Rogue Strawberry model's hacking attempt; CTO challenges converge, and more...
Ed Targett here, “freshly” back from Oracle CloudWorld.
A few takes on that here and here; with additional Intelligence Community cloud concerns captured below from an intriguing roadmap that adds federal context to Oracle's new-found love of hyperscaler partnerships.
My past two weeks have been punctuated by some really interesting one-to-one conversations with CTOs, most at the multinational scale across financial services and telecommunications; most recently in Vegas.
It’s striking how common themes the themes have been:
Sound familiar? (As ever, conversations with vendors and conversations with technology budget holders in non-tech verticals are VERY different.)?
Certainly in my conversations, the pendulum is swinging back towards "build it" over "buy it" and in-sourcing rather than out-sourcing talent, in a very meaningful way.
Look out for detailed interviews with Nomura's Dinesh Keswani, Vodafone's Pedro Sardo, and Elastic's Shay Banon in coming weeks – exclusively for subscribers of The Stack.
(Regular mailshots and newsletter come via subscribers to our website; link just above. This LinkedIn newsletter is an occasional beast...)
So, what else is new?
Well, OpenAI’s new “Strawberry” models are out in preview.
They use reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought reasoning to generate more analytical responses and in at least one hacking task, got pretty creative at rattling the cage. Do they represent a step-change in capability thought? Not that we can see...
Our new editor, the excellent Jasper Hamill (go and say hello on LinkedIn) has an interesting look at BT's work on the first "data centre to data centre" quantum-secure connection using rapidly evolving QKD technology.
Talking of portable data architectures, Alex Merced had some thoughts, apropos the recent incubation of Apache Polaris and the rise of Apache Iceberg...
Jasper had more on Microsoft's #EDR kernel deliberations...
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And I personally thought given their rarity, AWS's interesting post-mortem of a major US-EAST-1 wobble (that went a little overlooked following the Crowdstrike outage) deserved more attention, but perhaps I'm just a glutton for a good post-"event" summary...
All that and a whole shebang of other good stuff in The Stack, have an explore of the site.
On which note... we have a new one coming; we're inching closer!
We've never run adverts on this site (although we do offer occasional paid content partnerships, clearly marked as such – and greatly appreciate our partners) and I set up The Stack with a firm intention to never chase sugar-rush traffic or clicks.
The new design will reflect that vision with a single hero story at top that captures our desire to continue writing in more depth and with value-added. It will also be more navigable. As part of that site build we asked a few friends for testimonials.
They blew me away.
"I read The Stack to keep current, but what I especially value is a clear desire to keep the content 'agenda free'. ?It’s high quality journalism I can trust." Rob Francis, CTO, Booking.com:
"I find The Stack provides a discerning and nuanced?perspective to make sense of the shifting sands?in?technology and cyber security.” Shobie Ramakrishnan, CDTO, GSK:
Information digests are crucial for me to get my daily news fix without spending hours reading full-length versions of newspapers and magazines. The Stack is a fixed staple in my routine where I rely on Ed Targett and his team for relevant, insightful, and context-rich news from the technology field. Dr. Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer, NATO CIO
Many thanks indeed Rob, Shobie, Manfred – and to all of our loyal readers.
Spread the word, we love being a best-kept secret, but we're very happy for it to be whispered to a friend or two!
So much more good stuff to come from our growing team.
As ever, we also love to hear from readers, whether with tips, gripes, invitations, or just to shoot the breeze. Try me on [email protected]
Many thanks for reading,
Ed.