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Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman says he loves Sam Altman and believes he is sincere about AI security

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In an interview Tuesday on the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, made it clear that he admires OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin he asked what the plan can be when Microsoft’s vast AI future wasn’t so closely depending on OpenAI, using the metaphor of winning a cycling race. But Suleiman dodged it.

“I don’t buy the metaphor that there is a finish line. This is another false frame,” he said. “We have to stop seeing everything as a close race.”

He then toed Microsoft’s corporate stance on his company’s take care of OpenAI, wherein the corporate reportedly invested $10 billion through a mix of money and cloud credits. The deal gives Microsoft a big share of OpenAI’s industrial business and enables it to embed artificial intelligence models into Microsoft products and sell the technology to Microsoft’s cloud customers. Some reports indicate that Microsoft may you may even be eligible for some OpenAI payments.

“It’s true that we have fierce competition with them,” Suleyman said of OpenAI. “It’s an independent company. We don’t own or control them. We don’t even have board members. So they do their very own thing. But we share a deep partnership. I’m a excellent friend of Sam’s and I actually have numerous respect for them and trust and imagine in what they’ve done. And this is what it would seem like for a lot of, a few years,” Suleyman said.

It is essential for Suleiman to profess this close/distant relationship. Microsoft investors and corporate customers appreciate the close relationship. However, regulatory authorities became concerned about April as well The EU agreed that its investment was not a real takeover. If this changes, regulatory involvement will probably change as well.

Suleyman says he trusts Altman with AI security

In a way, Suleyman was the Sam Altman of AI before OpenAI. He has spent most of his profession competing with OpenAI and is known for his ego.

Suleyman was the founding father of DeepMind, a man-made intelligence pioneer, and sold it to Google in 2014. He was reportedly placed on administrative leave following allegations of worker mistreatment, as reported by Bloomberg in 2019and then moved on to other roles at Google before leaving the corporate in 2022 to hitch Greylock Partners as a enterprise partner. A number of months later, he and Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, a Microsoft board member, launched Inflection AI to construct their very own LLM chatbot, amongst other goals.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tried to rent Sam Altman last fall, but was unsuccessful when OpenAI fired him and then quickly reinstated him. Then in March, Microsoft hired Suleyman and most of Inflection, leaving a skeleton company and an enormous paycheck. In his recent position at Microsoft, Suleyman audited the OpenAI code, Semafor reported the case earlier this month. As one among OpenAI’s previous major rivals, it might now delve deeper into its crown jewel rival.

There is one other wrinkle to all this. OpenAI was founded with the goal of conducting AI safety research to stop a one-day evil AI from destroying humanity. In 2023, while Suleyman was still a competitor to OpenAI, he published a book with researcher Michael Bhaskar titled “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma”. The book discusses the threats related to artificial intelligence and methods to prevent them.

A bunch of former OpenAI employees signed the letter earlier this month, outlining his concerns that OpenAI and other artificial intelligence firms should not taking security seriously enough.

When asked about this, Suleiman also revealed that he had love and trust for Altman, but additionally that he wanted each regulation and a slower pace.

“Maybe it’s because I’m British with European leanings, but I’m not afraid of regulation in the way that everyone seems to be,” he said, describing all of the finger-pointing by former employees as “healthy dialogue.” He added: “I think it’s a great thing that technologists, entrepreneurs and CEOs of companies like myself and Sam, who I love very much and think are amazing,” are talking about regulation. “He’s not cynical, he’s genuine. He really believes in it.”

But he also said, “Friction can be our friend here. These technologies have gotten so powerful, can be so intimate, can be so ubiquitous, that it is time to take stock. If all this dialog slows AI development by six to 18 months or more, “it’s time well spent.”

Everything is very cozy between these players.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Image credits: TechCrunch

Suleyman wants cooperation with China, AI in classrooms

Suleiman also made interesting remarks on other issues. About the AI ​​race with China:

“With all due respect to my good friends in DC and the military-industrial complex, if the default assumption is that this can only be a new Cold War, then that’s exactly what it will be, because it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will be afraid that we are afraid that we will be hostile, so they must be hostile, and this will only escalate,” he said. “We need to find ways to work together, show them respect, while recognizing that we have a different set of values.”

On the opposite hand, he also said that China is “constructing its own technology ecosystem and spreading it around the globe. We really should pay close attention to this.

When asked about his opinion on children using artificial intelligence in class work, Suleiman, who replied that he had no children, shrugged. “I feel we’ve to be a bit of cautious about the shortcomings of any tool, you understand, similar to when calculators got here out, it was type of an instinctive response of, oh no, everyone will give you the chance to type of solve all of the equation problems immediately. And that may make us dumber because we couldn’t do mental arithmetic.

He also predicts that there’ll soon be a time when AI will act as a teacher’s aide, perhaps talking live within the classroom because the AI’s verbal skills improve. “What would it look like if a great teacher or educator had a deep conversation with artificial intelligence that was live and in front of an audience?”

The lesson here is that if we wish the individuals who create and profit from artificial intelligence to control humanity and protect it from its worst effects, we could also be setting unrealistic expectations.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Zepto raises another $350 million amid retail upheaval in India

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Zepto, snagging $1 billion in 90 days, projects 150% annual growth

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.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Wiz acquires Dazz for $450 million to expand cybersecurity platform

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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.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly

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Google corporate logo hangs outside the Google Germany offices

The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.

Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.

In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.

The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.

The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.

Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.

The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.

Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.

If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.

Google’s answer

In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.

“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.

Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.

He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI ​​race.

“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.

The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.

Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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