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: why agents are the new vehicle for enterprise AI ambitions, OpenAI secures the bag, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.
No one really agrees on a strict definition of "agent," but recent breakthroughs in large-language models have allowed companies to build enhanced versions of chatbots that can respond to natural-language queries with a plan of action.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: Following its latest round of upheaval, OpenAI continues its campaign to win the hearts and minds of developers, the race to develop AI coding assistants is getting a little out of hand, and the latest funding rounds in enterprise tech.
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It must have been a relief for OpenAI executives to talk about anything but its recent leadership turmoil during Tuesday's DevDay event, which was a stripped-down affair compared to last year's inaugural event. Instead, Tuesday's presentation focused on nuts-and-bolts tools pitched to software developers, which 25 years after Steve Ballmer's epic keynote speech remains probably the most important constituency that any would-be enterprise tech vendor needs to delight.
OpenAI released four new capabilities across its APIs during the event, adding features such as speech-to-speech communications and prompt caching that developers will be able to use in their own apps. The announcements reflect just how competitive the market for AI developers has become over the past year, as startups like Anthropic and big vendors like Microsoft and Google race to deliver the tools that will draw developers on their platforms.
The other three announcements focused on adding new ways to contain costs and improve performance for developers using OpenAI's existing models. If the generative AI revolution is ever going to achieve escape velocity, it's going to have to do more and cost less than the current generation technology allows.
Tuesday's event certainly lacked the buzz that accompanied last year's first-ever Demo Day, and CEO Sam Altman sat out the morning presentation and demos. But according to Maginative's Chris McKay, maybe that's a good thing: "While these announcements lacked the fanfare of previous events, they mark a shift in strategy for OpenAI—away from headline-grabbing new products, and toward creating a more efficient and sustainable ecosystem for developers," he wrote.
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It's hard to get a startup funded these days unless you're working on something AI-related, but the folks behind PearAI might just be a lasting symbol of the excesses of the past two years. Its launch over the weekend caused quite the commotion within AI, open-source, and entrepreneurial communities.
Techcrunch has a good summary of the debacle behind the launch of the coding assistant, which at first glance looked interesting as a new attempt to capitalize on one of the most promising applications for generative AI. However, PearAI immediately drew criticism as a very close clone of Continue.dev as well as Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, the most popular development environment in use today.
Both Continue.dev and VSCode are open-source projects, but PearAI's founders hit a new low (or high, if you like comedy) in the generative AI era by using ChatGPT to write a license for their product called the Pear Enterprise License, which closed the source code. After a pile-on the founders admitted their mistake and ditched the Pear Enterprise License, but add one more thing to the list of tasks that you probably shouldn't use ChatGPT to accomplish.
Observe raised $145 million in Series B funding and launched Project Voyager, a new AI observability tool focused on incident management.
Eon landed $127 million across three different funding rounds from the past year for its plan to build a "backup autopilot" for cloud customers
Supabase scored $80 million in Series C funding as it continues its work on a managed version of the PostgreSQL database.
DataPelago landed $47 million in new funding and launched its product, which allows companies to process data stored in structured or unstructured formats on the hardware of their choice using open-source data engines like Spark and Trino.
Qodo raised $40 million in Series A funding for its AI code-testing and bug-funding platform.
Resolve AI scored $35 million in seed funding and introduced its operations management tool, which, believe it or not, uses AI to detect and repair production issues.
Salesforce suffered a global outage that affected several services throughout the day on Tuesday, and as of publication time it was rolling out an "emergency release" to affected locations.
AWS announced plans to shut down several services, including AWS App Mesh, part of a continuing break from its long tradition of supporting services indefinitely under new CEO Matt Garman.
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Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!
This newsletter was updated Wednesday 10/2 to correct the name of OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode.
