Global enterprises are grappling with the complexities of AI adoption, according to hundreds of top industry executives at a recent private software conference hosted by UBS. UBS adds: We heard:
1. The data points from a private GPU cloud infrastructure provider were a very bullish readthrough to GPU demand, Microsoft's AI infra capabilities and the ramp of enterprise/software demand for training and inference compute.
2. One F500 customer was at 1% Office Copilot roll-out, moving to perhaps 2% in a year as they a) fine-tune internal best practices and b) negotiate to get Microsoft much lower on price.
3. One private flagged "copilot chaos," with customers having to choose between AI copilots from seemingly every tech firm (we wonder if this creates pricing pressure and/or an evaluation slowdown).
4. Popular use cases are AI apps for internal, domain-specific tasks (simple workflow automation).
5. Little evidence of AI resulting in customer headcount cuts, but headcount reduction with 3rd-party managed services providers and (India-based) SI firms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost. The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that's grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years. While new machine-learning techniques that predict weather by learning from years of past data are extremely fast and efficient, they can struggle with long-term predictions. General circulation models, on the other hand, which have dominated weather prediction for the last 50 years, use complex equations to model changes in the atmosphere and give accurate projections, but they are exceedingly slow and expensive to run. Experts are divided on which tool will be most reliable going forward. But the new model from Google instead attempts to combine the two.

"It's not sort of physics versus AI. It's really physics and AI together," says Stephan Hoyer, an AI researcher at Google Research and a coauthor of the paper. The system still uses a conventional model to work out some of the large atmospheric changes required to make a prediction. It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat -- typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco's fog, for example). "That's where we inject AI very selectively to correct the errors that accumulate on small scales," Hoyer says. The result, the researchers say, is a model that can produce quality predictions faster with less computational power. They say NeuralGCM is as accurate as one-to-15-day forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which is a partner organization in the research.

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research. Instead, it's in larger-scale climate events that are prohibitively expensive to model with conventional techniques. The possibilities could range from predicting tropical cyclones with more notice to modeling more complex climate changes that are years away. "It's so computationally intensive to simulate the globe over and over again or for long periods of time," Hill says. That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research." The researchers said NeuralGCM will be open source and capable of running on less than 5,500 lines of code, compared with the nearly 377,000 lines required for the model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Wiz, the cloud security startup that was in acquisition talks with Google, has decided not to forward with the deal and to remain an independent company, according to an internal note sent to company employees on Monday. Fortune: "While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz," CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in the note. Rappaport said in the email that the company's next target is to reach $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and to take the company public.

Azure used to be a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. Now, it's the most widely used operating system on Microsoft Azure. The New Stack's Joab Jackson writes: These days, Microsoft expends considerable effort that Linux runs as smoothly as possible on Azure, according to a talk given earlier this year at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit given by two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul, and Krum Kashan. "Linux is the #1 operating system in Azure today," Aboutoul said. And all must be supported in a way that Microsoft users have come to expects. Hence, the need for the Microsoft's Linux Platforms Group, which provides support Linux to both the internal customers and to Azure customers. These days, the duo of engineers explained, Microsoft knows about as much as anyone about how to operate Linux at hyperscale. [...]

As of today, there are hundreds of Azure and Azure-based services running on Linux, including the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and many of the other database services. "A lot of the infrastructure powering everything else is running on Linux," Aboutoul said. "They're different flavors of Linux running all over the place," Aboutoul said. To run these services, Microsoft maintains its own kernel, Azure Linux, and in 2023 the company released its own version of Linux, Azure Linux. But Azure Linux is just a small portion of all the other flavors of Linux running on Azure, all of which Microsoft must work with to support.

Overall, there are about 20,000 third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) packages in the Azure marketplace that rely on some Linux distribution. And when things go wrong, it is the Azure service engineers who get the help tickets. The company keeps a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Red Hat). [...] Overall, the company gets about 1,000 images a month from these endorsed partners alone. Many of the distributions have multiple images (Suse has a regular one, and another one for high-performance computing, for instance).

