Welcome to episode 290 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house this week – and a good thing too, since there’s a lot of news! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are all in the house to bring you news on DeepSeek, OpenVox, CloudWatch, and more.

• The cloud pod wonders if azure is still hung over from new years
• Stratoshark sends the Cloud pod to the stratosphere
• Cutting-Edge Chinese “Reasoning” Model Rivals OpenAI… and it’s FREE?!
• Wireshark turns 27, Cloud Pod Hosts feel old
• Operator: DeepSeek is here to kill OpenAI
• Time for a deepthink on buying all that Nvidia stock
• AWS Token Service finally goes cloud native
• The CloudPod wonders if OpenAI’s Operator can order its own $200 subscription

01:29 Introducing the GenAI Platform: Simplifying AI Development for All

• If you’re struggling to find that AI GPU capacity, Digital Ocean is pleased to announce their DigitalOcean GenAI Platform is now available to everyone.
• The platform aims to democratize AI development, empowering everyone – from solo developers to large teams – to leverage the transformative potential of generative AI.
• On the Gen AI platform you can:
  • Build Scalable AI Agents
  • Seamlessly integrate with workflows
  • Leverage guardrails
  • Optimize Efficiency.
• Some of the use cases they are highlighting are chatbots, e-commerce assistance, support automation, business insights, AI-Driven CRMs, Personalized Learning and interactive tools.

02:23 Jonathan – “Inference cost is really the big driver there. So once you once you build something that’s that’s done, but it’s nice to see somebody focusing on delivering it as a service rather than, you know, a $50 an hour compute for training models. This is right where they need to be.”

04:21 OpenAI: Introducing Operator

• We have thoughts about the name of this service…
• OpenAI is releasing the preview version of their agent that can use a web browser to perform tasks for you.
• The new version is available to OpenAI pro users.
• OpenAI says it’s currently a research preview, meaning it has limitations and will evolve based on your feedback.
• Operator can handle various browser tasks such as filling out forms, ordering groceries, and even creating memes.
• The ability to use the same interfaces and tools that humans interact with on a daily basis broadens the utility of AI, helping people save time on everyday tasks while opening up a new engagement opportunity for business
• Operator is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA). Combining GPT-4o’s vision capabilities with advanced reasoning through reinforcement learning, CUA is trained to in...

Welcome to episode 289 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matt are here this week to bring you a riveting podcast on EU regulations! Are you asleep yet? No? Ok great. We promise it will be a good show – despite the title.

• Stargate: We’re not saying its Aliens, but its $500 Billion
• AWS: Now with extra sessions
• EC2 Flex: Bigger, Badder and Probably still expensive
• SNS FIFO: So fast, it’ll give you whiplash
• Azure: Now with added Legalese (Thanks, EU)
• OpenAI’s Stargate: From Chatbots to Interdimensional Travel (maybe)
• GCP’s Biochar Initiative: Turning Waste into… Well, Less Waste (hopefully)
• AWS Console Multiple Sessions: So you can prove you dropped those databases from multiple accounts
• Amazon still adds new features to SNS and the cloud pod is impressed
• AWS tries to kill chrome profiles

01:47 Announcing The Stargate Project

• Open AI announced a joint investment of $500 billion dollars over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the US, with the intent to deploy $100B immediately.
• This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefits for the entire world.
• The initial equity funders in stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX.
• Softbank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with Softbank having financial responsibility, and OpenAI having operational responsibility.
• Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners.
• The buildout is currently underway starting in Texas, and they are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as they finalize definitive agreements.
• As part of Stargate, Oracle, Nvidia and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system. This builds on a deep collaboration between OpenAI and NVIDIA going back to 2016, and a newer partnership between OpenAI and Oracle.
• This also builds on the existing OpenAI partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI will continue to increase its consumption of Azure as OpenAI continues its work with Microsoft with this additional computer to train leading models and deliver great products and services.
• “All of us look forward to continuing to build and develop AI—and in particular AGI—for the benefit of all of humanity.” This quote TOTALLY didn’t terrify us…
• Our conversations back in December about OpenAI trying to figure out their ownership model makes a lot more sense now.

07:22 Justin – “…it’s interesting that SoftBank is investing so much money into it considering, you know, the trade issues with China and SoftBank, you know, being mostly Chinese owned and invested in. Yeah. It’s one of the things abo...

Welcome to episode 288 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts as we make our way through this week’s cloud and AI news, including back to Vertex AI, Project Digits, Notebook LM, and some major improvements to AI image generation.

• Digits… I’ll show you 5 digits…
• The only digit the AWS local zone in New York shows me is the middle one
• Keep one eye open near Mercedes with Agentic AI

01:59 Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits

• If you don’t want to hand over all your money to the cloud providers, you will be able to hand over $3,000 dollars to Nvidia… for a computer that is probably going to be obsolete in <12 months. That’s fun!
• The new personal AI supercomputer, called Project Digits, will launch in May.
• The heart of Digits is the new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which packs enough processing power to run sophisticated AI models, while being compact enough to fit on a desk and run from a standard power outlet.
• Digits can handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters, and looks very similar to a Mac Mini.
• “AI will be mainstream in every application for every industry. With Project Digits, the Grace Blackwell Superchip comes to millions of developers,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release. “Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher, and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI.”
• The Digits system comes with 128gb of unified coherent memory and up to 4tb of NVME storage. For even more demanding apps, two digit systems can be linked together to handle models with 405b parameters.
• The GB10 chip delivers up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, meaning it can perform 1 quadrillion AI calculations per second.
• Suppose you plunk down the money for Digits. In that case, you will also get access to Nvidia’s AI software library, including development kits, orchestration tools and pre-trained models available through the Nvidia NGC catalog.
• The system runs on a Linux-based NVidia NGC catalog, and supports popular frameworks like PyTorch, Python and Jupyter notebooks.

09:25 Jonathan – ““The Blackwell is pretty recent, it’s the one that had a lot of problems with yield. And I kind of suspect that they’re sort of packaging this up and selling some of the chips which didn’t pass all the tests for the commercial products. And so they’re enabling whatever cores they can in these things to sell to consumers… Having all the memories is really great for the big models. It’s not going to be particularly performant now. I think the spec I saw was like one teraflop at quite low precision – like fb4 precision – which is quite low, an...