Welcome to episode 280 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts as we travel through the latest in cloud news. This week we’re talking more about nuclear power, some additional major employee shakeups, Claude releases, plus saying RIP to CloudWatch Evidently and hello to Azure Cobalt VMs.

• The cloud providers are colluding on Nuclear Power
• I fear our AWS AI nightmare might get worse without Dr. Matt Wood.
• I’m a glow with excitement about nuclear cloud power
• Plainly no one else knew what “CloudWatch Evidently” did either
• We sing a Claude Sonnet about Nuclear Power
• Evidently, The Cloud Pod was always right
• Amazon goes nuclear while their AI VP goes AWOL

00:53 Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku

• Anthropic is announcing the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new Model Claude 3.5 Haiku.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across the board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding — an area where it already leads the field (per anthropic).
• Claude 3.5 Haiku interestingly matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, the prior largest model, on many evaluations at the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku.
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet also includes a groundbreaking new capability in beta: Computer Use.
• Available today as an API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do – by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text.
• Claude 3.5 is the first frontier AI model to offer this capability.
• Anthropic warns the feature is still experimental – at times cumbersome and error-prone. As well as things that are effortless for a human are still difficult including scrolling, dragging or zooming.
• The idea is to make Claude complete individual tasks, without always needing to leverage an API, like clicking in a GUI, or uploading a file from a computer. These types of solutions are typically found in Build and Test like scenarios with tools such as Saucelabs or Browserstack.
• To do this, Claude was built to perceive and interact with computer interfaces. You can use data from my computer to fill out this online form or check a spreadsheet, move the cursor to a web browser, navigate to the relevant web pages, select the data for the spreadsheet and so on.

3:06 Jonathan – “If you can take pictures of the screen, then it can identify where buttons and things are without having to know the name of the objects in the DOM and stuff like that. So you could say, give me instructions, click on this, click on this, click on this, do this stuff. It would be really easy to automate tests that way instead of having to know the names of the divs and things on a page, especially for web testing. Because if a developer changes those, the...

Welcome to episode 279 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan and Matthew are your guide through the Cloud. We’re talking about everything from BigQuery to Google Nuclear pow, and everything in between! Welcome to episode 279!

• AWS SKYNET (Q) now controls the supply chain
• AWS Supply Chain: Where skynet meets your shopping list
• Digital Ocean follows Azure with the Premium everything
• EKS mounts S3
• GCP now a nuclear
• Big query don’t hit that iceberg
• Big Query Yells: “ICEBERG AHEAD”
• The Cloud Pod: Now with 50% more meltdown protection
• The Cloud Pod radiates excitement over Google’s nuclear deal

00:46 OpenAI’s Newest Possible Threat: Ex-CTO Murati

• Apologies listeners – paywall article.
• Given the recent departure of Ex-CTO Mira Murati from OpenAI, we speculated that she might be starting something new…and the rumors are rumorin’.
• Rumors have been running wild since her last day on October 4th, with several people reporting that there has been a lot of churn.
• Speculation is that Murati may join former Open AI VP Bret Zoph at his new startup.
• It may be easy to steal some people, as the research organization at Open AI is reportedly in upheaval after Liam Fedus’s promotion to lead post-training – several researchers have asked to switch teams.
• In addition, Ilya Sutskever, an Open AI co-founder and former chief scientist, also has a new startup.
• We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this particular soap opera.

2:00 Jonathan – “I kind wonder what will these other startups bring that’s different than what OpenAI are doing or Anthropic or anybody else. mean, they’re all going to be taking the same training data sets because that’s what’s available. It’s not like they’re going to invent some data from somewhere else and have an edge. I mean, I guess they could do different things like be mindful about licensing.”

4:41 Introducing New 48vCPU and 60vCPU Optimized Premium Droplets on DigitalOcean

• Those raindrops are getting pretty heavy as Digital Ocean announces their new 48vCPU Memory and storage optimized premium droplets, and 60vcpu general purpose and CPU optimized premium droplets.
• Droplets are DO’s Linux-based virtual machines.
• Premium Optimized Droplets are dedicated CPU instances with access to the full hyperthread, as well as 10GBps of outbound data transfer.
• The 48vCPU boxes have 384GB of memory, and the 60vCPU boxes have 160gb.

6:02 Justin – “I’ve been watching the CloudPod hosting bill slowly creep up over the years as we get more and more data into S3 and we have logs that we store and things like that for the website. And I have other websites that I host there too. it originally started on DigitalOcean and it was a very flat rate for that VM that I need. You start sort of thinking like, maybe Amazon is great for this use ca...

Welcome to episode 278 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! When Justin’s away, the guys will… maybe get a show recorded? This week, we’re talking OpenAI, another service scheduled for the grave over at AWS, saying goodbye to pesky IPv4 fees, Azure FXv2 VMs, Valkey 8.0 and so much more! Thanks for joining us, here in the cloud!

• Another One Bites the Dust
• Peak AI reached: OpenAI Now Puts Print Statements in Code to Help You Debug

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00:59 Introducing vision to the fine-tuning API.

• OpenAI has announced the integration of vision capabilities into its fine-tuning API, allowing developers to enhance the GPT-4o model to analyze and interpret images alongside text and audio inputs.
• This update broadens the scope of applications for AI, enabling more multimodal interactions.
• The fine-tuning API now supports image inputs, which means developers can train models to understand and generate content based on visual data in conjunction with text and audio.
• After October 31, 2024, training for fine-tuning will cost $25 per 1 million tokens, with inference priced at $3.75 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens.
• Images are tokenized based on size before pricing. The introduction of prompt caching and other efficiency measures could lower the operational costs for businesses deploying AI solutions.
• The API is also being enhanced to include features like epoch-based checkpoint creation, a comparative playground for model evaluation, and integration with third-party platforms like Weights and Biases for detailed fine-tuning data management.
• What does it mean? Admit it – you’re dying to know.
• Developers can now create applications that not only process text or voice but also interpret and generate responses based on visual cues, and importantly fine tuned for domain specific applications, and this update could lead to more intuitive user interfaces in applications, where users can interact with services using images as naturally as they do with text or speech, potentially expanding the user base to those less tech-savvy or in fields where visual data is crucial.

03:53 Jonathan – “I mean, I think it’s useful for things like quality assurance in manufacturing, for example. You know, could, you could tune it on what your nuts and bolts are supposed to look like and what a good bolt looks like and what a bad bolt looks like coming out of the factory. You just stream the video directly to, to an AI, AI like this and have it kick out all the bad ones. It’s kind of, kind of neat.”

04:41 Introducing the Realtime API

• OpenAI has launched its Realtime API in public beta, d...