An anonymous reader writes: Windows users are being notified that their systems aren't backed up with the built-in Windows backup solution. A corresponding message appears with the advice that it's best to make backups so that all data is stored "in case something happens to the PC." It almost reads like an indirect threat, but Microsoft is actually just pointing out the option to store file backups on its own OneDrive cloud service. And it's also advertising more storage space.

The BBC reports that "while most of the world was grappling with the blue screen of death on Friday," there was one country that managed to escape largely unscathed: China. The reason is actually quite simple: CrowdStrike is hardly used there. Very few organisations will buy software from an American firm that, in the past, has been vocal about the cyber-security threat posed by Beijing. Additionally, China is not as reliant on Microsoft as the rest of the world. Domestic companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are the dominant cloud providers.

So reports of outages in China, when they did come, were mainly at foreign firms or organisations. On Chinese social media sites, for example, some users complained they were not able to check into international chain hotels such as Sheraton, Marriott and Hyatt in Chinese cities. Over recent years, government organisations, businesses and infrastructure operators have increasingly been replacing foreign IT systems with domestic ones. Some analysts like to call this parallel network the "splinternet".

"It's a testament to China's strategic handling of foreign tech operations," says Josh Kennedy White, a cybersecurity expert based in Singapore. "Microsoft operates in China through a local partner, 21Vianet, which manages its services independently of its global infrastructure. This setup insulates China's essential services — like banking and aviation — from global disruptions."
"Beijing sees avoiding reliance on foreign systems as a way of shoring up national security."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the article.

Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the database software and cloud computing company of invading people's privacy by collecting their personal information and selling it to third parties. Reuters: The plaintiffs, who otherwise have no connection to Oracle, said the company violated federal and state privacy laws and California's constitution by creating unauthorized "digital dossiers" for hundreds of millions of people. They said the dossiers contained data including where people browsed online, and where they did their banking, bought gas, dined out, shopped and used their credit cards. Oracle then allegedly sold the information directly to marketers or through products such as ID Graph, which according to the company helps marketers "orchestrate a relevant, personalized experience for each individual."

A widespread IT outage, caused by a defective software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, is affecting businesses worldwide, causing significant disruptions across various sectors. The issue has primarily impacted computers running Windows, resulting in system crashes and "blue screen of death" errors. The travel industry appears to be among the hardest hit, with airlines and airports in multiple countries reporting problems with check-in and ticketing systems, leading to flight delays. Other affected sectors include banking, retail, and healthcare.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz confirmed the outage was due to a "defect" in a content update for Windows hosts, ruling out a cyberattack. The company is working on a fix. CrowdStrike said the crash reports were "related to the Falcon Sensor" -- its cloud-based security service that it describes as "real-time threat detection, simplified management, and proactive threat hunting."

A Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch that the previous Microsoft 365 service disruption overnight July 18-19 was unrelated to the widespread outage triggered by the CrowdStrike update.

Editor's note: The story has been updated throughout the day and moved higher on the front page.

Microsoft grappled with a major service outage, leaving users across the world unable to access its cloud computing platforms and causing airlines to cancel flights. From a report: Thousands of users across the world reported problems with Microsoft 365 apps and services to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks service disruptions. "We're investigating an issue impacting users' ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services," Microsoft 365 Status said on X early Friday. On its status page for Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, the company said the issue began just before 10 p.m. ET Thursday, affecting systems across the central U.S. In an update, Microsoft said it had determined the cause and was working to restore access to its users.

Nvidia and French startup Mistral AI jointly announced today the release of a new language model designed to bring powerful AI capabilities directly to business desktops. From a report: The model, named Mistral-NeMo, boasts 12 billion parameters and an expansive 128,000 token context window, positioning it as a formidable tool for businesses seeking to implement AI solutions without the need for extensive cloud resources. Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at Nvidia, emphasized the model's accessibility and efficiency in a recent interview with VentureBeat. "We're launching a model that we jointly trained with Mistral. It's a 12 billion parameter model, and we're launching it under Apache 2.0," he said. "We're really excited about the accuracy of this model across a lot of tasks."

