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During its AWS re:Invent event today, AWS announced several updates to Amazon SageMaker , which is a platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models.  It introduced new features that are designed to improve the model deployment experience, including the introduction of new classes in the SageMaker Python SDK: ModelBuilder and SchemaBuilder.  ModelBuilder, selects a compatible SageMaker container to deploy to and captures the needed dependencies. SchemaBuilder manages the serialization and deserialization tasks of inputs and outputs from the models.  RELATED CONTENT:  AWS re:Invent Day 1 news AWS re:Invent Day 2 news “You can use the tools to deploy the model in your local development environment to experiment with it, fix any runtime errors, and when ready, transition from local testing to deploy the model on SageMaker with a single line of code,” Antje Barth, principal developer advocate at AWS, wrote in a blog post .  SageMaker Studio was also updated

An update to PlanetScale called Insights Anomalies introduces smart query monitoring to detect slower-than-expected queries in databases. PlanetScale’s Insights Anomalies is designed to simplify the process of assessing a database’s health and troubleshooting issues, according to the company in a blog post . The primary goal is to offer a clear overview of the database’s status and to make the troubleshooting process easy. PlanetScale believes that it’s not only important to detect anomalies in a database but also to understand their root causes. Insights presents relevant metrics for each anomaly, including high-level query metrics such as rows read and written per second, utilization metrics for database resources (such as CPU and disk usage), and information on backups and deploy requests that might impact shared resources. Insights records and retains precise query counts for every query pattern in a database. This allows for a comparison between the execution rate of each quer

Amazon re:Invent continues today, and so does Amazon’s list of announcements. Here are some of the announcements the company made today at the event: Amazon Q AI assistant announced Amazon Q is a new generative AI-based assistant that is designed to help employees complete tasks related to their jobs. For example, it can help a developer build, deploy, and operate workloads, or help a call center employee create responses to say to customers.  “Amazon Q could detect a customer is contacting your rental car company to change their reservation. It would then generate a response you could send, detailing the company’s change policies and guide you through the step-by-step process of updating the reservation,” the company explained. It leverages a company’s information repositories, code bases, and enterprise systems to better understand a company’s specific needs and provide accurate information.  RELATED CONTENT: What Amazon announced at AWS re:Invent 2023 Day 1 Amazon Bedrock upd

Amazon re:Invent continues today, and a number of companies have made more announcements on Day 2 of the event. Here are a few highlights: New integrations between Cisco ThousandEyes and Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor This new integration will provide customers with even greater visibility into cloud deployments. They can use these insights to optimize their AWS instances and monitoring coverage, Cisco explained.  Additionally, Cisco also announced new business metrics in Cisco Cloud Observability, which improves business context in observability. Customers can now view multiple business metrics in a single transaction, easily identify business transactions in troubleshooting, access advanced KPI visualizations, and segment data by attribute values.  NVIDIA announces partnership with Amazon Together the companies will provide advanced infrastructure, software, and services to run generative AI applications on.  AWS will bring NVIDIA’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips to its clo

FusionAuth has announced that it has improved the scalability and performance of its platform, which allows developers to incorporate authentication into their applications. According to the company, the complexity of modern authentication methods can be a challenge for developers to deal with, and while there are many identity tools that can provide them with basic capabilities that can be worked into their applications, those options tend to have less than ideal performance and can’t scale to large customer bases.  The latest improvements to FusionAuth’s identity platform aim to deal with that issue and provide developers with a solution that is both easy to use and scalable.  Specifically, the latest update improves performance for customer bases of one million users or more.  The user and entity search APIs now contain a new value that can be used to return the entire available result set.  In addition, the latest update adds support for signing webhook events, which helps de

