Technology
Amazon CodeWhisperer is now called Q Developer and is expanding its features
Pour one out for CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s AI-powered assistive coding tool. As of today, it’s kaput – in a way.
CodeWhisperer is now available Q-programmera part of Amazon’s Q family of business-oriented generative AI chatbots, which also includes the newly announced Q Business. Available via AWS, Q Developer helps with among the tasks developers perform of their every day work, akin to debugging and updating applications, troubleshooting, and performing security scans – very similar to CodeWhisperer did.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Doug Seven, CEO and director of AI developer experience at AWS, suggested that CodeWhisperer was a minor branding failure. Third party metrics reflect the identical; even with a free tier, CodeWhisperer has struggled to match the momentum of its fundamental rival GitHub Copilot, which has over 1.8 million paying individual users and tens of hundreds of enterprise customers. (Bad first impressions it definitely didn’t help.)
“CodeWhisperer is where we started (code generation), bbut we really wanted to have a brand and name that fit a broader set of use cases,” Seven said. “You can take into consideration Q Developer as an evolution of CodeWhisperer into something much broader.”
To do that, Q Developer can generate code, including SQL, a programming language commonly used to create and manage databases, in addition to test that code and help transform and deploy recent code developed based on developer queries.
As with Copilot, customers can tune Q Developer of their internal code bases to enhance the accuracy of the tool’s programming recommendations. (The now deprecated CodeWhisperer also offered this selection.) And with a capability called Q Agents, Developer can autonomously do things like deploy features and document and refactor (i.e. restructure) code.
Ask Q Developer to “create an ‘add to favorites’ button in my app” and Q Developer will analyze your app’s code, generate recent code if obligatory, create a step-by-step plan, and test your code app before implementing proposed changes. Developers can review and iterate the plan before Q implements it, linking steps together and applying updates to the obligatory files, code blocks, and test suites.
“Behind the scenes, Q Developer actually runs the development environment to work on the code,” Seven said. “So in the case of Q feature development, the Developer takes the entire code repository, creates a branch of that repository, parses the repository, does the work it was asked to do, and returns those code changes to the developer.”
Amazon says agents also can automate and manage code update processes because Java conversions are already available (specifically Java 8 and 11 built with Apache Maven to Java 17) and .NET conversions coming soon. “Q Developer analyzes the code – looking for anything that needs updating – and makes all those changes before returning it to the developer for review and approval,” Seven added.
In my opinion, Agents is very just like GitHub’s Copilot Workspace, which similarly generates and deploys roadmaps for bug fixes and recent software features. And – as with Workspace – I’m not entirely convinced that this more autonomous approach can solve the issues related to AI-based coding assistants.
GitClear’s evaluation of over 150 million lines of code committed to project repositories over the past few years found that The co-pilot generated more code errors pushed to code bases. Elsewhere, security researchers warn that Copilot and similar tools can do that amplify existing bugs and security issues in software projects.
This is not surprising. AI-powered coding assistants seem impressive. But they’re trained in existing code, and their suggestions reflect patterns in other developers’ work – work that will be seriously flawed. Assistants’ guesses cause errors which can be often difficult to detect, especially when developers – who adopt AI coding assistants great numbers — put aside for evaluation by assistants.
In a less dangerous area beyond coding, Q Developer can aid you manage your organization’s cloud infrastructure on AWS – or at the very least get the data you should manage it yourself.
Q Developer can fulfill requests akin to “List all my Lambda functions” and “List my resources located in other AWS regions.” Currently in preview, the bot also can generate (but not execute) AWS CLI commands and answer AWS cost-related questions akin to “What were the top three highest-cost services in the first quarter?”
So how much do these generative AI conveniences cost?
Q Developer is available without spending a dime on AWS Console, Slack, and IDEs akin to Visual Studio Code, GitLab Duo, and JetBrains – but with limitations. The free version doesn’t allow customization of custom libraries, packages and APIs and defaults to a knowledge collection scheme for users. It also imposes monthly limits of a maximum of 5 Agent tasks (e.g. feature deployment) per thirty days and 25 requests for AWS account resources per thirty days. (I find it surprising that Amazon places a limit on the questions you possibly can ask about its own services, but here we’re.)
The premium version of Q Developer, Q Developer Pro costs $19 per thirty days per user and provides higher usage limits, user and policy management tools, single sign-on, and – perhaps most significantly – mental property guarantee.
In many cases, the models underlying code generation services akin to Q Developer are trained on copyrighted or restrictively licensed code. Vendors say fair use protects them when models have been consciously or unconsciously developed using copyrighted code – but not everyone agrees. GitHub and OpenAI are there defendant In class movement which accuses them of copyright infringement by allowing Copilot to return licensed code snippets without attribution.
