Executive Exits Shaking Up the World of AI

Story by Shane Snider

Key Points:

• The late Wednesday departures of three OpenAI leaders -- including CTO Mira Murati -- conspicuously coincided with Thursday reports of the company’s moves to restructure its organization to a completely for-profit business.
• During a speaking event at Italian Tech Week Thursday, CEO Sam Altman confirmed the plan to restructure but said the departures of Murati and senior research executives were not linked to the plans. Major shifts started at the company after last year’s attempted ouster of Altman -- which included Murati’s brief promotion to CEO.
• Last year, Altman appeared before Congress to discuss the future of AI and potential regulations, saying the industry needed guidance. ChatGPT’s near overnight success had ignited a generative AI arms race along with serious concerns about existential dangers to humanity.
• But it was corporate interest that saved Altman’s position at the company. 微软 CEO Satya Nadella pulled his own power play, threatening to hire away OpenAI’s talent base.
• “That’s the obvious risk here is the potential for what I call mission drift,” says Manoj Saxena , CEO and founder of Responsible AI Institute and an InformationWeek Insight Circle member. “They could start drifting from the original mission to create broadly beneficial AI to now prioritizing profits over social responsibility.”
• Saxena says quickly changing market conditions have OpenAI’s GenAI competitors -- like Anthropic , Meta , and 谷歌 -- expanding rapidly. That’s putting pressure on the company to switch to a for-profit structure that is more appealing to investors.

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How Can AI Impact Cyber Resiliency?

Story by Gaurav Banga

Key Points:

• As generative AI technology continues to dominate executive mindshare, security leaders find themselves in a precarious position: tasked with harnessing the productivity promises of the technology while simultaneously safeguarding against its potential vulnerabilities, errors and biases. ?
• A recent report on the state of AI in cyber risk management from Balbix surveyed more than 600 US-based cybersecurity leaders and found that two out of three are keen to harness AI to prevent vulnerabilities.
• The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) tracked over 3,000 critical vulnerabilities in July of this year alone. According to Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), the rate of vulnerability exploits has been exploding with a 180% increase over the past year.
• In the face of escalating cyber threats, shrinking budgets, and understaffed teams, narrowing the skills gap is not just a necessity, it is a strategic imperative. For many CISOs, AI offers a significant opportunity to help bridge the gap between the resources they have and the resources they need. ?

Optimizing Data Pipelines

Story by Nathan Eddy

Key Points:

• Traditionally, data pipelines have been linear, making the extract, transform, load (ETL) process the norm. Businesses would extract data from sources, transform and clean up the data, and then load it into a data warehouse or data lake.?
• But as AI technologies increasingly drive digital transformations, data pipelines must evolve to become non-linear and avoid moving data as much as possible to accommodate the weight of unstructured data and the iterative nature of AI.?
• Rahul Rastogi , CIO at SingleStore , explains via email that scaling data pipelines can add extra layers of complexity when it comes to ensuring data accuracy, consistency, privacy, governance, and security across various sources -- especially as more organizations become increasingly data hungry.?
• Rastogi says the data pipeline architecture of the future will feature a growing emphasis on stream processing and low-latency data platforms for real-time insights, enabled by tools like Kafka, Flink, and Kinesis.?

Unpacking the CrowdStrike Hearing

Story by Carrie Pallardy

Key Points:

• On Sept. 24, Adam Meyers , senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike , answered questions during a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee hearing regarding the global IT outage that caused widespread disruption, beginning July 19.??
• CrowdStrike previously released a root cause analysis of the incident, and Meyers answered questions regarding the cause during the hearing. A content configuration update triggered the historic global outage.
• The company sent new threat detection configurations to sensors running on 微软 Windows devices, but its Falcon sensor’s rules engine did not understand the configurations.??
• “Think about a chessboard, trying to move a chess piece to someplace where there’s no square. That’s effectively what happened inside the sensor,” Meyers explained during the hearing. “So, when it tried to process the rule, it was not able to do what the rule was asking it to do, which triggered the issue within the sensor.”??
• The CrowdStrike incident was eye-opening. One seemingly small issue could have massive repercussions for IT systems around the world. The Congressional subcommittee had questions about single points of failure and their vulnerability to simple error or malicious actors.??

