On theCUBE Pod: The latest from the world of AI as X marks the spot

AI

This week, the world bid farewell to what was previously known as Twitter Inc., as Elon Musk announced the social media platform would be rebranded as X.

Musk changed the legal name of Twitter to X Corp. in April, after saying in October 2022 that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” It means that an iconic logo, name — even the word “tweets” — are a thing of the past, noted theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier.

“Virtually no one thinks it’s a good thing. It’s crazy,” Furrier said on the latest episode of theCUBE podcast.

Where the saga of X and Musk goes next is anyone’s guess, but many are still using the platform, including theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante. That’s because of the features that still exist on the site, including what’s possible with the blue checkmark — editing posts, writing in more than 280 characters, and more.

“Twitter is frickin’ awesome. Now, whether or not this brand change is going to mean anything — and they have their problems still with monetization,” Vellante said. “If it’s going to help them advertise, and Elon is probably their biggest detriment to that because he’s so outspoken. And advertisers are like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to advertise with this guy.’”

Enter Threads, Meta Platforms Inc.’s rival service, which launched on July 5. Vellante said he hadn’t spent as much time on that platform. However, it has left an open question: What will Mark Zuckerberg do next?

“I’m waiting for Threads 2.0 to see what he does there. Because I think that Threads is clearly tailing off,” Vellante added. “I’ve got to believe this was not a one-shot deal. He’s got something up his sleeve, and he’s going to come up with a bunch of new features and say, ‘Come on back in!’”

The latest in artificial intelligence

The discussion out of last week’s IBM Storage Summit in Palo Alto continues to resonate. The event brought together industry experts who discussed the evolution of storage and its convergence with data and AI. While there wasn’t any breaking news out of the conference, per se, it was an opportunity to learn more about various projects in the AI space, including IBM Corp.’s watsonx, according to Vellante.

“Watsonx is basically their AI play, their new AI play, which actually looks pretty good. They got some cool data tools that I think are competitive with Databricks and a little bit what Snowflake are doing,” he said. “They’ve got some advantages with storage. They’ve got some good IP in the flash which can compete with Pure and Dell. So, they’ve got a good story, and it’s a decent-sized business for IBM.”

Turning to Microsoft Corp., Vellante noted that prior to OpenAI, the company’s machine learning AI strategy was almost completely reliant on Databricks. Today, it’s almost completely reliant on OpenAI.

“Now, maybe they’ve got something else coming. But, when you’ve got to pay other guys and you don’t have your own, that has an effect,” Vellante said. “But there’s no reason that Microsoft can’t change that strategy.”

Amazon Web Services Inc., meanwhile, might be getting out-marketed, but is still in a good position, according to Vellante. The wild card here involves Amazon and AWS, and Microsoft and Azure, according to Furrier.

“Amazon’s success early on was about winning the developer startup people in the garage, because the alternative was to pay a lot of money,” Furrier said.

In the early days, there was no data center — it was cloud-native, cloud-first, and that created Airbnb Inc., Dropbox Inc., Twitter, and other companies in the Web 2.0 movement that all used AWS, Furrier noted.

Today, AWS has a huge enterprise installed base and are taking a very enterprise approach to all its news announcements. Microsoft, meanwhile, has a huge enterprise presence and has been doing it for decades longer than AWS. One thing that’s not a wildcard in the AI race right now is the startups, something that AWS needs to target, according to Furrier.

“[They need to satisfy] the hackathon startups, where there’s teams forming all around the world right now, building a new company,” he said. “Those teams are smaller, faster and more coding-friendly. They’re really savvy. And Amazon has got to make it easier for the developers in the startups too, and what I’m not hearing from them is that message.”

Watch the full theCUBE Podcast below to find out why these industry pros were also mentioned:

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms
Esther Crawford, former director of product management at Twitter and angel investor
Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Eric Herzog, CMO of Infinidat
Bob Frankston, co-creator of VisiCalc spreadsheet program
Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc spreadsheet program
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft
Lord Acton, late historian, politician and writer
Elizabeth Warren, U.S. senator
Lindsey Graham, U.S. senator
Joe Biden, 46th president of the U.S.
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel
Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services
Matt Wood, VP of product at AWS
Matt Garman, SVP of sales and marketing at AWS
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, founder of Block
Evan Williams, chairman and CEO of Medium
Sunil Daluvoy, business development executive and early-stage investor
Bruno Aziza, partner at CapitalG

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Photo: SiliconANGLE