Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today's Cloud Wars AI Minute, I explore why falling token prices aren't necessarily making AI transactions cheaper.

Highlights

00:01 — So, one of the things that I want to talk about today is going to be the token economy. And what we're actually seeing is that tokens are about 12 times cheaper than they've been before.

01:30 — But what we're seeing is the average cost of a transaction is actually going up, and that is because of the fact that while token prices are coming down, the amount of tokens it takes to process something is actually going up. We're actually seeing a 520 percent increase in the amount of tokens that you're going to need to have per unit of work.

01:56 — And the reason behind this has been this agentic reasoning loop and the reasoning models that are starting to go and process. As a matter of fact, you're actually seeing that most recently, we've even seen that chat-based things and chat conversations that have happened between humans and agents have actually now, for the first time, started to fall off.

02:30 — So, if this industry trend continues, what you're going to see is that we're going to continue to see this drop. But what we want to see is we want to start also seeing some sort of normalization and drop happening on the average amount of tokens spent on a per-transaction basis.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explain why Workday believes AI security is becoming an ecosystem problem that no single vendor can solve independently.

Highlights

00:06 — Workday has become the latest organization to join the Open Secure AI Alliance. It's a well-supported initiative that aims to improve the security of AI systems through open-source tools, research, and knowledge sharing. Workday's joining this alliance, and it's in very good company alongside companies like NVIDIA, Cloudflare, Microsoft, and IBM.

00:31 — I want to read a short passage from Workday's joining announcement to give you a sense of why the company chose to join the alliance. So, from Workday: “Delivering safe, trusted enterprise AI requires multiple layers of protection across the entire application stack, from identity management and access permissions to continuous guardrails, monitoring, and governance.”

00:53 — “Our commitment to continuously build our internal security engineering programs to meet these high standards is why Workday is joining the Open Secure AI Alliance.” Enterprise AI is shifting quickly towards more open stacks and more ambitious agents. Initiatives like the Open Secure AI Alliance are incredibly important.

01:22 — Workday and the other members of the alliance recognize that AI security is quickly becoming an ecosystem problem, not just something that one vendor can solve independently. And that's why, for example, Workday specifically said that it has historically worked on security internally for its own platform, but now is sharing what it's learned with the wider community.

01:50 — As AI becomes more open, distributed, and agentic, securing models isn't going to be enough. The challenge now, and that's one that Workday and the other members of the alliance are trying to address, is securing everything around these models.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine why the emerging Google Cloud and Oracle alliance could reshape how enterprises accelerate their AI transformations.

Highlights

00:01 — Interesting to see some new and different combinations of partners moving forward here in the AI Revolution, because the pace at which customers have to move, their escalating business, competitive pressures, their new technology requirements, and just the urgency they're all feeling to innovate, move into their AI transformations as quickly as possible, is leading to some unexpected combinations of companies and new sorts of enhanced partnerships.

00:33 — So, I think a real power pair that is emerging are the number one and number two companies on the Cloud Wars Top 10, Google Cloud and Oracle, and I think they're coming together. Each has sort of put forward into the mix, not some peripheral products they have, but really, in each case, sort of the crown jewels for what's happening right now.

01:26 — Google Cloud for Q2 had revenue of almost $25 billion, up a remarkable 82%. Meanwhile, its backlog soared 390% to $514 billion. Oracle, for the quarter ended May 31 — and it'll have its new numbers out in a couple of weeks — but for the quarter ended May 31, its fiscal Q4, its cloud revenue was almost $10 billion, up 47%.

02:50 — So, really, each company has put forward the very best it has to offer in this new and extended partnership. And again, I think we're going to see more and more of these sorts of groundbreaking, unprecedented, or certainly unexpected partnerships going forward, because what customers want and need now is changing so rapidly.

03:47 — So, this is a great, great new step forward for customers. And again, I think we're seeing lots of different combinations among the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies. So, these partnerships, alliances, whatever you want to call them, they're more important than ever before.

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00:03 — According to recent reports, Microsoft is set to reveal its Maia 300 AI accelerator as early as September this year. For context, Microsoft launched Maia 200 back in January with the direct aim of reducing the cost of AI inference.

00:27 — The Maia 300 is expected to support both AI training and inference, but the key story here is the scale of ambition behind it. Now, Microsoft is once again partnering with TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, who delivered the first iteration of Maia chips. However, this time, the scale is much larger. increasing from tens of thousands of Maia 200 accelerator units.

00:54 — It's increasing from tens of thousands of Maia 200 accelerator units to potentially hundreds of thousands, or even over a million Maia 300 chips. For me, this initiative is really about Azure. By investing in these chips, Microsoft isn't necessarily trying to compete with NVIDIA. Rather, it aims to ensure that Azure doesn't rely entirely on NVIDIA infrastructure.

01:14 — This move will give Microsoft greater control over the cost, supply, and performance of the AI infrastructure running on Azure. And beyond that, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has stated that building the company's own silicon to work alongside NVIDIA and AMD chips is a priority.

01:35 — The successful launch of Maia 200 demonstrated that Microsoft's custom silicon strategy can work, albeit on a relatively small scale. The hope now is that Maia 300 will enable Microsoft to scale this strategy into a genuine competitive advantage for Azure.

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