AWS Over Claiming Just a Tad? & The AI Ouroboros Effect

What I liked and didn’t across the AOPG news network last week.

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New AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region Opens as Hyperscale Giant Expands Growing Reach

Lets start with Data & Storage Asia and coverage of the massive announcement from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its investment in Malaysia.

The big news here is how AWS will be investing RM29billion in developing a new AWS region in Malaysia. Wow. But hold on when is that money coming into Malaysia? Well, its between now and 2038, so it’s an investment over 14 years. Now call me a sceptic, but do you know wany commercial tech company that can back commitments on spending beyond a year, never mind ?a decade ( I mean one and half decades). my point is AWS are making big promises that no-one will hold them and they will never be checked against.

It makes great headlines, and is designed to curry favour with cloud decision makers in Malaysia, but the reality is these are big numbers that no one will hold them to. If AWS doesn’t grow their business enough in the Malaysia region, you can be sure the investment may not reach these numbers.

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Bottom line is that AWS is building a region in Malaysia and that’s good, especially ?for Malaysian companies that want to use AWS and have data sovereignty concerns. However in terms of the next 14 years the extent of AWS continued investment in Malysia will be dictated not by this announcement but by how much money this region makes for them. You can read the details here: https://datastorageasia.com/new-aws-asia-pacific-malaysia-region-opens/

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Protect Your Devices from Cyber Threats During Your School Holidays

Next onto Cybersecurity Asia, and a press release from Checkpoint Software. So let me start with the headline first. Hmm, apparently this headline was crafted based on the assertion from Checkpoint that mobile phone usage goes up during school holidays.

I don’t know about you, but as far as I can make out, people are glued to their phones whether on vacation or not so i have to question whether phone usage really goes up at that time. However, the assertion gave a tenuous reason for a creative person to come up with this headline.

Now I have that off my chest, the substance of the press release is still valid. Devices, namely personal mobile phones are truly a big target on the attack surface for the bad guys looking to hack individuals and/or the companies for whom they work. This release outlines new research into the level of threat and gives some high level guidance for how you can protect your devices.

You can read more here - https://cybersecurityasia.net/protect-devices-threats-school-holidays/

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AI Is Currently Plaguing the Internet With Misinformation

Finally, on to Disruptive Tech News and a great feature article about AI. Now if you read my tech rants, you will know how frustrated I have become with the over hype and over use of AI in almost every tech press release that crosses our news desk.

In this article, our journalist Izzat Najmi Abdullah does a great job of outlining red flags with generative AI, why we can’t rely on it, and in my opinion why it must always have human oversight. He mentions the Ouroboros effect, where AI models train themselves using content created by AI (rather than quality source materials created by humans), the net effect is that quality of output goes down not up.

As Najmi puts it, as more of the content in the internet become Ai generated it “leads to a recursive loop in which AI content begets more AI content”. However, unlike human intelligence where we advance from previous learning, Generative AI actually declines.

It's a fascinating read which you can look at here - https://disruptivetechnews.com/big_news/ai-plague-internet-misinformation/