Neptune Insurance's Neptune Flood said it will provide real-time preliminary flood insurance quotes within ChatGPT via a Neptune Flood app. The company, which we profiled last year, is building out its direct-to-consumer efforts. Through ChatGPT, consumers can ask about flood risk, get quotes, explore options and transition to Neptune Flood's site to complete a purchase.
See: Neptune Insurance highlights AI exponential, data, build vs. buy trends
Anthropic said Claude will be able to create custom charges, diagrams and visualizations directly into conversations without code. Anthropic announced the feature, which is in beta and turned on by default, in a blog post.
Palantir said it has expanded a partnership with GE Aerospace to improve military aircraft readiness. The company also partnered with sensing company Ondas to build a next-gen intelligence platform. The news is part of the AIPCon 9 customer showcase.
Atlassian said it will cut its workforce about 10% or 1,600 employees. In a post, CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said the cuts will fund investments in AI and enterprise sales. He said:
"We fundamentally believe people and AI create the best outcomes. Our approach is not “AI replaces people”.
But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.
This is primarily about adaptation. We are reshaping our skill mix and changing how we work to build for the future."
Here's a look at Atlassian's employee growth in recent years.
Nebius and Nvidia announced a partnership that revolves around deploying Nvidia's platforms such as Rubin, Vera CPUs and BlueField Storage. Nvidia will also invest $2 billion in Nebius. Separately, Nebius said it will expand its footprint in Asia-Pacific.
Google said that it has closed the acquisition of Wiz. The company will join Google Cloud and operate as a brand in the security portfolio. The plan is to create a unified security platform that can secure AI and work across the major cloud providers beyond Google Cloud.
See:
Anthropic said it is launching The Anthropic Institute, which will bring together research from the AI company to examine the challenges more powerful AI systems will bring. The effort is led by Jack Clark, Anthropic co-founder. Clark will become Anthropic's Head of Public Benefit. The staff is ramping up and will include interdisciplinary engineers, economists and social scientists.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang penned a post on the 5 layer cake of AI. No one following Nvidia will be surprised by what Huang had to say, but the bigger picture is that GTC is likely to feature a lot of architecture talk. Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said the post is a good set up for future discussion.
CoreWeave launched two new consumption models designed for AI workloads that may differentiate the neocloud from the pack.
The first model is Flex Reservations, which guarantees peak capacity for workloads that ramp or scale unevenly. Customers buy a capacity ceiling with a lower 24/7 holding fee and only pay full usage rates when instances are active. Flex Reservations are in preview.
In addition, CoreWeave launched Spot, which is a lower-cost option for batch analytics and backfills that can tolerate interruptions. Spot is generally available.
Separately, CoreWeave announced a preview of Dedicated Inference, which gives customers the ability to run custom models in production on chose GPUs.
Nexthop AI, which is focused on efficient AI networking, raised $500 million in a Series B round and is now valued at $4.2 billion. The round was led by Lightspeed Ventures and joined by Andreessen Horowitz and existing investors.
The company also launched switches designed for neoclouds and hyperscalers. Nexthop said the switches were part of its Disaggregated Spine architecture. The Broadcom-powered switches include NH-4010, NH-4220 and NH-5010. Those switches are engineered for scale-up and scale-out infrastructure, but the theme is that they are more efficient and save power.
Ahead of Oracle’s earnings report, the company put out a statement countering a Bloomberg article noting OpenAI pulled back on a deal because facilities didn’t have the latest Nvidia GPUs. Bloomberg reported that the companies ended plans to expand a data center in Abilene, TX. Oracle reportedly secured the site, ordered the hardware and spent on construction and staff with the expectation of expansion in the future.
Oracle shot back in a post on X and said the Bloomberg report, followed by CNBC, was false and incorrect. Oracle said existing projects were on track but didn’t address the expansion plans. Oracle said:
“Recent media activity about the Abilene site are false and incorrect. First, Crusoe and Oracle are operating in lockstep to deliver one of the world's largest AI Data centers in Abilene at record-breaking pace. Two buildings are completely operational and the rest of the campus is on track. Second, Oracle has completed leasing for the additional 4.5GW to deliver on our commitments to OpenAI.”
Constellation Research analyst Michael Ni on LinkedIn covered CData's Software's latest news and how it applies to moving AI from pilot to production. He also analyzed Nimble's latest round of funding.
