That was quick: It’s a wrap for Sam Bankman-Fried, whose jury took only about four hours to decide he’s guilty on all counts. Now, pending an appeal, the main question is how long he’ll be behind bars.
SBF’s conviction was the capper for a busy week. Regulations finally came to artificial intelligence purveyors around the world. AI also lifted earnings outlooks, if not earnings themselves yet, across a wide swath of enterprise companies.
But as we’ve been noting for a while, spending on AI may be coming at the expense of other tech investments, so some companies are reporting slowing business. Despite the overall stock markets rising about 5% this week on the prospect of an end to the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes, Confluent’s stock dropped about 40%, Atlassian’s about 10%, ZoomInfo’s more than 16%, and they weren’t alone.
On the cybersecurity front, chief information security officers are freaking out over the Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit against not only SolarWinds but its CISO as well.
Oh, and check out that new Beatles song — it’s not a classic, but the refrain does stick in my head. The only problem is that it may well usher in a raft of sucky imitators across pop music. Wasn’t auto-tune bad enough?
TheCUBE analysts Dave Vellante and John Furrier discuss this and other news, along with their weekly rants, on their latest installment of theCUBE Pod weekly podcast, out today in audio form, video form to follow Saturday. And don’t miss Vellante’s weekly Breaking Analysis, coming over the weekend.
SBF goes down
A landmark case — remind me again why anyone wants anything to do with crypto? FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all seven counts in fraud and conspiracy trial Although he surely will appeal after sentencing, he could spend decades in jail.
AI regulation arrives
Biden signs executive order directing AI companies to develop safer AI
By most accounts, it’s a surprisingly good start to bringing some order to a field that has potential for great good and grievous harm. As Standard AI CEO Jordan Fisher, a former Development Branch chief for the SEC, said in an email, it’s also coming fairly quickly given the glacial pace of many government efforts. “This is exactly the thoughtful, nuanced, timely response you want from the government,” he said. “The EO is asking for AI’s with very large amounts of computing power to be disclosed, with initiatives to analyze their safety.”
The good parts are that because the rules apply only to the biggest AI model developers, it doesn’t lead to regulatory capture, the reality that agencies can become dominated by the entities they’re supposed to regulate, and they don’t look like they will slow progress, rather they open a needed conversation.
“I can’t emphasize enough that we really don’t know how AI works,” he added. “We don’t know what it will be capable of next year, or the year after. Biden’s EO calls for more testing (red-teaming, etc.), which is a great start. We need to get really good at this, really fast.”
Here’s an analysis of the EO’s prospects by David Strom: Biden’s AI executive order is promising, but it may be tough for the US to govern AI effectively And lots more detail here from an Ernst & Young report
The Office of Management and Budget puts some meat on the bones: OMB releases draft AI guidance for federal agencies
And in the EU, a parallel effort that actually started earlier: 28 countries sign Bletchley Declaration on AI safety
In other AI news:
Beatles get back together for one last song with the help of artificial intelligence And it’s not bad!
Growing split in the AI community: Google Brain founder Andrew Ng says threat of AI causing human extinction is overblown
Courts start to sort out copyright in AI training but there’s miles to go: Judge dismisses most copyright claims by artists against generative AI art providers
AI code generation continues apace: Red Hat applies IBM watsonx code generation to Ansible automation
Making RAG easy, meaning better AI models: With RAGStack, DataStax enables generative AI models to gain additional context from third-party data
Amazon aims to capitalize on the GPU shortage: AWS offers more flexible access to Nvidia GPUs for short-duration AI workloads
Another sign that amassing data will be critical for success in AI (unless the government intervenes: HubSpot announces plans to acquire business data provider Clearbit
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search adds new enterprise-ready generative AI features
Generative AI is at the heart of a slew of Snowflake announcements
Weav.ai emerges from stealth with a series of ‘copilots’ for analyzing unstructured data
LinkedIn launches an AI chatbot to coach people on getting a new job
Google DeepMind debuts new version of its AlphaFold model for researchers
Privacy-focused Brave browser releases AI assistant Leo
Around the enterprise and in the cloud
Earningspalooza:
A rising AI tide lifts (almost) all stocks of companies leveraging it, though that’s not helping some overcome the doldrums caused by rising interest rates and slower spending on other enterprise tech:
In other news
Data storage supplier Western Digital to split into two companies
Broadcom still expects to acquire VMware after deal misses targeted closing date
Apple announces new MacBook Pros and M3 chips at ‘Scary Fast’ event
UK antitrust regulator ends e-commerce probes into Amazon and Meta
Splunk to cut 7% of workforce, or about 500 employees, ahead of Cisco acquisition (per CNBC)
Cyber beat
Cybersecurity consolidation accelerates: SailPoint closes Osirium acquisition as Proofpoint to buy Tessian and Palo Alto Networks acquires Dig Security for reported $400M
Is the CISO freakout a sign of government overreach, or overreaction to a needed corrective for cyber transparency? Cybersecurity practitioners fret after SEC sues SolarWinds and its CISO
US, dozens of allies pledge not to pay ransomware hackers
Microsoft launches internal initiative to make its products more secure
New Iranian state-sponsored hacking campaign uncovered
Chainguard raises $61M for its ultra-secure software container images
Generative AI worming its way into cyber: Orca Security deepens integration with AWS through Amazon Bedrock support
Okta reveals hackers accessed 134 customers’ data in support system breach
Comings and goings
Google Cloud appoints Matt Renner, who joined the cloud unit in April as global chief operating officer for go-to-market, as its new president of North America and global startups, following earlier stints at Microsoft and Oracle.
Blackberry will seek a permanent new CEO as the company mulls splitting its cybersecurity operations from its internet of things business: BlackBerry Announces John Chen to Retire as Executive Chair and CEO
Tabnine appoints former Cockroach Labs and NGINX exec Peter Guagenti president and chief marketing officer.
Jeff Bezos is leaving Seattle for Miami.
What’s next
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America Nov. 7-9: SiliconANGLE will have all the news and theCUBE will be onsite in Chicago doing interviews with all the experts and providing analysis.
More tech earnings next week from RingCentral, Kyndryl, NXP Semiconductors, Uber, Lyft, Datadog, GlobalFoundries, Robinhood, Rackspace, Twilio and more.
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