The collaboration between Nvidia, a titan in GPU manufacturing and AI hardware, and Mistral AI, a rising star in the European AI scene, represents a significant shift in the AI industry's approach to enterprise solutions. By focusing on a more compact yet powerful model, the partnership aims to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities. Catanzaro elaborated on the advantages of smaller models. "The smaller models are just dramatically more accessible," he said. "They're easier to run, the business model can be different, because people can run them on their own systems at home. In fact, this model can run on RTX GPUs that many people have already."

GitLab, a U.S. provider of cloud-based software development tools whose investors include Google parent Alphabet, is exploring a sale after attracting acquisition interest, Reuters is reporting. From the report: GitLab, which has a market value of about $8 billion, is working with investment bankers on a sale process that has attracted interest from peers, including cloud monitoring firm Datadog, the sources said. Any deal is still weeks away and no agreement is certain, the sources said, requesting anonymity because the matter is confidential.

Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: Google tried to derail a Microsoft antitrust settlement over anticompetitive software licensing in the European Union by offering a $500 million alternative deal to the group of cloud providers behind the EU complaint, Bloomberg reported. According to Bloomberg, Google's offer to the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) required that the group maintain its EU antitrust complaint. It came "just days" before CISPE settled with Microsoft, and it was apparently not compelling enough to stop CISPE from inking a deal with the software giant that TechCrunch noted forced CISPE to accept several compromises.

Bloomberg uncovered Google's attempted counteroffer after reviewing confidential documents and speaking to "people familiar with the matter." Apparently, Google sought to sway CISPE with a package worth nearly $500 million for more than five years of software licenses and about $15 million in cash. But CISPE did not take the bait, announcing last week that an agreement was reached with Microsoft, seemingly frustrating Google. CISPE initially raised its complaint in 2022, alleging that Microsoft was "irreparably damaging the European cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice in their cloud deployments" by spiking costs to run Microsoft's software on rival cloud services. In February, CISPE said that "any remedies and resolution must apply across the sector and to be accessible to all cloud customers in Europe." They also promised that "any agreements will be made public."

But the settlement reached last week excluded major rivals, including Amazon, which is a CISPE member, and Google, which is not. And despite CISPE's promise, the terms of the deal were not published, apart from a CISPE blog roughly outlining central features that it claimed resolved the group's concerns over Microsoft's allegedly anticompetitive behaviors. What is clear is that CISPE agreed to drop their complaint by taking the deal, but no one knows exactly how much Microsoft paid in a "lump sum" to cover CISPE legal fees for three years, TechCrunch noted. However, "two people with direct knowledge of the matter" told Reuters that Microsoft offered about $22 million.

Amazon is now monitoring the hours corporate employees spend in the office. From a report: This move is intended to crack down on people who are trying to skirt the company's return-to-office policy, Business Insider has learned. Several teams across Amazon, including the retail and cloud-computing units, were told in recent months that a minimum of two hours per visit is required to count as office attendance, according to multiple screenshots of internal Slack messages obtained by BI and people familiar with the matter. Some teams have been told to stay at least six hours per visit.

Amazon's goal is to ramp up scrutiny of "coffee badging," some of the Slack messages said. Coffee badging refers to employees who badge in, get coffee, and leave the office shortly to satisfy their return-to-office mandate. Amazon started requiring office attendance for most corporate staffers three times a week last year, but it didn't have a minimum-hour obligation for each visit.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is reportedly in advanced negotiations to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for approximately $23 billion, Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The potential deal, which would value Wiz at nearly double its most recent private valuation of $12 billion, underscores the growing importance of cybersecurity in Alphabet's enterprise strategy as it seeks to narrow the gap with cloud computing rivals such as Microsoft, Morgan Stanley said in a note.

