MongoDB hits 8.0; Microsoft's open-source data project
Today on Product Saturday: MongoDB focuses on performance and resilience, Microsoft tackles event handling with a new open-source project, and the quote of the week.
Today: After a parade of executive departures, OpenAI is becoming a very different company, allegations of price-fixing hit SAP, and the latest enterprise moves.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: After a parade of executive departures, OpenAI is becoming a very different company, allegations of price-fixing hit SAP, and the latest enterprise moves.
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As we approach the two-year anniversary of the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which kicked off the enterprise generative AI tech boom, the organization that produced that breakthrough bears little resemblance to its late-2024 counterpart. And as companies like Google and Meta continue to push the boundaries of large-language models, Microsoft's close partnership with OpenAI — once thought of as a key competitive advantage — is entering a very different phase.
Enterprise tech was stunned Wednesday by the "abrupt" (in CEO Sam Altman's words) departure of OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, who led the company's product and engineering teams during the development of ChatGPT and the subsequent GPT models that kicked off an investment frenzy. Hours later, OpenAI announced that Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, who led "the post-research training team at OpenAI" according to his LinkedIn, would also be leaving.
Meanwhile, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times all reported the same day that OpenAI is finalizing the process of turning itself into a for-profit company and moving away from the complicated organizational structure that governed its early years.
So where does OpenAI go from here? Rather than pursuing some vision of "shared prosperity" that Altman described in a gauzy essay just days ago, it increasingly looks like a company that wants the spoils of the AI boom for itself. And it's going to have to reach that goal without some of the core people that convinced Microsoft to pour billions into the company, people who didn't necessarily sign up to become the next big tech vendor.
Enterprise tech companies have a love/hate relationship with the federal government, which is an enormous potential customer but uses an enormously frustrating procurement process. They often turn to government-focused resellers like Carahsoft to get a piece of that pie, but according to the Department of Justice, SAP might have gone too far.
Court records indicate the DOJ has been investigating SAP on the suspicion that it "illegally conspired with Carahsoft to fix prices on sales to the US military and other parts of the government," according to Bloomberg. This is not a criminal investigation at the moment, and both companies are cooperating with the government, but it's not a great look.
"The long-running civil probe is focused on the companies possibly rigging the market for the more than $2 billion worth of SAP technology that the US government has purchased since 2014," Bloomberg reported. ServiceNow and Okta also reportedly used Carahsoft when working with the government, but it's not clear if they are also involved in the investigation.
Ketan Karkhanis is the new CEO of ThoughtSpot, joining the company after serving as executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce's flagship Sales Cloud product for the last two years.
Chris Stori is the new CEO of Bright Machines, following several years in various leadership roles at Cisco.
Baran Erkel is the new chief strategy officer at UserTesting, with plans to focus on acquisitions and strategic partnerships following seven years in a similar role at Nintex.
Vivek Raghunathan is the new senior vice president of engineering at Snowflake, according to a report by The Information confirmed by the company.
Google escalated its dispute with Microsoft in Europe over software licensing practices, filing a formal complaint with the European Union.
Oracle now owns 29% of Arm server chip designer Ampere, and could also exercise an option to buy the company under certain conditions over the next few years.
Nvidia acquired OctoAI, a startup working on compilers for machine learning infrastructure, for an undisclosed sum.
Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!