Weekend Warp

So, let us do what we have not done for the last two Weekend Warps – start with Sam Altman. Fifteen days without Altman making news is now the same as Musk keeping quite for a month – both surprising and improbable occurrences.

In an interview at Stanford, Altman lay down the gauntlet. “It does not matter if we burn $50bn a year, we are going to build AGI”, he said. He also talked about how ChatGPT was not a success, at best it was ‘mildly embarrassing’.

See this and more in this wonderful interaction with would-be Stanford entrepreneurs here

Let us move to something even more improbable now – 亚马逊 launching a GenAI product! "Today, we’re launching the general availability of Amazon Q, the world’s most capable GenAI-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ internal data—and that aims to remove much of the muck of repetitive and tedious coding and data tasks for developers and employees at large.", declared CEO Andy Jassy; and, predictably, the Amazon stock went up. Amazon seems to be focusing on the enterprise, leaving the consumer space to the OpenAI s and 谷歌 s of the world, and that is sound strategy. Read more about Q here.

Interestingly, a little bird (told me that Amazon requires cloud events to spend up to 80% of their time talking about generative AI!!

See the leaked memo news here

Another slumbering giant seems to be waking up. 苹果 hinted at some big GenAI announcements in two big events coming up soon. Apple is in an interesting place. As the post smartphone devices emerge to disrupt the iPhone, iOS and the App Store (read my article in ET on that here), Apple can seize the advantage to continue to be a behemoth in the world of new AI and LLM led devices. Or not, if they cede grounds to the various new startups mushrooming in this space, plus the rumored Jony Ive – Sam Altman tie up (link).

Read more about Apple’s announcements here

Bonus: The first commissioned video created entirely with OpenAI’s fabulous text-to-video generator, Sora, is here. It is amazing, watch it.

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