Founded in January 2020, Wiz has quickly established itself as a leading player in the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) space, utilizing an agentless approach to secure cloud application deployments throughout their lifecycle. The company's platform continuously assesses and prioritizes critical risks across various security domains, providing customers with a comprehensive view of their cloud security posture. Wiz has experienced rapid growth since its inception, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeding $350 million as of January 2024, representing a year-over-year increase of over 75%. The company boasts an impressive client roster, with more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies among its customers, and has raised nearly $2 billion in funding to date.

If confirmed, the acquisition would mark Alphabet's largest to date, significantly expanding its footprint in the burgeoning cloud security market. The move follows previous security-focused acquisitions by the tech giant, including the $5.4 billion purchase of Mandiant in 2022 and the $500 million acquisition of Siemplify. Morgan Stanley adds that the potential acquisition could raise questions about Wiz's ability to maintain neutrality across multiple cloud platforms, potentially benefiting competitors such as Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike in the near term.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A basket of 27 large-cap AI stocks created by wealth manager and brokerage house Jefferies has surged 127% in value since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022, adding about $10 trillion in market cap. However, 2025 earnings forecasts for these companies have increased only 25% over the same period, Jefferies warned in a note to clients.

This disconnect has pushed the incremental price-to-earnings ratio for AI stocks to 73 times, suggesting investors are pricing in extremely optimistic growth expectations across the sector.

Nvidia has seen the largest gains, with its stock price up 656% since late 2022. Despite signs of overvaluation, Jefferies believes the AI bubble could keep expanding in the near term, citing strong capital expenditure plans through 2025 and ample cash reserves at major cloud providers.

AT&T paid more than $300,000 to a member of the team that stole call records for tens of millions of customers, reports Wired — "to delete the data and provide a video demonstrating proof of deletion." The hacker, who is part of the notorious ShinyHunters hacking group that has stolen data from a number of victims through unsecured Snowflake cloud storage accounts, tells WIRED that AT&T paid the ransom in May. He provided the address for the cryptocurrency wallet that sent the currency to him, as well as the address that received it. WIRED confirmed, through an online blockchain tracking tool, that a payment transaction occurred on May 17 in the amount of 5.7 bitcoin... The hacker initially demanded $1 million from AT&T but ultimately agreed to a third of that. WIRED viewed the video that the hacker says he provided to AT&T as proof to the telecom that he had deleted its stolen data from his computer...

AT&T is one of more than 150 companies that are believed to have had data stolen from poorly secured Snowflake accounts during a hacking spree that unfolded throughout April and May. It's been previously reported that the accounts were not secured with multi-factor authentication, so after the hackers obtained usernames and passwords for the accounts, and in some cases authorization tokens, they were able to access the storage accounts of companies and siphon their data. Ticketmaster, the banking firm Santander, LendingTree, and Advance Auto Parts were all among the victims publicly identified to date...

The timeline suggests that if [John] Binns is responsible for the AT&T breach, he allegedly did it when he was likely already aware that he was under indictment for the T-Mobile hack and could face arrest for it.

Alphabet unit Google's cloud subsidiary will look into other options in its fight against Microsoft's licensing practices, the head of Google Cloud head said on Wednesday. From a report: The comments by Amit Zavery came after Microsoft reached a deal with trade body CISPE to resolve the latter's antitrust complaint about its cloud licensing practices. "Many regulatory bodies have opened inquiries into Microsoft's licensing practices, and we are hopeful there will be remedies to protect the cloud market from Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior," he said.

"We are exploring our options to continue to fight against Microsoft's anti-competitive licensing in order to promote choice, innovation, and the growth of the digital economy in Europe."

Despite soaring investment in AI hardware, most companies are struggling to turn the technology into profitable ventures, Goldman Sachs' latest AI adoption tracker reveals. Equity markets project a $330 billion boost to annual revenues for AI enablers by 2025, up from $250 billion forecast just last quarter, yet only 5% of US firms currently use AI in their production processes.

