The AI funding race continues unabated, at the same time as challenges grow – especially for OpenAI

It was a little bit of a turbulent week, as investors continued pouring money into artificial intelligence firms akin to Glean at the same time as it’s not yet apparent when the AI money gusher will arrive — assuming it should.

Just Friday, Elon Musk threw in a haymaker, suing OpenAI for — get this — trying too hard to make a profit. The SEC joined in too.

Meantime, enterprise technology earnings reports got here in largely positive this week, as Dell Technologies and NetApp knocked it out of the park, while a number of exceptions akin to Snowflake, Elastic and Thoughtworks missed estimates and saw their shares plunge.

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio, was onsite at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona all week, interviewing the likes of Michael Dell, HPE CEO Antonio Neri and Broadcom Semiconductor Solutions Group President Charlie Kawwas, amongst others. MWC wasn’t nearly 5G because it has been recently, not least because there isn’t really a killer app for it, SiliconANGLE CEO John Furrier says. Relatively it’s all concerning the silicon. Take a look at the coverage for more on why.

You possibly can examine this and other news on theCUBE Pod, John Furrier’s and Dave Vellante’s weekly podcast, out now on YouTube from Barcelona. And don’t miss Dave Vellante’s weekly deep dive into technologies and trends, Breaking Evaluation, coming out this weekend.

Here’s a sampling of this week’s news:

Big bucks, latest challenges for AI

Tony Baer’s two-part dissection of generative AI’s challenges (mainly it’s crazy expensive) and its potential (hint: it’s not all about those huge models): 

Is that enormous sucking sound generative AI?

How will generative AI repay?

OpenAI fights back: OpenAI to court: Recent York Times’ lawsuit used evidence obtained through hacking

But then on Thursday, Elon Musk sued OpenAI for breach of contract, allegedly violating the corporate’s principles and becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft: Elon Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over alleged breach of contract

That got here just a few days after the Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly (via the Wall Street Journal) is looking into whether the corporate misled investors, based on internal communications from CEO Sam Altman.

Yet the large bucks carry on coming into AI:

AI-powered enterprise search startup Glean raises $200M+ at $2.2B valuation

Humanoid AI-driven robotics startup Figure raises $675M at $2.6B valuation

Ideogram raises $80M because it releases text-to-image model

AI app startup FlowGPT raises $10M in funding

Intenseye, which uses AI computer vision to boost workplace safety, raises $61M

Startup Slice, which uses generative AI to make sure equity compliance, raises $7M in seed funding

AI chip startup Groq acquires Definitive Intelligence to scale its cloud platform

Together with all the brand new models:

Now a Microsoft partner, Mistral AI challenges OpenAI with three latest LLMs

Author proclaims Palmyra-Vision, a multimodal LLM able to understanding image

SambaNova debuts ‘composition of experts’ AI model with 1T+ parameters

StarCoder2 AI code generator released with support for 619 programming languages

And latest products: 

Look out, Sora: Lightricks launches LTX Studio to advance realism in text-to-video generation

Salesforce launches Einstein Copilot AI assistant into beta

ServiceNow and Nvidia bring powerful generative AI tools to telecom providers

GitHub’s enterprise-grade Copilot tool is now generally available

Stack Overflow inks AI partnership with Google Cloud

Couchbase’s database gets support for vector search and retrieval-augmented generation

And… latest troubles:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls inaccurate Gemini responses ‘unacceptable,’ guarantees fix

Mozilla research reveals AI-generated content labeling falls short

Peace, not war: Tumblr and WordPress are gearing as much as sell their data to AI firms

The large news and evaluation from MWC

TheCUBE was onsite in Barcelona all week on the mobile industry’s biggest event. Here’s what our analysts learned, together with a very powerful news from the event on SiliconANGLE:

Telecom’s tipping point: Monetization, AI and the ability of partnership at MWC

AI networking and silicon synergy shape the longer term of telecom: theCUBE day one evaluation at MWC

Navigating the evolving landscape of telecommunications: theCUBE’s day 2 keynote evaluation from MWC

Analysts discuss Open RAN: Challenges, guarantees and AI in telecom

Analysts dissect Cisco’s challenges and its path toward AI networking

Collaboration at MWC: Industry analyst sees cloud and telco firms forming closer ties

The rise of AI, edge computing and the longer term of connectivity: Final insights from Mobile World Congress