Amazon says it’ll defend Q Developer Pro customers against claims that the service infringes a 3rd party’s mental property rights so long as they permit AWS to regulate its defense and resolve “as AWS deems appropriate.”
Technology
The company is currently developing washing machines for humans
Forget about cold baths. Washing machines for people may soon be a brand new solution.
According to at least one Japanese the oldest newspapersOsaka-based shower head maker Science has developed a cockpit-shaped device that fills with water when a bather sits on a seat in the center and measures an individual’s heart rate and other biological data using sensors to make sure the temperature is good. “It also projects images onto the inside of the transparent cover to make the person feel refreshed,” the power says.
The device, dubbed “Mirai Ningen Sentakuki” (the human washing machine of the longer term), may never go on sale. Indeed, for now the company’s plans are limited to the Osaka trade fair in April, where as much as eight people will have the option to experience a 15-minute “wash and dry” every day after first booking.
Apparently a version for home use is within the works.
Technology
Zepto raises another $350 million amid retail upheaval in India
Zepto has secured $350 million in latest financing, its third round of financing in six months, because the Indian high-speed trading startup strengthens its position against competitors ahead of a planned public offering next yr.
Indian family offices, high-net-worth individuals and asset manager Motilal Oswal invested in the round, maintaining Zepto’s $5 billion valuation. Motilal co-founder Raamdeo Agrawal, family offices Mankind Pharma, RP-Sanjiv Goenka, Cello, Haldiram’s, Sekhsaria and Kalyan, in addition to stars Amitabh Bachchan and Sachin Tendulkar are amongst those backing the brand new enterprise, which is India’s largest fully national primary round.
The funding push comes as Zepto rushes so as to add Indian investors to its capitalization table, with foreign ownership now exceeding two-thirds. TechCrunch first reported on the brand new round’s deliberations last month. The Mumbai-based startup has raised over $1.35 billion since June.
Fast commerce sales – delivering groceries and other items to customers’ doors in 10 minutes – will exceed $6 billion this yr in India. Morgan Stanley predicts that this market shall be value $42 billion by 2030, accounting for 18.4% of total e-commerce and a pair of.5% of retail sales. These strong growth prospects have forced established players including Flipkart, Myntra and Nykaa to cut back delivery times as they lose touch with specialized delivery apps.
While high-speed commerce has not taken off in many of the world, the model seems to work particularly well in India, where unorganized retail stores are ever-present.
High-speed trading platforms are creating “parallel trading for consumers seeking convenience” in India, Morgan Stanley wrote in a note this month.
Zepto and its rivals – Zomato-owned Blinkit, Swiggy-owned Instamart and Tata-owned BigBasket – currently operate on lower margins than traditional retail, and Morgan Stanley expects market leaders to realize contribution margins of 7-8% and adjusted EBITDA margins to greater than 5% by 2030. (Zepto currently spends about 35 million dollars monthly).
An investor presentation reviewed by TechCrunch shows that Zepto, which handles greater than 7 million total orders every day in greater than 17 cities, is heading in the right direction to realize annual sales of $2 billion. It anticipates 150% growth over the following 12 months, CEO Aadit Palicha told investors in August. The startup plans to go public in India next yr.
However, the rapid growth of high-speed trading has had a devastating impact on the mom-and-pop stores that dot hundreds of Indian cities, towns and villages.
According to the All India Federation of Consumer Products Distributors, about 200,000 local stores closed last yr, with 90,000 in major cities where high-speed trading is more prevalent.
The federation has warned that without regulatory intervention, more local shops shall be vulnerable to closure as fast trading platforms prioritize growth over sustainable practices.
Zepto said it has created job opportunities for tons of of hundreds of gig employees. “From day one, our vision has been to play a small role in nation building, create millions of jobs and offer better services to Indian consumers,” Palicha said in an announcement.
Regulatory challenges arise. Unless an e-commerce company is a majority shareholder of an Indian company or person, current regulations prevent it from operating on a listing model. Fast trading corporations don’t currently follow these rules.
Technology
Wiz acquires Dazz for $450 million to expand cybersecurity platform
Wizardone of the talked about names within the cybersecurity world, is making a major acquisition to expand its reach of cloud security products, especially amongst developers. This is buying Dazzlespecialist in solving security problems and risk management. Sources say the deal is valued at $450 million, which incorporates money and stock.
This is a leap within the startup’s latest round of funding. In July, we reported that Dazz had raised $50 million at a post-money valuation of just below $400 million.
