0 three months after its launch at its Dreamforce Developer conference this Fall. The company has over a 1000 deals done for Agentforce 1. The new version integrates AI Agents into its CRM suites, and leverages its customer footprint in businesses large and small. Founder/CEO Marc Benioff is laser focused on the AI enterprise markets, both against incumbents like Microsoft, and new enterprise entrants like OpenAI. In particular, the company is focused on Sierra, the AI enterprise startup founded by former co-CEO Bret Taylor. More here.

Google also ramps up AI Reasoning: With ‘Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental’, Google announced its AI Reasoning roadmap, concurrent with OpenAI’s o3 releases this week. It blends its Gemini AI model with the same ‘Chain of Thought’ reasoning of OpenAI’s o1 and other similar models this year. The new model is available on Google’s AI Studio platform, free for now. The effort comes from Google’s Deepmind AI architecture roadmap, which is aggressively building the next levels of AI beyond chat and search, to AI reasoning and Agents. Similar to robust efforts by OpenAI and others. Separately, Google Deepmind also released Veo 2, its text to video model, competing with OpenAI’s Sora models. More here.

AI: Reset to Zero