SAP's data double-down; Glean stretches out
Today on Product Saturday: SAP strikes a big partnership with Databricks, Glean introduces its agent builder, and the quote of the week.
Today: why Meta wants (almost) everyone to use its large-language model, Microsoft tries to inspire its partner community, and the latest funding rounds for enterprise tech startups.
Welcome to Runtime! Today: why Meta wants (almost) everyone to use its large-language model, Microsoft tries to inspire its partner community, and the latest funding rounds for enterprise tech startups.
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While the history books written about the Facebook/Meta conglomerate will likely focus on different things, the company has been a consistent supporter of open-source technology in hardware and software over the last 15 years. It has a twist on that strategy for the generative AI era, which could give companies and governments around the world a foundation on which to build the AI services of your dreams and nightmares.
Meta announced the release of its Llama 2 foundation model Tuesday, allowing the technology to be used for commercial purposes under certain conditions. Earlier this year it opened up the model to academic research, and despite pushback from critics who felt it was moving too fast signaled plans to expand its distribution in May.
Meta has shared the fruits of its internal research and development with the public several times in its history.
However, it's not clear exactly how "open" Llama 2 will be.
Still, OpenAI's GPT models deserve competition, and while it might not be pure open source, Llama 2 will make it cheaper for companies to jump on the generative AI train.
It's becoming clear that there's still a long way to go before enterprise tech figures out how best to utilize these technologies.
The Meta partnership was certainly the headline news at Microsoft's Inspire conference Tuesday, but the company also revealed a little bit more about how it plans to pay for its massive investments in OpenAI.
Partners are an enormous part of every enterprise tech company's distribution strategy, and it's especially true for Microsoft given its longevity in this market. A year after rebranding its partner program to focus on Azure, Microsoft is now calling it the "AI Cloud Partner Program," and will roll out incentive packages to encourage partners to sell the fancy new AI stuff.
It also set the price for Microsoft 365 Copilot, which will probably be one of the first entry points to generative AI for the average office worker, at $30 per user per month. That's kind of a lot, considering the entire Office suite costs around or less than that per month depending on which plan your company's on.
Netcraft landed $100 million in private-equity funding, the first funding round raised by the cybersecurity company since it was founded in 1995.
Wing Cloud emerged from stealth mode with $20 million in seed funding to support the development of its new programming language for managing cloud infrastructure.
Adobe and Citrix customers kicked off the week rushing to patch separate zero-day flaws disclosed by Rapid7, according to Ars Technica.
Google plugged a security hole in Cloud Build that could have led to the next software supply-chain security attack.
A Microsoft Azure Container Apps update went haywire, preventing some users of the tool from seeing log data.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!
Correction: This newsletter was updated to reflect that Llama 2 is available on AWS today.