Microsoft released SharePoint Embedded into public preview to provide a new method for constructing custom content applications for enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs).  This feature allows the development of headless, API-only content apps that can integrate various management functionalities such as collaboration, security, and compliance into any application. These apps store content within an enterprise’s existing Microsoft 365 tenant. Enterprises can utilize SharePoint Embedded to create line-of-business apps, offering a unified experience for both users and system administrators managing these apps. Similarly, ISVs can employ this technology to include Microsoft 365 content management capabilities in every enterprise app they develop. With SharePoint Embedded, documents are managed within the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant, providing a reliable and consistent content management system with global security and compliance features. SharePoint Embedded is a versa

AWS re:Invent kicked off today, and Amazon has already made a number of announcements, including product updates, performance improvements, and better integrations among services. Here are some highlights from the event so far:  Cost Optimization Hub provides recommendations for cost saving This is a new section in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. It provides recommendations for how customers can optimize their billing and allows them to query how much will be saved by implementing each action. Currently the tool provides six types of cost optimization actions: stopping idle resources, rightsizing, upgrading to a later-generation product, Graviton migration, saving plans, and reserved instances.  RELATED CONTENT: News from third-party providers out of AWS re:Invent Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client provides easy-to-manage, affordable virtual desktops The Thin Client devices are pre configured devices that can run Amazon WorkSpaces that are shipped directly to an end user

Orca 2 was released by Microsoft to explore the capabilities of smaller language models (LMs) with around 10 billion parameters or less.  The model demonstrates that improved training signals and methods can enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller LMs to make them more on par with larger models.  Compared to similar-sized models, including the original Orca, Orca 2 significantly outperforms them and achieves performance levels similar to or better than models 5-10 times larger, according to Microsoft in a blog post .  It is available in two sizes (7 billion and 13 billion parameters), both fine-tuned on tailored, high-quality synthetic data derived from LLAMA 2 base models. The Orca 2 weights are made publicly accessible to encourage further research on the development, evaluation, and alignment of smaller LMs, Microsoft explained. The training data was generated to teach Orca 2 various reasoning techniques, such as step-by-step processing, recall then generate, recall-reason-g

In the fast-paced world of machine learning, innovation requires utilizing data. However the reality for many companies is that data access and environmental controls which are vital to security can also add inefficiencies to the model development and testing life cycle.  To overcome this challenge — and help others with it as well — Capital One is open-sourcing a new project called Synthetic Data. “With this tool, data sharing can be done safely and quickly allowing for faster hypothesis testing and iteration of ideas,” said Taylor Turner, lead machine learning engineer and co-developer of Synthetic Data. Synthetic Data generates artificial data that can be used in place of “real” data. It often contains the same schema and statistical properties as the original data, but doesn’t include personally identifiable information. It’s most useful in situations where complex, nonlinear datasets are needed which is often the case in deep learning models. RELATED CONTENT: Capital One ope

LambdaTest has today emerged as a popular name especially in the field of cross-browser testing, helping businesses and developers to ensure the functionality and compatibility of their web applications over a wide variety of devices and browsers. With the quick evolution of web technologies and the diverse landscape of devices and browsers, cross-browsing testing today has become an indispensable feature of web development. LambdaTest mainly addresses this challenge by offering a strong and user-friendly platform that enables developers to test their web applications and websites on real browsers and operating systems, allowing them to deliver a smooth user experience to their audience. What is LambdaTest? The dynamic digital age necessitates high-performance and innovative web tools. In this massive world of website testing and software development, LambdaTest holds a desirable reputation as a cloud-based, cross-browser testing software. LambdaTest is one of the most intuitive

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have announced their return to OpenAI. Last Friday, the company’s board had unexpectedly fired Altman, and co-founder and president Brockman resigned upon learning the news. The two had been announced to be forming a new team at Microsoft, a company that has heavily invested in OpenAI.  “i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. when i decided to join msft on sun evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft,” Altman wrote on X .  RELATED CONTENT: OpenAI board of directors removes Sam Altman from CEO role (11/17)   Sam Altman, Greg Brockman join new AI research team at Microsoft; OpenAI names another interim CEO; OpenAI staff sign letter calling for board to resign (11/20) Industry responds to OpenAI’s leade