A special take from Intellyx’s Jason Bloomberg: Beyond the excitement: IoT and AI innovation at Mobile World Congress

Michael Dell shares his vision of AI-powered connectivity and innovation at MWC

Antonio Neri on HPE’s blueprint for AI networking, edge-to-cloud and data insights

Juniper Networks’ CEO Rami Rahim weighs in on AI, edge opportunity for telcos and HPE acquisition

Nvidia’s lightweight RTX 500 and 1000 GPUs to power latest generation of AI-accelerated laptops

Intel unveils Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids-D Xeon processors to support ‘AI In every single place’

Intel’s latest Intel vPro platform to power the following generation of AI PCs

At MWC, AI and wireless vendors come together to form the AI-RAN Alliance

Qualcomm debuts latest wireless networking chips and AI model bundle

Broadcom/VMware targets telecom network modernization and security at the sting And evaluation from Zeus Kerravala: VMware, as a part of Broadcom, releases latest 5G, SD-WAN, SASE and edge compute solutions at MWC 2024

ServiceNow and Nvidia bring powerful generative AI tools to telecom providers

Google integrates generative AI features into Messages, Maps, Android Auto and more

Across the enterprise and cloud

Regulatory watch

EU launches investigations into Microsoft over security software practices, Mistral AI investment

Google is facing $2.3M lawsuit from dozens of European media firms over ad practices

SEC investigating whether OpenAI investors were misled (from the Wall Street Journal)

Earnings

Dell shares soar on strong earnings and growth forecasts

Snowflake’s stock tumbles as CEO Frank Slootman proclaims he’s stepping down

Salesforce reports earnings beat, shares hold regular after-hours

Okta shares surge after reporting strong earnings and revenue growth

HPE’s stock drops on big revenue decline, while NetApp heads upward

HP shares drop after falling short on revenue in first quarter

Pure Storage’s shift to AI and cloud subscriptions pays off with strong earnings beat

Nutanix comfortably beats forecasts despite uncertain macroeconomic backdrop

Zoom reports revenue and earning beats, shares rise in late trading

Workday squeezes past the Street’s expectations and acquires AI talent recruitment startup

Thoughtworks shares plunge 28%+ on fourth-quarter earnings miss

Zscaler shares dip despite outperforming earnings expectations

Autodesk’s fiscal 2024 ends on a high note, as earnings exceed analysts’ predictions

Elastic TK…

Splunk reported positive fourth-quarter results, but because it also said the deal to be acquired by Cisco is more likely to close late this quarter or early next, investors yawned.

Artificial intelligence play C3.ai climbs almost 13% on earnings report, outlook (from Investor’s Business Each day)

Duolingo’s stock soars greater than 20% after ‘record’ bookings, quarterly profit for company (from MarketWatch)

Zuora’s Q4 earnings results: Revenue according to expectations (from Yahoo Finance)

In other news

Broadcom to dump VMware’s distant access computing business to KKR in $3.8B deal

Intel launches standalone FPGA business and previews upcoming chips

Oracle’s autonomous database goes distributed and global

Cox Enterprises buys gov tech leader OpenGov for $1.8B

Submarine data cables in Red Sea reportedly damaged by Houthi Rebels

Case study: Geofencing helps construction firm avoid $2.5M in equipment theft

IPOs warming, slowly? Cloud storage service Egnyte hires banks for IPO, sources say (from Reuters)

MongoDB expands global availability of MongoDB Atlas to 6 additional cloud regions

Cyber beat

That didn’t take long: LockBit ransomware gang returns after being temporarily disrupted by law enforcement

Surge in high-risk open-source vulnerabilities present in business codebases

Researchers find security flaw in multiple smart doorbells

US launches ‘unprecedented’ investigation into Chinese connected cars, citing national security concerns

Biden issues executive order protecting Americans’ data from countries of concern 

Elsewhere around tech

That’s a giant crash: Apple reportedly scraps ‘Project Titan’ electric automobile project

US Supreme Court seems split over landmark social media laws

Comings and goings

Dbt Labs names former Rubrik Exec Austin Stefani chief revenue officer

What’s next

Enterprise earnings reports show down, but there might be a number of bellwethers next week:

Monday, March 4: GitLab

Tuesday, March 5: Box, CrowdStrike, Couchbase and HashiCorp

Thursday, March 7: Broadcom, Marvell Semi, MongoDB and DocuSign

Image: SiliconANGLE/Google Gemini