Beyond OpenAI: The rise of not-too-large language models

A flurry of recent artificial intelligence models this week illustrated what’s coming next in AI: smaller language models targeted at vertical industries and functions.

Each Nvidia and Microsoft debuted smaller large language models too. Also supporting the notion of more customized models — call them VLMs — OpenAI made its GPT-4o fine-tuning generally available. As much as LLMs have captured much of the eye, these smaller, more controlled models look appealing to enterprises concerned about data governance and privacy, not to say efficiency.

Indeed, Chinese startups are heading in the identical direction, partly to avoid wasting energy and partly to avoid the necessity for probably the most advanced Nvidia graphics processing units to which they don’t have access under export controls. That said, it looks like many Chinese corporations are having access to that high-end computing power through cloud providers equivalent to Amazon Web Services.

Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su doubled down this week on her quest to slice off a piece of Nvidia’s lucrative GPU market, because it acquired AI infrastructure provider ZT Systems.

Infrastructure observability firms are having a moment. Not too long after Cisco Systems closed its acquisition of Splunk, others proceed to reap the rewards, including Datadog turning in an upside quarter earlier this month. This past week, Grafana Labs raised a boatload at a $6 billion valuation.

Snowflake shares dropped almost 15% Thursday after a disappointing revenue outlook in addition to concerns about profitability. But everyone else had pretty positive earnings reports, including Palo Alto Networks, Workday, Synopsys, Zoom and Zuora.

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch sadly died at sea off Sicily with several others, celebrating just a pair months after winning his long-running HP court case. Oddly, co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain was hit by a automotive and died earlier this week.

Next week SiliconANGLE, theCUBE and theCUBE Research analysts shall be at VMware Explore Monday through Wednesday to suss out what’s happening with the virtualization and cloud pioneer under latest owner Broadcom. Also next week: earnings reports from more bellwethers equivalent to Nvidia, Salesforce, CrowdStrike, Dell, NetApp, Pure Storage, HP, MongoDB, HashiCorp and more.

SiliconANGLE and theCUBE Research analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante discuss this and other news in additional detail on this week’s theCUBE Pod, out now on YouTube. And don’t miss Vellante’s weekly deep dive, Breaking Evaluation, this weekend.

Here’s the massive news of the week from SiliconANGLE and beyond:

AI and data: Application-specific models multiply

Issues and policy

China finds a cloud workaround for high-end AI: Report: Chinese organizations use public cloud to access restricted AI chips

More attention on AI training data: 

An AI holdout: Procreate says it won’t ever use generative AI in its creative products

OpenAI agrees content licensing take care of Condé Nast to feed SearchGPT and ChatGPT

Money matters

Opkey reels in $47M to automate ERP change testing with AI

A key for agentic AI: AI payment processing startup Skyfire launches $8.5M in funding

BeyondMath raises $8M to rework engineering and design with AI trained on world’s knowledge of physics

Piramidal raises $6M to advance AI brainwave evaluation and improve diagnoses of neurological conditions

Agribusiness AI startup Ceres Imaging rebrands as Ceres AI after closing on late-stage funding

Recent models and services

Nvidia, Microsoft release latest small language models

Juniper Networks rolls out AI networking blueprint to speed up deployments

OpenAI makes fine-tuning for GPT-4o customization generally available

AI21 Labs’ updated hybrid SSM-Transformer model Jamba gets longest context window yet

Nvidia debuts StormCast generative AI model for forecasting mesoscale weather events

Waymo debuts sixth-generation Driver autonomous driving platform

Salesforce’s newest AI agents help to filter out sales prospects and train salespeople

Onehouse’s vector embeddings support goals to chop the associated fee of AI training

Google Cloud Run quickens on-demand AI inference with Nvidia’s L4 GPUs

Nvidia to present AI and data center performance innovations on the Hot Chips conference

