It’s still frothy in AI, but memory chips are now the b…

You know AI is still pretty frothy when a company with no product or even publicly stated plans for one gets a billion dollars from the likes of Sequoia and maybe Nvidia, Alphabet and Microsoft. But that’s what Ineffable Intelligence just did. Fei-Fei Li also…

You know AI is still pretty frothy when a company with no product or even publicly stated plans for one gets a billion dollars from the likes of Sequoia and maybe Nvidia, Alphabet and Microsoft. But that’s what Ineffable Intelligence just did. Fei-Fei Li also just raised a billion dollars for her World Labs, though it’s much further along with its physical AI models for robots and other applications.

Meantime, OpenAI, in a class of its own, reportedly is finalizing a $100 billion raise at an $850 billion valuation. Perhaps it’s no wonder that some investors are backing off from AI trades a bit, at least for the likes of Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft whose stocks have been lifted by their AI opportunities. But they have an alternative to hedge their bets: Apple, which is more decoupled from the Nasdaq than anytime in the past 20 years — which sure doesn’t say much about Apple’s position in AI.

And where is all the AI investment money going? To Nvidia, of course, but also to makers of memory chips. John Furrier says memory chips are the new bottleneck for AI systems, but that also means an unprecedented “supercycle” for memory-chip makers, a massive and incredibly rapid switch from computer chips as the key driver of chip industry revenue. And that’s already raking in big bucks for Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix and others.

Anthropic keeps forging ahead, with a new version of its general-purpose computer-use Sonnet model and an enterprise AI deal with Infosys. But the Pentagon may bring the hammer down given Anthropic’s insistence that Claude doesn’t get used to create things like, say, Skynet. OpenAI snatched OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger out of the clutches of Meta, a big catch. But for its part, Meta remained resolute on the AI superintelligence push, pledging to buy buy millions of Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin graphics processing units and a similar number of Grace central processing units.

Another piece from John Furrier raises an interesting wrinkle about the contest between OpenAI and Anthropic: Will OpenAI’s bet on owning the open control plane for AI agents, which it calls Frontier, win, or will it be Anthropic’s vertical integration starting with the agent itself? Don’t expect an answer yet, but the question suggests a way to watch the competition for the next few years.

Don’t miss theCUBE Research’s annual predictions for this year, which generally revolve around the imperative for enterprises to get some returns on their huge AI investments. Palo Alto Networks kept pushing ahead on its platform push with the $400 million acquisition of Koi. Next week’s packed earnings schedule includes Nvidia, Salesforce, Dell, Workday, HP, CoreWeave and more — when we’ll hear more about that memory-chip crunch.

Vertical software, are we cooked? Fintool co-founder and CEO Nicholas Bustamante answers in his analysis: Some of us are indeed cooked, but not quite as soon as investors fear. Selling AI software isn’t as easy as it used to be (per the Wall Street Journal) Customers are taking longer to assess purchases. Accenture combats AI refuseniks by linking promotions to log-ins (per Financial Times) Um, but if you have to hammer people to use AI, how useful is it for them, really?

Nobody had to force us to use the internet, or even personal computers. Of course, AI is very useful, but it needs to be made a lot easier to use in an effective way for the rest of us. OpenAI hired OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger in push toward autonomous agents. OpenAI poached Instagram’s celebrity whisperer, Charles Porch, for newly created role as VP of global creative partnerships (per Vanity Fair).

There’s a new executive row at AI security platform Cyera, which appointed a new president: former dbt Labs President and COO Brandon Sweeney. It also added Shira Azran as chief legal officer and promoted Joseph Iantosca to CFO and Sharon Shaked to chief people officer. API and AI connectivity firm Kong named Bruce Felt, most recently with Domo, chief financial officer. Qualcomm hired 23-year AMD veteran Jason Banta as VP of global compute sales (per CRN).

The San Diego-based chip designer told CRN Friday that it appointed Jason Banta, a 23-year AMD veteran, as vice president of global compute sales. And so does security training firm KnowBe4, which hired former Trellix CFO Yuneeb Khan in the same job. Feb. 24-26: Vast Forward, Salt Lake City: TheCUBE will be onsite Feb. 25 with interviews and coverage. Wednesday, Feb. 25: Snowflake, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Salesforce, C3 AI, IonQ, Zoom, Synopsys, Circle Internet Thursday, Feb.

26: Dell, NetApp, Zscaler, CoreWeave, Elastic, Block, Autodesk, Expensify, Duolingo, Avepoint Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals.

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Summary

This report covers the latest developments in samsung. The information presented highlights key changes and updates that are relevant to those following this topic.

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