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: why the decades-old bargain that governed cloud security is showing its age, OpenAI thinks smaller is better, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: why the decades-old bargain that governed cloud security is showing its age, OpenAI thinks smaller is better, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
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Cloud computing's fundamental approach to securityl seemed like a great deal when it was first proposed to companies struggling to protect their self-managed infrastructure. The bargain was simple: we take care of the hard stuff, and all you have to do is control access to your account.
But the shared-responsibility model is groaning under the weight of the modern security environment, with its sophisticated threat actors, scarily good phishing scams, and automated attacks. Snowflake's ongoing nightmare should be a wake-up call for any infrastructure or SaaS provider that they need to do more to protect their customers, because the old model is no longer working.
Here's how Microsoft defines the shared-responsibility model, which is one of the better summaries of how cloud computing security has traditionally worked across its three major pillars: infrastructure services, platform services, and software services.
Security experts have been sounding the alarm about that last statement for some time. While Snowflake did nothing wrong under the shared responsibility model, which holds that customers are responsible for properly securing access to their accounts, a growing number of people believe that cloud providers need to do more to protect their customers.
But taking on more responsibility for account security will force enterprise tech vendors to accept more friction in the user experience of their products. That could be a tough sell for vendors that have made onboarding and ease-of-use a big part of their product strategy.
Security experts are hopeful that vendors can turn security into a competitive advantage, forcing everyone to follow suit. Google Cloud is trying to rebrand the shared responsibility model as "shared fate," and is reportedly willing to spend $23 billion on Wiz to double down on that strategy.
One clear trend emerging from the maturing generative AI boom is that while the massive models might be powerful, they are extremely expensive to run. OpenAI released a new, smaller version of its GPT-4o model Thursday that it said would be "an order of magnitude more affordable than previous frontier models."
GPT-4o mini will also replace GPT 3.5 Turbo as OpenAI's cheapest option, although it doesn't yet support video and audio use cases. “For every corner of the world to be empowered by AI, we need to make the models much more affordable,” OpenAI’s Olivier Godement told TechCrunch.
Enterprise customers won't be able to get their hands on the new model until next week, but individual customers can start playing with it today. Believe it or not, OpenAI compared the performance of the new model favorably to other small models currently available based on benchmark results, as we await the reckoning that AI benchmark results are as problematic as processor benchmarking results were decades ago.
Portland's own Lisa Spelman is the new CEO of Cornelis Networks, the networking chip startup spun off from Intel, after 18 years in the chip maker's data-center group.
Kim Baslie is the new CIO of Kyndryl, after previously serving as vice president of IT transformation and strategy at the IT consulting company spun off from IBM in 2021.
Anirban Sengupta is the new CTO at Aviatrix, joining the cloud networking company after running Google Cloud's Anthos and GKE Enterprise products.
Dan Priest is the new chief AI officer at PwC, after serving in various technology leadership roles at the consulting company over the last 11 years.
GitLab is courting buyers, according to Reuters, and seeing interest from Datadog as it tries to ride GitHub's coattails.
Reuters also reported that Smartsheet is fielding takeover offers from private equity firms as the SaaS consolidation spree continues.
Microsoft convinced France's OVHCloud to drop an antitrust complaint, tying off another loose end in its battle with European regulators.
OpenAI is thinking about making its own AI server chip, according to The Information, hiring designers from Google Cloud's TPU team and consulting with Broadcom about working together.
Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!