Runtime

At Writer, we’re not just building generative AI, we’re redefining it. Last week at HumanX, Writer CEO May Habib sat down with Runtime’s Editor-in-Chief Tom Krazit to discuss our unique approaches to AI innovation and insights on enterprise adoption, including: ?? Why building our own models was the way forward “For five years, we have kept up and led many innovations, with the next one up being self-evolving models, which we believe is the path to super intelligence.” ?? How agentic AI is pushing enterprises to rethink AI adoption “Agentic AI is like the straw that broke the enterprise's back, and people are understanding they can't be doing all of this themselves. They need support.” ?? What’s really holding companies back from scaling generative AI “There aren't these clean handoffs where if you wanted to do the whole thing in code and just hand off an application layer to a business user, that produces a fine application. Generative AI challenges the concept of done.” ?? Read the full interview: https://lnkd.in/g6_gNdPj?

Google Cloud has long made multicloud services a key part of its product development strategy, which makes sense when you're the third-place player in a category known as the Big Three. Tuesday's $32 billion acquisition of Wiz — a cloud security platform designed to work across all major cloud providers — will be a test of its commitment to work with its competitors and a signal of whether security trumps other considerations when it comes to buying cloud services. Both Google and Wiz said they will continue to support Wiz customers running applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, but no company spends $32 billion without plans to capture new business. Security services are both a vital part of any cloud infrastructure customer's operating environment as well as a profitable business for infrastructure vendors. In other news, NVIDIA introduced Blackwell Ultra, its next-generation GPU expected to ship later this year; Vera Rubin, a new combination CPU/GPU that includes the first custom CPU designed entirely by the company; and Dynamo, which is open-source inference software that can orchestrate AI workloads across hundreds of GPUs. In this edition of the Runtime newsletter, you'll also find the six biggest rounds of enterprise tech funding from this week, and four other stories you need to know about. https://lnkd.in/g8yMVWY8

When it comes to AI, don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Companies that have struggled to deploy production generative AI apps over the last year or so report getting somewhere around 80% to 90% through the process before tripping up while applying the finishing touches, mostly because of concerns about accuracy. At the #HumanX conference, Runtime's Tom Krazit spoke with a panel of experts from ada, Airwallex, Monte Carlo, and Pinecone, who say something that works 80% of the time is probably good enough. The key, they say, is to iterate. In other news, OpenStack has found a new home, thanks to an announcement from the Open Infrastructure Foundation that it is merging with the The Linux Foundation Foundation. And we round up the four biggest enterprise tech leadership moves of the week.

?? What does AI mean for the future of finance? This week, our SVP & Global Head of Product, Shannon Scott, joined a dynamic panel at HumanX in New York to unpack how AI and data are reshaping business growth and financial services. Moderated by Tom Krazit of Runtime, he was joined by AI leaders from companies shaping the future of data and automation – including Mike G. (ada), Barr Moses (Monte Carlo), and Edo Liberty (Pinecone). ??“Over time, AI is going to replace manual effort, shifting finance teams to roles of oversight and informed decision-making,” Shannon shared. “Understanding cash flow, managing expenses, and optimising vendor impact — these are insights AI agents will bring to businesses in a natural, seamless way.” As AI continues to evolve, we're focused on helping global businesses move faster and operate smarter – without borders. #HumanX #AI #FintechInnovation #GlobalPayments

Today, Pinecone founder and CEO Edo Liberty joined Barr Moses, CEO & Co-founder at Monte Carlo, Shannon Scott, SVP, Global Head of Product, at Airwallex, and Mike G., CPTO at ada -- with moderator Tom Krazit of Runtime -- for a conversation around turning data into business growth. The discussion covered many things, including the importance of knowledgeable AI in agentic workflows today (and the role data pipelines, vector databases, etc. play). HumanX is filling a gap in the industry with a dedicated conference focus on enterprise AI. Glad to have been a part of it!

Apps built for or around generative AI have different hardware and software requirements than their older cousins. At the #HumanX conference, Runtime's own Tom Krazit moderated a panel discussion with tech leaders from Anyscale, Cerebras Systems, Lamini AI, and Vercel, who gave their advice about what to do and what not to do when drawing up infrastructure plans for AI. This involves understanding that generative AI is a completely different animal, and those building around it need to learn some new tricks. Companies also need to seriously rethink their approach to data management and storage. Also in this edition of the Runtime newsletter, ServiceNow is bulking up its product lineup by acquiring Moveworks, which has built a series of enterprise-oriented AI assistants, for $2.85 billion. And we sum up the five biggest rounds of enterprise funding this week.

CoreWeave, one of the biggest winners of the generative AI frenzy, says it's planning to go public. Here's what we learned from the company's S-1. Swedish fintech company Klarna explains what it actually did with all the data it pulled out of Salesforce (Hint: It didn't dump it all into LLMs). Plus, the six biggest rounds of enterprise tech funding this week.

Over the next few months, Pinecone says it will begin rolling out the second generation of the serverless architecture for its flagship vector database. Pinecone is one of the leading vector database startups to emerge during the generative AI boom. And it thinks it has identified some of the roadblocks that companies need to clear before turning their generative AI experiments into production. Plus: Microsoft's stock price fell nearly 3% after financial analysts at TD Cowen said the company had canceled plans to lease computing capacity from "at least two private data center operators." And we round up the six biggest rounds of funding in enterprise tech this week. Get all that in the latest edition of the Runtime newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gJrVKeUM

Over the next few months, Pinecone says it will begin rolling out the second generation of the serverless architecture for its flagship vector database. Pinecone is one of the leading vector database startups to emerge during the generative AI boom. And it thinks it has identified some of the roadblocks that companies need to clear before turning their generative AI experiments into production. While the generative AI hype meter has come back down to earth somewhat since Pinecone raised a $100 million funding round in April 2023, vector databases are still in demand. But there's one potential problem for Pinecone that enterprise tech buyers and sellers have been wondering about over the last few years. As database vendors of all stripes rushed to add vector capabilities to their databases in response to the AI boom, it wasn't necessarily clear why anyone would want to bet on a standalone vector database run by a startup when they were already using other databases sold and maintained by vendors with decades of enterprise experience. Read the whole story on Runtime: https://lnkd.in/gBAW8phW

I'm going to be attending the HumanX conference in Las Vegas the week of March 10th and moderating two panels: "Infrastructure 2.0: Building the foundations for AI’s next leap" on Monday afternoon, featuring Sharon Zhou, PhD, Andrew Feldman, Robert Nishihara and Guillermo Rauch, and "Turning data into business growth" on Wednesday afternoon, featuring Shannon Scott, Mike Murchison, Edo Liberty and Barr Moses. It's good to see a non-vendor produced enterprise tech conference starting to get some traction, we've needed one of those for quite some time. Please stop by if you're at the conference! And if you're thinking about going, ticket prices go up later this week.