Canonical has announced that its chiselled Ubuntu containers are now generally available. These are ultra-small OCI images that just deliver an application and its runtime dependencies, leaving out things like operating system-level packages, utilities, or libraries.  According to Canoncial, not including unnecessary components in the final image reduces bloat, increases efficiency, and reduces attack surfaces.  Chiselled Ubuntu containers utilize a package manager called Chisel, which is based on the idea of package slices. Slices are subsets of Debian packages that contain their own content and dependencies. “In the end, it’s like having a slice of Ubuntu – get just what you need. You can have your cake and eat it too,” the Chisel documentation states.  Key benefits of chiselled Ubuntu containers include compatibility throughout the developer experience, fewer dependency issues, a CLI that allows customers to build or extend their containers, and simpler image rebuilds.  “Wi

Neo4j entered into a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with AWS in a collaboration that aims to enhance generative AI outcomes by combining knowledge graphs and native vector search.  The goal is to reduce generative AI hallucinations, making results more accurate, transparent, and explainable. This partnership addresses a common challenge for developers working with LLMs, providing a solution for establishing long-term memory in LLMs grounded in specific enterprise data and domains. “Neo4j has been an AWS Partner since 2013 – with this latest collaboration representing an essential union of graph technology and cloud computing excellence in a new era of AI,” said Sudhir Hasbe, the chief product officer at Neo4j. “Together, we empower enterprises seeking to leverage generative AI to better innovate, provide the best outcome for their customers, and unlock the true power of their connected data at unprecedented speed.” Neo4j has made its fully managed graph database

OpenAI has caused quite the stir over the weekend. On Friday , the board of directors fired CEO Sam Altman, leading to a cascade of events , including OpenAI trying to rehire him, co-founder and president Greg Brockman also resigning, Altman and Brockman joining Microsoft to lead up a new AI research team there, and over 500 of OpenAI’s 770 employees signing an open letter threatening to quit unless Altman is reinstated and the board resigns. In addition, the company also hired a new interim CEO (Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch) to replace the interim CEO (Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI) it appointed on Friday.  “From what we know as of Monday morning, the changes to OpenAI’s leadership and potential changes to their organizational structure and talent pool could have significant long-term effects on the company, but the situation is currently too dynamic to say what those effects will be or what the broader consequences for the market are,” said Rowan Curran, senior analyst at Forr

The OpenAI board of directors made headlines on Friday when it suddenly removed Sam Altman, the CEO of the company, from his position. Over the weekend, there were several events that happened following the announcements.  Board tries to get Altman back immediately Following the announcement of his removal, the OpenAI board very quickly started trying to get Altman to return to his position. The Verge reported that the two parties were in discussions over the weekend, and that Altman was “‘ambivalent’ about coming back and would want significant governance changes.” It also reported that when Altman was fired, Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of OpenAI, resigned along with several senior researchers. On Friday when the news broke OpenAI had initially said Brockman would only step down from his position as chairman of the board and still stay in his position within the company, but has since resigned completely.  The Verge said that it had been reported that Brockma

Microsoft announced that it is open-sourcing Terminal Chat and invites developers from the open-source community to engage with and contribute to the development of AI within a terminal application. This move aligns with the team’s desire to let users and developers shape the future of AI in the Windows Terminal, fostering a collaborative environment for innovation, according to the company in a blog post .  Terminal Chat, currently available in Windows Terminal Canary, enables users to engage in conversations with an AI service directly within the terminal. This feature empowers users to receive intelligent suggestions, such as looking up commands or understanding error messages, all while maintaining the context of their terminal session. The Terminal Chat feature in Windows Terminal currently relies on users providing their own Azure OpenAI Service endpoint and key, as it does not come with its own large-language model. Users interested in using Terminal Chat can find the code i

