Summary Bullets:

• Chinese startup DeepSeek had released an open-weight model, DeepSeek-R1, with similar capabilities to many of the leading generative AI (GenAI) models available in the market, at a fraction of the cost.

• Like OpenAI o1, R1 is a “reasoning” model. These models produce responses incrementally, simulating a process similar to the way humans reason through problems.

Another week, another AI revelation. The news that Chinese startup DeepSeek had released an open-weight model, DeepSeek-R1, with similar capabilities to OpenAI o1, sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley (and Wall Street) just as the new US administration was inaugurated, with a display of big tech billionaires in attendance. A delicious irony, then, that while inauguration week was capped off with headlines surrounding the muscular Stargate project, a $500 billion initiative to fund AI infrastructure, the quiet (initially) release of DeepSeek-R1 would eventually steal that thunder.

Summary Bullets:

• OpenAI’s latest fundraising round puts it at a $150 billion valuation.

• The startup recently released the OpenAI o1 platform, designed to solve complex tasks in science, coding, and math.

The world’s most high-profile technology startup has been in the news again, this time because of a new funding round that has increased its valuation to $150 billion. Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia joined the fundraising alongside Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures. MGX, the Abu Dhabi (the UAE) investment firm that has also been in the news lately thanks to its investment in data centers (please see: Microsoft Joins BlackRock in $100-billion Investment Drive to Fund Data Center Infrastructure Projects, September 20, 2024) also contributed.

Summary Bullets:

• Salesforce is leveraging generative AI (GenAI) capabilities to address customer pain points such as processing unstructured data and unlocking the value in this data creating unified customer profiles.

• Salesforce Data Cloud will be available on Hyperforce in the UK in July 2024. Salesforce Hyperforce aims to address customers’ growing appetite for compliance, safety, and standardization in the public cloud.

The Salesforce World Tour took place on June 6, 2024, at the Excel Centre in East London (England), with sponsors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognizant, Deloitte, and PWC. The annual event included workshops, demos, and discussions with partners, the announcement of an AI center, and innovations in the Salesforce Data Cloud and Slack platforms. For GenAI observers, the most salient news was the general availability of Salesforce Data Cloud Vector Database, built into the Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform, which infuses GenAI into the vendor’s CRM platform, Salesforce Customer 360. The vector database collects, “ingests,” and combines structured and unstructured data regarding end users. This is of great importance to Salesforce’s customers’ customers. According to the vendor, around 80% of customer data is scattered across internal corporate departments in an unstructured configuration, “trapped” in PDFs, emails, chat conversations, transcripts, customer reviews, and so on. This data can be leveraged to create a closer overall relationship with the customer by creating a unified profile of the so-called customer journey. Being able to ground all types of data in Salesforce Data Cloud – where it is processed – unlocks a ton of valuable information and not just to engage with the customer in positive ways: It makes it possible to be agile as possible in case of problems including issues such as product recall, returns, and so on.

Summary Bullets:

• Google’s I/O event for developers included the announcements of Project Astra, Gemini 1.5 Flash, and a new tensor processing unit (TPU) architecture.

• Google also updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, extending its context window from one to two million tokens, and refining its code-generation and reasoning capabilities.

Google I/O 2024 included an impressive array of generative AI (GenAI) announcements such as upgrades to Google Gemini (Gemini), an AI assistant called Project Astra, and a new chipset architecture. The release of Trillium, the sixth generation of Google Cloud TPUs confirms Google’s position in the contested silicon market, where a competitive microprocessor architecture has become an essential element in the arsenal of every hyperscaler trying to beef up its GenAI strategy. This was demonstrated once again when Microsoft recently announced a new collaboration with AMD. As the original pioneer of custom-made, proprietary semiconductors for AI, Google is keeping the platform fresh by releasing timely upgrades. The new architecture includes the next generation of SparseCore, an accelerator for processing the embeddings found in AI-based ranking and recommendation systems.

Summary Bullets:

• Microsoft has signed a multiyear agreement with startup Mistral to include GenAI models in Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio and Azure Machine Learning model catalog.

• Mistral-Large is a new LLM that introduces native fluency in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian.

Microsoft has signed a multiyear agreement with GenAI startup Mistral, signaling the hyperscaler’s ambitions to branch out from its relationship with trailblazer OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California (US), and explore more diverse opportunities. The alliance makes Mistral the second company to provide commercial large language models (LLMs) on the Microsoft Azure platform. Microsoft has partnerships with Meta and Hugging Face, whose open-source models are also available on Microsoft Azure.