The disconnect between sky-high investment and tepid adoption underscores the significant hurdles businesses face in implementing AI effectively. Industry surveys by Goldman indicate that while many small businesses are experimenting with the technology, most have yet to define clear use cases or establish comprehensive employee training programs. Data compatibility and privacy concerns remain substantial roadblocks, with many firms reporting their existing tech platforms are ill-equipped to support AI applications.

The lack of in-house expertise and resources further compounds these challenges, leaving many companies unable to bridge the gap between AI's theoretical potential and practical implementation. Even among those organizations actively deploying AI, only 35% have a clearly defined vision for creating business value from the technology. This strategic uncertainty is particularly acute in consumer and retail sectors, where just 30% of executives believe they have adequately prioritized generative AI. The barriers to profitable AI use are not limited to technical and strategic issues. Legal and compliance risks loom large, with 64% of businesses expressing concerns about cybersecurity risks and roughly half worried about misinformation and reputational damage stemming from AI use.

Despite these challenges, investment continues to pour into AI hardware, particularly in semiconductor and cloud computing sectors. Markets anticipate a 50% revenue growth for semiconductor companies by the end of 2025. However, this enthusiasm has yet to translate into widespread job displacement, with AI-related layoffs remaining muted and unemployment rates for AI-exposed jobs tracking closely with broader labor market trends.

Amazon Web Services is the latest entrant to the generative AI game with the announcement of App Studio, a groundbreaking tool capable of building complex software applications from simple written prompts. TechCrunch's Ron Miller reports: "App Studio is for technical folks who have technical expertise but are not professional developers, and we're enabling them to build enterprise-grade apps," Sriram Devanathan, GM of Amazon Q Apps and AWS App Studio, told TechCrunch. Amazon defines enterprise apps as having multiple UI pages with the ability to pull from multiple data sources, perform complex operations like joins and filters, and embed business logic in them. It is aimed at IT professionals, data engineers and enterprise architects, even product managers who might lack coding skills but have the requisite company knowledge to understand what kinds of internal software applications they might need. The company is hoping to enable these employees to build applications by describing the application they need and the data sources they wish to use.

Examples of the types of applications include an inventory-tracking system or claims approval process. The user starts by entering the name of an application, calling the data sources and then describing the application they want to build. The system comes with some sample prompts to help, but users can enter an ad hoc description if they wish. It then builds a list of requirements for the application and what it will do, based on the description. The user can refine these requirements by interacting with the generative AI. In that way, it's not unlike a lot of no-code tools that preceded it, but Devanathan says it is different. [...] Once the application is complete, it goes through a mini DevOps pipeline where it can be tested before going into production. In terms of identity, security and governance, and other requirements any enterprise would have for applications being deployed, the administrator can link to existing systems when setting up the App Studio. When it gets deployed, AWS handles all of that on the back end for the customer, based on the information entered by the admin.

An anonymous reader writes: Per a report from DruckerChannel, HP has finally been forced to discontinue its cheaper e-series LaserJet printers due to customers experiencing problems with their online-only and always tied to HP+ subscription requirements. Among other things, HP+ requires a permanent Internet connection, and customers only use HP-original ink and toners, not allowing for third-party alternatives to be used at all. There are benefits to HP+, including cloud printing and an extra year's warranty, but the forced online requirement for a cheaper printer left a bad taste in the mouths of many consumers.

In any case, it's important to clarify that this discontinuation of HP printers will only impact HP LaserJet printers that have an "e" added to the end of their model name to denote the alternative business model. So, the HP Laserjet M110w is unaffected by this, but the HP LaserJet M110we and M209dwe, two cheaper always-online alternatives, will no longer be produced or sold by HP. Another critical point of clarification is that the existing HP e-series LaserJet printer models in the wild will still function exactly as they did when they were purchased. No software updates are forthcoming to unlock the true potential of the hardware, so existing customers will have to deal with it and HP+ until they can replace their printers entirely. At least they'll still get HP+ benefits, but after such backlash, it'd be nice if HP acknowledged its mistake enough to remove some of the restrictions on e-series printer users.