OpenAI’s board of directors has just announced that CEO Sam Altman will be leaving the company after the board voted that it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” In a statement published by OpenAI, the company said that the board felt that Altman was not consistent in his communications, which the board said was “hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Mira Murati, who was serving as the company’s chief technology, will be stepping in as the interim CEO. This transition is effective immediately, according to the company. The Verge also reported that OpenAI employees found this news out at the same time of the public. “OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity,” the company wrote in a statement . “The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same

As we venture deeper into the realm of machine learning and Generative AI (GenAI), the emphasis on data quality becomes paramount. John Jeske, CTO for the Advanced Technology Innovation Group at KMS Technology, delves into data governance methodologies such as data lineage tracing and federated learning to ensure top-tier model performance. “Data quality is the linchpin for model sustainability and stakeholder trust. In the modeling process, data quality makes long-term maintenance easier and it puts you in a position of building user confidence and confidence in the stakeholder community. The impact of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is exacerbated in complex models, including large-scale language and generative algorithms,” says Jeske.  The Problem of GenAI Bias and Data Representativeness Bad data quality inevitably culminates in skewed GenAI models, regardless of the model you choose for your use case. The pitfalls often arise from training data that misrepresents the organization’s

Yesterday, to kick off Microsoft Ignite , Microsoft announced over 100 new features and products designed to help companies on their AI journeys. Earlier this year, the company announced Copilot for Microsoft 365, and at Ignite the company announced some results of a survey it did on use of the tool. Seventy percent of respondents said Copilot helped them improve productivity; 64% say it helps save time working on emails, 87% say it is helpful with creating a first draft of something, and 75% say it’s helpful in finding information in files.  “What everyone wants to know now is: Will Copilot really change work, and how? Our research, using a combination of surveys and experiments, shows the productivity gains are real,” Frank X. Shaw, chief communications officer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .  Copilot updates across Microsoft’s portfolio  To make people even more productive, Microsoft has announced several enhancements to Copilot.  Copilot for Microsoft 365 adds features l

The Android development team is making several changes aimed at supporting Android developers and their growth.  It is adding new capabilities around creating and managing Google Play listings, including the ability to save listings as drafts, schedule listings to publish at a specific time, and test listings with a portion of your audience.  This follows changes from earlier this year, such as the ability to create custom store listings for different audiences and new metrics and insights related to deep links .  The team is also adding several updates to price experiments, which is a feature that allows developers to test different price points and optimize prices for local purchasing power. Starting next month developers will be able to save price experiments as drafts, remove variants from experiments if performance isn’t good, see warning notifications for price configuration issues, and apply the “winning” price to all products.  Developers can also now more efficiently

IBM has announced the upcoming general availability of watsonx.governance in early December.  This tool aims to address challenges associated with generative AI, which is powered by large language models (LLM) or foundation models. While such AI models offer various business use cases, they also bring risks and complexities, such as the use of unverified training data and the generation of outputs that lack explainability, IBM explained.  Watsonx.governance is designed to help organizations manage these risks, enhance transparency, and prepare for compliance with future regulations focused on AI. “Company boards and CEOs are looking to reap the rewards from today’s more powerful AI models, but the risks due to a lack of transparency and inability to govern these models have been holding them back,” said Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D, senior vice president of product management and growth at IBM Software. “Watsonx.governance is a one-stop-shop for businesses that are struggling to deploy and ma

The past few years have seen intense interest in observability tools, which collect data about the performance of systems and applications to help companies identify and address performance issues and outages. The category seems to be nearing the top of its hype cycle, as seen in Cisco’s recent $28 billion cash offer to acquire Splunk. The concept of observability is a valuable one, but the way the term has been used is misleading and leaves some teams worse off because of limitations in what observability tools actually provide. Enterprises need to rethink what observability means and regard it as a practice rather than a catch-all product category that can serve every team member’s needs equally.  There are several teams that can benefit from observability, and they each have needs specific to their roles and responsibilities. For example, key constituents include: SRE and infrastructure specialists Data engineers Developers Security specialists What enterprises really nee