ESG Strategies Continue to Advance

Story by Lisa Morgan, CeM, J.D.

Key Points:

• ESG and IT can be at odds, however, when the company sets targets, but things like AI computation and legacy tech are increasing the company’s carbon footprint.??
• “I focus on using data to track and report on our sustainability metrics, helping us see where we can improve. For example, I look at where we can fine-tune our IT infrastructure and tools, like cloud services and hardware, so we can reduce our energy consumption, carbon footprint, and resource usage further,” says Nicolas Bragard , CIO at finance automation company Esker.?
• Esker has certain principles, such as believing a company’s economic development must have a beneficial impact, not just on its entire business ecosystem, but on society and the environment.
• “We opt for specialized solutions tailored to specific use cases, rather than generic AI solutions that can generate far more CO2 emissions. This approach allows us to leverage the benefits of AI while minimizing our environmental impact, says Bragard.
• “It’s crucial for CIOs to be driving a focus on ESG efforts. The increasing emphasis on ESG disclosures reflects the concerns of key stakeholders, including large institutional investors and regulators,” says Tom Andresen Gosselin the ESG practice director at attestation and compliance services company Schellman.

Commentary of the Week

Story by Bjorn Andersson

Key Points:

• Our traditional linear economy refers to taking natural resources, making products and byproducts, and disposing of them as waste at the end of an often-short lifecycle. It’s an unsustainable global process that chews up Earth and spits out garbage and poison.
• The circular economy concept isn’t new. It embraces remanufacturing, refurbishment, repair, recycling, repurposing, and reuse to minimize waste and emissions dramatically. You’re extracting needed materials from existing products already in circulation --?much the way nature does.
• What is new is the capacity of AI, data analytics, and digital technologies to streamline circular economy complexities and help industries overcome previous implementation challenges at scale.??
• Larger businesses and industrial enterprises are poised to tap into the circular economy’s market potential and sustainable outcomes. Their path to reimagining “waste” will rely on new, data-driven approaches and circular forecast systems where shared data and predictive AI help us examine product lifecycles and glean actionable insights from newly understood patterns.

Podcast of the Week

Podcast and Story by Joao-Pierre Ruth

Key Points:

• Repercussions from the CrowdStrike outage might be sorted out in court, with hundreds of millions of dollars potentially at stake. Other, shorter-term outages included hiccups in cloud and software services at Salesforce , Atlassian , and AT&T .
• As the year stands at the threshold of its last three months, how does IT infrastructure hold up? Are systems and services as resilient as they should be?
• Given the volume of data and software that circulates around the world, is the global IT infrastructure mostly reliable? How bad could outages become in worst-case scenarios?
• This episode of DOS Won’t Hunt brought together Thomas Phelps , (upper right in video) CIO and senior vice-president of corporate strategy with Laserfiche ; Stephanie Aceves , (lower left) senior director of product management, incident response with Tanium ; Alex Hoff , (upper left) co-founder of Auvik ; and James W. Doggett , (lower middle) CISO of Semperis . They discussed typical culprits behind outages, the inevitability of outages, and what else organizations might do to boost their recovery plans -- just in case.

Latest Major Tech Layoff Announcements

Original Story by Jessica C. Davis, Updated by Brandon Taylor

Key Points:

• As COVID drove everyone online, tech companies hired like crazy. Now, we are hitting the COVID tech bust as tech giants shed jobs by the thousands.
• Updated September 28, 2024 with layoff announcements from Northvolt, Drata, Moov, and IBM.
• Check back regularly for updates to our IT job layoffs tracker.

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“Generative AI: From Bleeding Edge to Mainstream, How It's Shaping Enterprise IT”

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