Bard

for business? Google enters the chatbot battle

Google has thrown its hat into the AI chatbot ring with Bard, an artificial intelligence search tool which may have profound implications for enterprises.

Bard is an experimental conversational AI service powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications. LaMDA for short, the large language model (LLM) has long been in the making at Google HQ, but without the public access that has recently seen OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT take the internet by storm. After openly partnering and investing in OpenAI since 2019, Microsoft said it will be incorporating the viral tool into its Bing search engine.

Following the news of an almost $400m investment by Google Cloud in ChatGPT rival Anthropic Google has announced Bard is available to private testers in beta before a public rollout. Google plans to onboard individual developers, creators and enterprises to test out its Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow thereafter.

Theo Priestley, CEO and founder of AI analytics platform Metanomic, commented on LinkedIn that “[ERP companies] will all be scrambling to integrate either Bard (if Google allows it) or ChatGPT (as it’s already an open tool) to quickly offer enterprisegrade solutions that allow businesses to use the power of LLMs pointed directly at their own data.

“Will it be more cost effective [for companies] to develop and train their own LLM vs the immediate lead over the competition they’ll get paying the price elsewhere? Time will tell but it’s going to get bloody.”

Pentagon picks AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle in $9bn cloud contract

The Pentagon has announced that joint cloud contracts have been awarded to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft Oracle

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contracts, which total $9bn, will run until 2028 and look to enable the US Department of Defense (DoD) to leverage commercial cloud capabilities.

Cloud technology will be available across all security domains and classification levels, with global accessibility from headquarters to the tactical edge.

It follows the cancellation of the previous Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract in 2021. In an ongoing legal dispute, AWS and Oracle challenged the decision to make Microsoft the sole JEDI contract winner. In July 2020, Microsoft pulled out of the contract.

With the new JWCC contracts, the DoD will now have the opportunity to acquire resilient services including centralized management and distributed control, elastic computing, storage and network infrastructure, advanced data analytics, fortified security and tactical edge devices.

Sap And Red Hat Strengthen Partnership To Power Sap Software Workloads

SAP and Red Hat have expanded their partnership to significantly increase SAP’s use of and support for Red Hat Linux.

This strategic collaboration aims to enhance intelligent business operations, support cloud transformation across industries and drive holistic IT innovation.

SAP is migrating part of its internal IT landscape and the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio onto the standard foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which aims to meet SAP’s evolving business and IT demands. As part of its migration journey, SAP is boosting support for the RISE with SAP solution using Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its preferred operating system.

By adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SAP will gain greater flexibility to address modern and future technology requirements. Paired with the RISE with SAP solution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers enhanced performance capabilities and allows for easy cloud adoption and transformation for customers.

Over the next year, both companies will collaborate closely to strengthen support for RISE with SAP solution workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and accelerate SAP’s adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux more broadly. Additionally, customers can benefit from greater business agility with Red Hat’s scalable, flexible, hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Lalit Patil, CTO, SAP Enterprise Cloud Services, SAP SE, said: “Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a robust, open infrastructure to support SAP software deployments, providing a consistent foundation for hybrid cloud workloads. We look forward to building on our legacy of innovation together with Red Hat to empower our customers with greater flexibility and resilience across cloud environments.”

MICROSOFT PRUNES AS EVEN INDUSTRIAL METAVERSE ISN’T SAFE FROM INDUSTRY WOES

Microsoft has announced a fresh round of job cuts, culling its industrial metaverse unit, amid slowing growth and ongoing waves of macroeconomic uncertainty.

Staff working on HoloLens, Surface laptop and Xbox products, along with the 100 workers on the four-month-old industrial metaverse team - Project Bonsaiwill go, including its co-founders.

The pruning comes as part of CEO Satya Nadella’s plan to shed 10,000 workers, affecting just under five percent of the Microsoft workforce and totaling a $1.2bn hit to earnings. The VR company AltspaceVR, acquired by Microsoft in 2017, will also terminate operations.

Microsoft saw the worst quarterly growth in six years in its last quarter, affecting even cloud incomes, and Nadella hints at a fast and direct return on investment from artificial intelligence (AI), as Microsoft customers hope “to do more with less”.

ChatGPT and other AI tools will take focus, as the firm extends its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI.