Artificial Intelligence News for the Week of December 13; Updates from Ayar Labs, Cloudera, IBM & More
Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King curated this list of notable artificial intelligence news for the week of December 13, 2024 – special 6th annual Insight Jam LIVE!: Strategies for AI Impact edition.
Keeping tabs on all the most relevant artificial intelligence news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last week in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy artificial intelligence news items.
For early access to all the expert insights published on Solutions Review, join Insight Jam, a community dedicated to enabling the human conversation on AI.
Artificial Intelligence News for the Week of December 13, 2024
Acceldata Adds AI Reconciliation to Data Observability Offering
Acceldata’s platform provides insights into data quality, pipeline performance and infrastructure efficiency to support more reliable and efficient data operations. Functions include data discovery, monitoring, processing optimization and quality management.
Anthropic Claude 3.5 is Now Live and in the Wild
Previously limited to developers accessing it via Anthropic’s API following its launch in October 2024, this smaller, faster model has garnered attention for its ability to outperform larger models on key benchmarks while maintaining a competitive price point.
NVIDIA-Backed Ayar Labs Raises $155 Million in Venture Funding
The company intends to use the funds to further advance its optical I/O technology, which is designed to address the growing challenges of data transfer in AI infrastructure. Ayar Labs claims that its optical I/O solution offers a faster alternative, improving data flow, reducing power consumption, and lowering operational costs for AI systems.
Cloudera Announces RAG Studio Preview
Dataiku Stories bridges the gap between static slide presentations, which are easy to create and share but often showcase outdated or untrusted data, and enterprise dashboards, which can be complex to build and maintain but access governed data. Now, with simple prompts, users of Dataiku Stories can discover and share powerful decision-making insights based on the latest, most trusted company information without sacrificing speed or accuracy – all within the Dataiku Universal AI Platform.
Crusoe Raises $600 Million in Series D Funding
Crusoe provides a reliable, cost-effective, and environmentally aligned solution for AI infrastructure by harnessing large-scale clean energy, building AI-optimized data centers, and empowering builders with a feature-rich development platform.
Dataiku Launches New GenAI-Powered Stories Service
Dataiku Stories bridges the gap between static slide presentations, which are easy to create and share but often showcase outdated or untrusted data, and enterprise dashboards, which can be complex to build and maintain but access governed data. Now, with simple prompts, users of Dataiku Stories can discover and share powerful decision-making insights based on the latest, most trusted company information without sacrificing speed or accuracy – all within the Dataiku Universal AI Platform.
EDB Enhances Postgres AI
The EDB Postgres AI platform’s hybrid infrastructure allows organizations to modernize data strategies, control costs, and meet the demands of traditional and AI-driven workloads alike. With simplified database deployment, management, observability, and automation, EDB provides a comprehensive solution purpose-built for transactional, analytical, and AI applications anywhere, any environment.
Globant and MIT Release New Software Development and GenAI Report
Based on survey research and in-depth executive interviews, the findings reveal that generative AI has rich potential to revolutionize software development, but that many enterprises are still in the early stages of realizing its full impact. While adoption is widespread and accelerating, there are significant untapped opportunities.
IBM Reveals New Breakthrough Research in Optics Tech
Researchers have pioneered a new process for co-packaged optics (CPO), the next generation of optics technology, to enable connectivity within data centers at the speed of light through optics to complement existing short reach electrical wires. By designing and assembling the first publicly announced successful polymer optical waveguide (PWG) to power this technology, IBM researchers have shown how CPO will redefine the way the computing industry transmits high-bandwidth data between chips, circuit boards, and servers.
ISG Says Firms Want Self-Service and AI with Their Analytics
The ISG Buyers Guides for Analytics and Data, produced by ISG Software Research (formerly Ventana Research), say AI and machine learning expand the power of analytics technology to classify, predict and suggest behaviors that help improve business operations.
KNIME Releases New AI Companion
Unlike AI tools that generate scripts, KNIME’s intuitive visual workflows help data workers immediately understand how AI contributed to their work. Not only does the visual workflow act as documentation of every step in a data manipulation or data analysis process, but K-AI also adds its own narrative text to document its work, so you can easily review it.
LambdaTest Secures $38 Million in Venture Funding
HyperExecute, LambdaTest’s AI Native unified test execution and orchestration cloud, enables teams to run tests up to 70 percent faster than any cloud grid by running tests intelligently across multiple environments, enabling 2.5x faster test resolution and 60% quicker error detection. The latest platform, KaneAI, can help reduce manual efforts in test script generation, reducing it by 40-70 percent.
LogicMonitor Says AI is ‘Transforming’ IT Operations
Conducted in partnership with industry research firm EMA, the report offers a deep dive into the adoption of AI in IT Operations (ITOps), gathering insights from over 500 IT professionals worldwide to uncover pivotal trends, challenges, and the innovations driving the future of IT.
NetApp Releases 2024 Data Complexity Report
Two-thirds of companies worldwide report that their data is either fully or mostly optimized for AI—meaning their data is accessible, accurate, and well-documented for AI-use cases. However, despite this progress, 2025 will still demand investment in AI and data management.
MinIO Releases Object Storage and AI Report
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the research is the ubiquity of object storage today. Respondents indicated that 70 percent of the enterprise’s data was in object storage today and it was expected to grow to 75 percent over the next two years. The reason for the growth was AI. “Support AI” was the most popular reason why IT leaders are adopting object storage at their organization. Performance and scalability rounded out the top three.
MLCommons Releases New v0.5 Benchmark
MLPerf Client represents a collaboration among technology leaders, including AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and top PC OEMs. These stakeholders have pooled resources and expertise to create a standardized benchmark, offering new insight into performance on key consumer AI workloads.
OpenAI Releases New AI Video Generator Called Sora
Sora is known as a text-to-video generator, a tool that can create AI video clips based on a user’s written prompts. An example on OpenAI’s website has the prompt of “a wide, serene shot of a family of woolly mammoths in an open desert”. Its video shows a group of three of the extinct creatures slowly walking through sand dunes.
Qlik Says Enterprises Are Scaling Back AI on Lack of Trust
A lack of AI skills, governance issues and insufficient resources are all hindering successful AI deployment, causing many projects to get stuck in the planning stages. Ready-made solutions are a preferred way for global businesses to start working with AI solutions, and see return on investment in the technology.
RapidCanvas Raises $16 Million Venture Capital for AI Agents
Peak XV led the Series A funding round, which included additional participation from Titanium Ventures and existing investors Accel and Valley Capital Partners. Since its founding in 2021, RapidCanvas has raised over $23.5 million.
Red Hat Announces Release of Enterprise Linux AI
RHEL AI 1.3 brings support for the latest advancements in the Granite large language model (LLM) family and incorporates open-source advancements for data preparation while still maintaining expanded choice for hybrid cloud deployments, including the underlying accelerated compute architecture.
SkySQL Raises Seed Funding for Database Conversational AI
SkySQL is now introducing a duo of AI products, including something it’s calling “semantic agents” that serve insights on operational data. So, SkySQL customers can effectively build and embed their own AI agents into their apps, allowing their users to ask natural language questions of their data stored in SkySQL.
Thoughtworks Partners with AWS on GenAI Adoption
This will help Thoughtworks’ clients in industries across automotive, energy, financial services, healthcare, and media and entertainment, harness and launch GenAI solutions to improve customer engagement and grow revenue.
Torq Extends Agentic AI
Torq Agentic AI takes a cutting-edge multi-agent approach, in that its agents autonomously analyze security incidents, and then assess what other agents are required to successfully achieve mitigation. Torq agents are capable of breaking down tasks and sequentially coordinating and assigning elements to other specialized agents.
Vapi Secures $20 Million in Series A Funding
This advancement, coupled with the accessibility of voice models on consumer mobile devices, has spurred growing interest among enterprises aiming to automate business-to-customer interactions. However, deploying and scaling voice agents can require months, if not years, of specialized engineering.
Expert Insights Section
Watch this space each week as our editors will share upcoming events, new thought leadership, and the best resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community where the human conversation around AI is happening. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.
Final Day of the 6th Annual Insight Jam LIVE!: Strategies for AI Impact, December 10-13
The 6th Annual Insight Jam LIVE! is the original celebration of enterprise tech and a 4-day virtual event dedicated to equipping builders, implementers, and experts with actionable strategies for maximizing AI’s impact across the enterprise.
Centered on the theme Strategies for AI Impact, the event features more than 25 Expert Keynotes and Roundtable panels with participation from over 100 executives and thought leaders.
Solutions Review Editors Release Annual Curation of AI Predictions by Network of Experts
As we enter 2025, artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize industries, driving innovation and reshaping how businesses operate. From foundational advancements in generative AI to cutting-edge applications in automation, decision-making, and customer experience, the AI landscape is evolving at an unprecedented pace.
December 19: Solutions Review is Set to Host Neudesic, Microsoft, Databricks & Solutions Review Thought Leader Wayne Eckerson for an Exclusive Roundtable on Scaling Your AI with an Intelligent Data Platform
With the next Expert Roundtable event, the team at Solutions Review has partnered with Neudesic, Microsoft, Databricks, and Eckerson Group to hear from experts at Databricks, Microsoft, and Neudesic as they share practical learnings and best practices to ensure successful AI outcomes.
NEW Episode of The Digital Analyst with Solutions Review Thought Leader John Santaferraro Featuring Eidolon AI Founders Ravi Ramachandran and Dave Brewster
They discuss the urgent need for frameworks to manage the coming proliferation of AI agents, the technical challenges of building agent architectures, and the importance of trust and governance in enterprise AI implementations. Tune in for insight on how AI agents will fundamentally transform business operations and why organizations need to start preparing for this shift now.
NEW by Solutions Review Thought Leader John Santaferraro: How to Spot an AI Imposter – Part 4
At Ferraro Consulting we have come up with three technology innovations that separate the leaders from all others in their use of AI for business intelligence: a business semantic layer, an embedded AI engine, and advanced human in the loop feedback.
For consideration in future artificial intelligence news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.
Tim King
Executive Editor
Tim is Solutions Review's Executive Editor and leads coverage on data management and analytics. A 2017 and 2018 Most Influential Business Journalist and 2021 "Who's Who" in Data Management, Tim is a recognized industry thought leader and changemaker. Story? Reach him via email at tking@solutionsreview dot com.
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