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One of the key talking points at VMware Explore this week was the proposed acquisition of the company by Broadcom.
First announced in May 2022, the $61 billion deal is still making its way through the regulatory hoops. However it successfully passed one of the big hurdles earlier this week, with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority giving the deal the green light on Monday.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan used the opening keynote to outline via video some of the details of what will happen once the deal is closed (expected on Oct. 30), according to ChannelFutures.
Significantly, he indicated that Broadcom would immediately invest $2 billion in VMware. Half of that investment would go towards R&D and the other half would focus on helping accelerate the deployment of VMware solutions through VMware and partner professional services.
While the deal has still to be finalized globally, the UK competition authority's decision is significant and follows approval by Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, South Africa and Taiwan. Approval from China is still pending but VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram said the remaining processes are “well under way."
The merger will enable Broadcom to accelerate its adoption of cloud technologies, while VMware will get the money it needs for research and development.
VMware, Nvidia Deepens Partnership For AI
The acquisition wasn't the only notable news out of VMware Explore. For the digital workplace, VMware unveiled an extended partnership with Nvidia that is focused on generative AI training and deployment.
According to a statement from VMware, the new VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia offers a single-stack product that gives organizations everything they need to build LLMs and run private generative AI applications on their own data, hosted on VMware’s hybrid cloud infrastructure.
VMware stated that enterprises can use data wherever it is located, while the multi-cloud approach gives organizations the choice of where AI models are built and perfected.
This will be enabled by NVIDIA NeMo, an end-to-end, cloud-native framework included in the NVIDIA AI Enterprise — the operating system of the NVIDIA AI platform — that allows enterprises to build, customize and deploy generative AI models virtually anywhere.
NeMo combines customization frameworks, guardrail toolkits, data curation tools and pre-trained models to offer enterprises what it calls an easy, cost-effective and fast way to adopt generative AI. The result is that organizations will be able to customize models and run generative AI applications, including intelligent chatbots, assistants, search and summarization.
“Generative AI and multi-cloud are the perfect match,” Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware, said in a joint statement from the two companies. "Customer data is everywhere — in their data centers, at the edge, and in their clouds. Together with NVIDIA, we’ll empower enterprises to run their generative AI workloads adjacent to their data with confidence while addressing their corporate data privacy, security and control concerns."
Ultimately, VMware and Nvidia are giving enterprises running VMware’s cloud infrastructure the ability to work with any open model they want including Llama 2, MPT or Falcon, and streamline the development, testing and deployment of their generative AI apps.
The new offering will be ready for release in early 2024 and will feed into a market that McKinsey estimates is worth up to $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.
Microsoft Adds Jira, Trello, Planner to Loop
Elsewhere, as Microsoft continues to roll-out Loop to its enterprise customers — Petri reports that Loop with be accessible to new business users in September — Microsoft has announced it is adding integrations with Planner, Trello and Jira to Loop.
According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, Planner and Loop customers will be able to integrate their plans into Loop-enabled applications using a Planner component, making it possible to edit a plan with Planner's board view in context with their other work. The component will first be available in the Loop app with the rollout scheduled for September.
Microsoft describes Planner as a lightweight, mobile and web-based application that comes with most Office 365 for business subscriptions. With Planner, teams can create plans, assign tasks and see charts of your team’s progress.
This follows the recent announcement that Jira and Trello are being integrated into Loop too.
Exciting news! 📢 Introducing integrations with @Jira and @Trello! Now, managing projects in Loop is easier than ever as you can update your Jira and Trello boards without leaving Loop. This is just the first step towards more exciting integrations coming your way. #NewInLoop pic.twitter.com/esjrLpXMzV
— Microsoft Loop (@MicrosoftLoop) August 14, 2023
The post reads that uses will be able to update their Jira and Trello boards without leaving Loop.
Microsoft Loop is a collaborative workspace platform that combines notes, tasks, and code for efficient teamwork.
Jira, which started off as a bug tracking tool, has evolved into a collaboration tool designed to help teams track all activity considered work. Work might include running projects, managing approval processes, performing daily and periodic tasks, creating documents and more.
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Trello, for its part, is a visual tool where teams can manage any type of project, workflow or task tracking.
Alone, any of these integrations are good to have, but combined they increase Loop's reach and power as an enterprise collaboration offering that covers most day-to-day tasks in the digital workplace.
Microsoft Retires Stories From Viva Engage
In other Redmond, Wash. news, Microsoft announced this week the discontinuation of the Stories functionality in Viva Engage.
The short-lived video and image feature was in public preview and apparently caused confusion among early adopters around which tool to use when (a common refrain in the Microsoft world). With Stories, users would create the visual assets in a stream removed from their conversation feeds — in much the same way as Instagram stories function — rather than incorporating them into the broader conversation. According to the company, 2.8 million people took part in the public preview and the feedback resulted in these changes.