Remediation and posture management – two areas of focus for Dazz – are key services within the cybersecurity market that Wiz hasn’t sorted in addition to it wanted.
“Dazz is a leader in this market, with the best talent and the best customers, which fits perfectly into the company culture,” Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz, said in an interview.
Remediation, which refers to helping you understand and resolve vulnerabilities, shapes how an enterprise actually handles the various vulnerability alerts it could receive from the network. Posture management is a more preventive product: it allows a company to higher understand the scale, shape and performance of its network from a perspective, allowing it to construct higher security services around it.
Dazz will proceed to operate as a separate entity while it’s integrated into the larger Wiz stack. Wiz has made a reputation for itself as a “one-stop shop,” and Rappaport said the integrated offering will proceed to be a core a part of it.
He believes this contrasts with what number of other SaaS corporations are built. In the safety industry, there are, Rappaport said, “a lot of Frankenstein mashups where companies prioritize revenue over building a single technology stack that actually works as a platform.” It could be assumed that integration is much more necessary in cybersecurity than in other areas of enterprise IT.
Wiz and Dazz already had an in depth relationship before this deal. Merat Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP of R&D, respectively) — worked closely with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his previous startup Adallom.
After Rappaport left to found Wiz together with his former Adallom co-founders, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP of Product Yinon Costica and VP of R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was one in all the primary investors. Similarly, when Bahat founded Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in it.
The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are also close friends, and she or he was the second family of Mickey, Rappaport’s beloved dog, referred to as Chief Dog Officer Wiz (together with LinkedIn profile). Once the deal was done, the 2 faced two very sad events: each Bahat and Mika’s mother died.
“We hope for a new chapter of positivity,” Bahat said. The cycle of life does indeed proceed.
Rumors of this takeover began to appear earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that they then began talking seriously.
But that is not the one M&A conversation Wiz has gotten involved in. Earlier this 12 months, Google tried to buy Wiz itself for $23 billion to construct a major cybersecurity business. Wiz walked away from the deal, which might have been the biggest in Google’s history, partly because Rappaport believed Wiz could turn into a fair larger company by itself terms. And that is what this agreement goals to do.
This acquisition is a test for Wiz, which earlier this 12 months filled its coffers with $1 billion solely for M&A purposes (it has raised almost $2 billion in total, and we hear the subsequent round will close in just a few weeks). . Other offers included purchasing Gem security for $350 million, but Dazz is its largest acquisition ever.
More mergers and acquisitions could also be coming. “We believe next year will be an acquisition year for us,” Rappaport said.
In an interview with TC, Luttwak said that one in all Wiz’s priorities now’s to create more tools for developers that have in mind what they need to do their jobs.
Enterprises have made significant investments in cloud services to speed up operations and make their IT more agile, but this shift has include a significantly modified security profile for these organizations: network and data architectures are more complex and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to to hack into these systems. Artificial intelligence makes all of this far more difficult when it comes to malicious attackers. (It’s also a chance: the brand new generation of tools for our defense relies on artificial intelligence.)
Wiz’s unique selling point is its all-in-one approach. Drawing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk aspects and provides its users with a series of detailed views to understand where these threats occur, offering over a dozen products covering the areas, corresponding to code security, container environment security, and provide chain security, in addition to quite a few partner integrations for those working with other vendors (or to enable features that Wiz doesn’t offer directly).
Indeed, Wiz offered some extent of repair to help prioritize and fix problems, but as Luttwak said, the Dazz product is solely higher.
“We now have a platform that actually provides a 360-degree view of risk across infrastructure and applications,” he said. “Dazz is a leader in attack surface management, the ability to collect vulnerability signals from the application layer across the entire stack and build the most incredible context that allows you to trace the situation back to engineers to help with remediation.”
For Dazz’s part, once I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million at a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of constructing strong solutions and this week said the third quarter was “amazing.”
“But market dynamics are what trigger these types of transactions,” she said. She confirmed that Dazz had also received takeover offers from other corporations. “If you think about the customers and joint customers that we have with Wiz, it makes sense for them to have it on one platform.”
And a few of Dazz’s competitors are still going it alone: Cyera, like Dazz, an authority in attack surface management, just yesterday announced a rise of $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion (which confirms our information). But what’s going to he do with this money? Make acquisitions, after all.
Wiz says it currently has annual recurring revenue of $500 million (it has a goal of $1 billion ARR next 12 months) and has greater than 45% of its Fortune 100 customers. Dazz said ARR is within the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and currently growing 500% on a customer base of roughly 100 organizations.
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