Anthropic enters the enterprise chat
Today: Anthropic throws its hat in the enterprise AI ring, AT&T has had it with Broadcom's changes to VMware licensing, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Today: how Cloudflare thinks it can outmaneuver the big clouds on the edge, Progress Software reveals another major vulnerability in a file-transfer product, and the quote of the week.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: how Cloudflare thinks it can outmaneuver the big clouds on the edge, Progress Software reveals another major vulnerability in a file-transfer product, and the quote of the week.
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In between baffling attempts to defend some of the worst people on the planet, Cloudflare has been building a very interesting approach to cloud computing that looks a little different than the traditional strategy followed by the Big Three. It updated that strategy for the AI boom this week during the observation of its 13th birthday.
"Our job isn't to be the final destination for your data, but to help it move and flow," Cloudflare co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn wrote in their annual birthday letter to shareholders and customers. Rather than the hub-and-spoke centralized cloud computing model built around massive data-center complexes in dedicated regions, Cloudflare built and maintains computing and networking infrastructure that connects relatively small data centers with modest amounts of computing power across a larger number of locations around the world.
Cloudflare is making a bet that inference will be the most strategic enterprise AI workload in the long run, a sentiment echoed by several AWS execs in Seattle earlier this month.
The company rolled out several new services this week in hopes of capitalizing on this trend.
It also introduced a new vector database, which is fast becoming an important part of any AI application.
Two years ago Prince told me that Cloudflare was "aiming to be the fourth major public cloud." While it hasn't made huge inroads against the major cloud providers when it comes to traditional applications, all bets are off as enterprise tech tries to figure out its AI strategy.
As the fallout from the MOVEit vulnerability continues to grow, Progress Software disclosed Thursday that it had identified several new vulnerabilities in a different file-transfer product made by the company.
Eight vulnerabilities — two of them critical — were recently identified in the WS_FTP product by third-party security researchers and Progress Software itself, according to The Record. Thankfully, in this case, Progress said it did not believe that the vulnerability has been exploited, and patches are available for customers to prevent that from happening.
These types of file-transfer products, which allow sensitive corporate information and personal data to move around corporate networks constantly, are clearly a ripe target for the criminal hacking community. It's much harder for enterprise security teams to defend against attacks exploiting flaws in their software stack than ones launched when employees click on a funny-looking link in that weird email.
"I think that the worry and sort of the fear that I think from a practitioner level that you see is, maybe I don't mind if myself or my team are looking at me individually. But I know that the minute those (metrics) end up in a dashboard, or in a system, they're eventually going to get rolled up and now an executive is going to make a choice.
And they're just going to draw a line without any context for understanding and there are going to be people above and below that line. And that has some potentially really dire consequences for everyone involved, including that executive." — Google's Nathen Harvey, on why individual software developer productivity metrics designed by shady consulting firms can do more harm than good.
In the weeks before Anthropic signed a new investment and cloud computing deal with AWS, Google Cloud was having trouble maintaining an Nvidia H100 cluster used by the LLM startup, according to Big Technology.
Meta slipped out a new version of its Llama 2 LLM this week that it claims can outperform similar LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!