AMD strikes back; Bret Taylor's new voice

Welcome to Runtime! Today: AMD takes on both Nvidia and Intel, Sierra unveils its first voice AI agent for contact centers, and the quote of the week.

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Ship it

AMD's data-center double: Days after Blackwell GPUs started trickling out to Nvidia's best friends, AMD unveiled its strongest attempt yet at denting its dominance of the AI chip market with the Instinct MI325X. AMD CEO Lisa Su touted its performance on AI inference and cost-effectiveness compared to the Blackwell H200, and it will start shipping in the fourth quarter.

AMD also announced the general availability of the latest version of its Epyc server CPUs, which are shipping to cloud providers and through most major server vendors. "For AMD, its performance and price advantages with the just-announced “Turin” Zen 5 and Zen 5c mean that AMD will continue to gain market share despite what Intel has been able to do to try to catch up in X86 server CPUs," wrote The Next Platform.

Your call is important: Sierra, the AI startup founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Googler Clay Bavor, introduced a voice AI agent on Wednesday designed to handle customer-service requests in contact centers. The new voice agents "are aware of sentiment and tone shifts, and they can adjust their approaches accordingly in real-time — including escalating to your customer service team if needed," the company said in a blog post.

It's no secret that enterprise software companies are pushing heavily to make AI agents the product that justifies the generative AI hype, and contact centers are considered the "low-hanging fruit" among companies working on agents, as Scott Stephenson of Deepgram told me last week. It's a little funny, however, that Sierra and Salesforce are working on basically the same product after Taylor's abrupt departure in December 2022.

Big agent energy: Not to be left behind in the agent race, SAP announced that its Joule AI Copilot will support "multiple autonomous AI agents that will combine their expertise across the business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows," SAP's Muhammad Alam said, according to CIO. The company demonstrated how an agent could handle a dispute over an invoice or automate bill processing, and promised those capabilities would start coming to SAP in the fourth quarter.

SAP also improved its data lake strategy by "expanding the data fabric architecture of Datasphere with an integrated object store," VentureBeat reported. SAP's Hana is still one of the most widely used databases in enterprise tech, but customers increasingly want more flexibility around how they store and manage their data.

Deno 2.0: Ryan Dahl created Node.js more than a decade ago as an easier way to build JavaScript applications, and although the project became widely adopted it's starting to look a little outdated. Dahl co-founded Deno in 2018 to modernize development tools for JavaScript and TypeScript developers, and this week the company released Deno 2.0.

The new version is fully backward compatible with Node.js, which gives developers a roadmap to move their old Node.js applications to something much faster like Deno. A rival JavaScript runtime (!) called Bun that was backward-compatible with Node.js at launch has attracted significant buzz over the last year, but most JavaScript developers are still using Node.

Data apps for data gaps: Databricks has spent much of the current decade trying to hone its chops in the enterprise market after rising to prominence as the preferred data tool of data scientists. This week it introduced a custom data app builder called Databricks Apps "that allows users to create secure, tailored, enterprise-specific apps in just minutes" on AWS and Azure, according to InfoWorld.

Once a company reaches a certain size, it can be hard to find off-the-shelf data apps that do exactly what its data wranglers need to solve bespoke business problems. Databricks Apps was designed to be accessible to anyone who knows Python — one of the most common programming languages in the data world — and it is serverless, which means customers won't have to provision and manage the cloud infrastructure resources it needs to run.

Stat of the week

The Log4j vulnerability was a seismic event in cybersecurity history, requiring an all-hands-on-deck approach to fix a flaw in an open-source project relied upon by countless companies. But three years later, despite all the notoriety that surrounded that incident, 13% of all Log4j installations are still running the vulnerable version and the number of malicious packages floating around open-source communities is up 156% compared to last year, according to new research from Sonatype.

Quote of the week

“Imagine Company A and Company B are working together to negotiate a contract and they send their lawyers’ digital twins to come up with a preliminary draft [in] 20 to 30 minutes. And afterward the two CEOs look at the draft without any problem. That’s the future of work.” — Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, outlining a scenario that can't possibly go wrong in an interview with Fortune.

The Runtime roundup

Nvidia has sold out of Blackwell capacity for the next 12 months, according to Barron's, which could be a big boost for Intel and AMD's chances of eroding its lead in AI chips.

CoreWeave landed a $650 million revolving credit facility, according to Axios, which should give it some more room to acquire those Blackwell chips when they arrive.

Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!