Redis debuts latest data integration and AI features for its database

Hotshot debuts latest AI model for generating video clips

Recogni’s latest Pareto system optimizes AI compute with minimal accuracy loss

RingCentral debuts latest AI capabilities for its RingCX contact center solution

Dropbox acquires AI-powered calendar app Reclaim.ai

There’s more AI and big data news on SiliconANGLE

Across the enterprise: AMD puts more pressure on Nvidia

Money matters

AMD to amass hyperscale solutions provider ZT Systems in data center AI expansion bid

IT infrastructure monitoring startup Grafana Labs raises $270M at $6B valuation

Eppo raises $28M in funding for its A/B testing platform

Cryptography chip startup Fabric secures $33M in funding

Depot raises $4.1M to expand construct acceleration platform with latest capabilities

Earnings

Snowflake beats expectations but stock falls on fears of decelerating revenue growth

Palo Alto Networks shares rise following Q4 earnings beat and powerful 2025 outlook

Zoom impresses with second-quarter earnings beat and upbeat guidance

Chip design software firm Synopsys delivers record revenue as AI accelerates demand

Zuora exceeds second-quarter projections, raises fiscal 2025 revenue forecast

Workday’s stock flopped, then popped on confident long-term growth forecast

In other enterprise news

Environmentalists raise concerns over Virginia data centers as water consumption skyrockets

Rackspace expands OpenStack offerings with latest enterprise-ready managed cloud solution

There’s plenty more news on cloud, infrastructure and apps

Cyber beat: Iran targets political campaigns

Attack & response

US intelligence agencies confirm that Iran is targeting each Trump and Harris presidential campaigns

Disaster recovery in motion: Kaseya responds to CrowdStrike crisis

Toyota alleges stolen customer data published on hacking site got here from outside supplier

Mandiant uncovers critical privilege escalation vulnerability in Azure Kubernetes service

McDonald’s Instagram hacked to advertise cryptocurrency scam featuring Grimace

Services at oil giant Halliburton disrupted by suspected ransomware attack

Recent services

Google Cloud unveils latest convergence-focused safety features

Fortanix expands data security platform with latest file system encryption feature

More cybersecurity news here

Elsewhere in tech: The limitless regulatory dance

Apple updates iOS and iPadOS to enhance compliance with EU’s DMA law

UK antitrust watchdog closes Google, Apple probes to revise regulatory approach

Google inks controversial take care of California’s lawmakers to fund local news

US judge blocks FTC’s ban on noncompete clauses

Fintech startup Bolt reportedly raising $450M at $14B valuation Emphasis on “reportedly,” since one supposed investor apparently isn’t.

Story raises $80M for blockchain-based IP network to handle creative ownership within the AI era

A person is playing video games again after Neuralink’s second successful brain implant surgery

HTC opens up the metaverse with Viverse Create, a no-code virtual world-building platform

Wiliot brings generative AI to real-time supply chain analytics

And take a look at more news on emerging tech, blockchain and crypto and policy

Comings and goings, and passings

Sad news: Divers recuperate body of Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch from superyacht wreckage Coincidentally, co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain was hit by a automotive and died earlier this week.

Five9 plans 7% workforce layoff, affecting fewer than 200 people (per CRN)

Noam Shazeer, ex-CEO of Character.AI who joined Google this month, shall be Gemini co-technical lead and work with Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals (per The Information)

Stability AI’s latest chief technology officer is Hanno Basse, former CTO of Digital Domain.

Decentralized AI infrastructure startup Mira appointed former Uber exec Ninad Naik chief product officer.

What’s next

Events

Aug. 26-28: VMware Explore, Las Vegas: SiliconANGLE, theCUBE and theCUBE Research shall be onsite with all of the news, plus interviews and evaluation.

Earnings: One other busy week

Tuesday, Aug. 27: Box and SentinelOne

Wednesday, Aug. 28: Nvidia, HP, NetApp, Pure Storage, Salesforce, CrowdStrike and Okta

Thursday, Aug. 29: Dell, MongoDB, Marvell, Autodesk, Elastic and HashiCorp

Image: SiliconANGLE/Ideogram