The company announced this week it would be retiring the Stories experience and working towards a late 2023 launch of a more integrated video and image experience, where customers can create visual assets directly from two buttons located in the command bar. In the interim, the Stories functionality will automatically integrate any assets created directly into feeds. The updates later this year will include new preview functionality, easier modes of recording, as well as new presentation modes based on whether or not the visual asset is a "hero image."
Meta’s SeamlessM4T Translation Model
Elsewhere, Meta has just announced the public release of a new AI model that can translate and transcribe nearly 100 languages. Meta stated that the new SeamlessM4T is the first all-in-one multilingual multimodal and is available in open source along with SeamlessAlign, a new translation dataset. What's particularly unique about the model is its integration of speech and text into what is called multi-modality — working with both forms of data within one program.
According to a statement from Meta, the new model supports:
- Speech recognition for nearly 100 languages.
- Speech-to-text translation for nearly 100 input and output languages.
- Speech-to-speech translation, supporting nearly 100 input languages and 36 (including English) output languages.
- Text-to-text translation for nearly 100 languages
SeamlessAlign, for its part, is the biggest open multimodal translation dataset to date, according to Meta, and is built on 270,000 hours of mined speech and text alignments. The result, Meta states, is a single model approach that removes errors and delays, making the entire process of translation quicker and more accurate.
According to the post about the release, SeamlessM4T is the natural progression of previous efforts to create an effective translation tool. As well as the No Language Left Behind (NLLB) model, Meta also offered a demo of its Universal Speech Translator, which Meta claims was the first speech-to-speech translation system for Hokkien.
This is not Meta’s first foray into the translation space. The company released NLLB-200 in 2022, under the banner of the No Language Left Behind initiative, which aims to develop machine-powered translation capabilities for as many of the world’s languages as possible.
Earlier this year, it unveiled its Massively Multilingual Speech models, which the company states provides language identification and speech synthesis technology across more than 1,100 languages.
This is not an end, however. Meta says it plans to use this foundational model to enable new communication capabilities.
While the ability to translate from one language to another has a massive business advantage, it is also going to be key in making Mark Zuckerberg's conception of the metaverse work.
Even if the metaverse becomes a cross-organizational communication space and not a bigger, global phenomena like the web, instantaneous language translation is going to be key to its success. This is a step in that direction.
The company is distributing SeamlessM4T under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license, so researchers will be free to improve it as they see fit.
IBM Reassures Workers About ChatGPT
For those afraid that ChatGPT is going to take their job, a new IBM study suggests that rather than fearing the technology, people should use it for their own development.
The study, Augmented work for an automated, AI-driven world, looks at the impact AI is having on work and different business models.
The study is based on the findings of two other reports: a survey of 3,000 C-level executives across 28 countries and a survey of 21,000 workers in 22 nations.
Three principal findings emerged, notably:
- AI and upskilling: Organization leaders estimate that 40% of their workforce will need upskilling in automation and AI over the next three years.
- Operating models: Organizations that have actively restructured their work and operating models considering the emergence of generative AI are outperforming in terms of revenue growth.
- Work: Employees prioritize impactful work over autonomy, equity and flexible work arrangements.
What is also interesting is that 87% of executives say generative AI will augment roles rather than replace them.
The finding that most executives don’t expect generative AI to replace jobs is debatable given the research from other companies which directly refutes that conclusion.
However, there is no arguing the value of developing strategies for the new work models that AI will require for successful deployments. It is also true that developing strategies for work has been a key to successful workplaces for a very long time. Generative AI — like any other technology — requires planning. Without it, success will be unlikely.
OpenAI Buys Global Illumination
Finally this week, in what is being reported as its first acquisition, ChatGPT parent company OpenAI has bought Global Illumination, a developer of creative tools, infrastructure and other products.
Founded in 2021 by Thomas Dimson, Taylor Gordon and Joey Flynn, who all previously worked at Meta’s Instagram, Global Illumination also includes contributors from Facebook, YouTube, Google, Riot Games and other companies.
OpenAI issued a statement that it had acquired the Global Illumination team to work on core products including ChatGPT.
In its most recent project Global Illumination worked on open-source technology related to online game production. Thomas Dimson, for his part, is credited with drafting some of the original code for Instagram's content ranking algorithms.
Last month OpenAI released GPT-4 in general availability. It also pushed the APIs for GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL-E and Whisper into generally availability for developers.
According to the Reuters news service, OpenAI made $30 million in revenue last year, but CEO Sam Altman has reportedly told investors that the company intends to boost that figure to $200 million this year and $1 billion next year.
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