Weekend Warp

It took an IT outage of Biblical proportions to take AI off the front pages this week.

For those living under a rock, or entirely devoted to the 苹果 environment, here is what happened: A global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released a new patch of its Falcon software, and a glitch in it disrupted airlines in Australia, US and India, affected the NHS in the UK, blanked TV screens, and hit millions of SMBs with the much-dreaded Blue Screen of Death or BSOD. Crowdstrike scrambled to build a patch, which will mean manually resetting most Windows servers and machines, as the world recovers from this and discovers how vulnerable it is in this connected world humans have created. This promises to be the biggest IT outage ever, a Y2K moment that happened 24 years after it was supposed to. It also exposes the fragility of our digital world, and the lack of redundancies which are supposed to be baked in. Crowdstrike is a cloud cybersecurity company, so its software works on the cloud where most of the world’s software resides today, rather than local in-premise; the whole shock will reopen the cloud vs. in-premise debate again. It was 微软 which was exclusively hit by this disruption, and LINUX and iOS machines escaped its wrath. In a delicious irony, Microsoft might actually gain from this – Crowdstrike is the second largest cloud security company in the world, the leader is…. Microsoft! 300 of the Fortune 500 companies had Crowdstrike, many of them might be rethinking about that…

Read more about this here

Another piece of news from the world of cybersecurity: 谷歌 owner Alphabet Inc. is in advanced discussions to buy fast-growing cybersecurity startup Wiz for a whopping $23 billion. Wiz seems to be a Crowdstrike competitor, making cybersecurity software for cloud computing. This would be Alphabet’s biggest-ever acquisition, and pit it directly against arch-nemesis Microsoft, and now the weakened Crowdstrike. Interesting time for security up ahead.

Read more here

Moving back to the familiar confines of Generative AI and, therefore, OpenAI : it announced the launch of GPT-4o mini, a new, smaller version of its latest GPT-4o AI language model that will replace GPT-3.5 Turbo in ChatGPT. It will be available today for free users and those with ChatGPT Plus or Team subscriptions and will come to ChatGPT Enterprise next week. GPT-4o mini has a knowledge cutoff of October 2023, and is relatively cheaper as an API product, costing 60 percent less than GPT-3.5 . At a meta level, what this heralds is the emergence of smaller language models which imply lesser costs, less parameters and training data, and consequently lesser power requirements and environmental impact.

Read about GPT 4o mini here

Image credits Anuj Magazine

The space is certainly heating up....... at warp speed.