CLOUD

Amazon’s Worldwide Sway

Attendees usually must head to the home of The Hangover for Amazon Web Services’s biannual re:Invent conference. This week, the serverless bonanza lived up to its namesake by taking place 100% virtually, in the .

Before we dive in, a word on the importance of AWS. 

• For Amazon: It’s the high-margin crown jewel.  
• For consumers: It’s the backbone powering many of your favorite parts of the internet, as we saw in a recent AWS outage.

Now to the news

The re:Invent conference had its usual coder overtures, with AWS unveiling a disorienting amount of specialized software and compute hardware. One surprise: It will rent out M1-chip-equipped Mac Minis to developers remotely building software for Apple products (for a pretty penny).

AWS also beefed up its retrofit game, rolling out five new machine learning services for the industrial sector. These systems could form an all-seeing eye for factory floor managers or oil rig operators. Two examples: 

• The Monitron sensor-AI package keeps industrial machinery humming by flagging funky behavior and predicting malfunctions. 
• With Panorama Appliance, AWS provides a brain to dumb cameras, unlocking computer vision capabilities. 
• Note: These services won’t include pre-packaged facial recognition, AWS told the FT. 

Sound familiar? One could imagine Amazon is simultaneously upgrading and repurposing its own tech into a revenue stream. We're just speculating, but turning cost centers into cash cows is exactly what it's done with AWS, fulfillment, and more.

View from the top

Companies, schools, and your neighborhood utilities still stuck on legacy tech had no choice but to upgrade this year. And that pandemic-era procurement was wind to the cloud’s back. 

But critics say AWS is losing cloudshare. AWS chief Andy Jassy addressed those naysayers this week, saying his unit’s revenue grew 29% year over year in Q3 at a $46 billion run rate. 

• Google Cloud had ~45% YoY Q3 growth at a $13.6 billion run rate. 
• Azure sales grew 59% in Q3. Microsoft doesn’t break out revenue, but it sits somewhere between AWS and GC.

Bottom line: In search of further growth, the pioneer of disruption is going after a relatively undisrupted industrial sector. 

AI

Google Fires a Top AI Ethicist

On Wednesday, a Twitter thread rippled through the artificial intelligence world: Google had fired Timnit Gebru, co-lead of its ethical AI research team and one of the few Black women in an AI leadership role. 

The big why: Tensions between Dr. Gebru and management had reportedly been building for days over a research paper she had submitted on the potential bias and ethical harms stemming from “the rush for ever-larger language models.” 

• "The paper doesn't say anything surprising to anyone who works with language models," one Google employee familiar with the research told Business Insider. "It basically makes what Google's doing look bad," said another. 

When Google reportedly told Gebru to either redact Googlers as authors or retract the paper altogether, Gebru voiced her frustrations on an internal listserv, an action Google called “inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.” 

Big picture: This is the latest clash between Google and its workers over ethical concerns, and the company’s decision to cut ties with Gebru raises questions about the seriousness of its commitment to ethical AI. 

Google declined to comment in response to our inquiry, but Jeff Dean, SVP of Research, sent an internal email about the decision. 

SPONSORED BY BRIGHTCOVE

Marketers, Here’s How to Keep on Truckin’

Oh my, has ROI been hard to come by lately. Events, in-store experiences, and the like have fallen by the wayside, leaving marketers with limited options to connect with audiences and show CEOs the ROIs they love.

Brightcove is the answer. Their video solutions have helped big-time brands like Adobe, HubSpot, and MasterClass engage prospects throughout the customer journey, bring products to life, and generate buzz. 

Take Freightwaves for example. A leader in the global trucking industry, they expected 2,000 attendees at their annual event. But when they partnered with Brightcove to take their event virtual this year, 90,000 people tuned in.

That’s a lot of trucker hats. And a lot of vital marketing exposure for Freightwaves, who saw a greater ROI on their annual event than ever before.

Convinced yet? For video that means business, hit up Brightcove.

VR/AR

Reality Check

If you took a ghost tour of the Google Graveyard, you’d quickly become acquainted with the spirits of bygone AR/VR projects. The place is full of them. (Rest in peace, Daydream, Expeditions, and SoundStage.) 

The latest addition: Poly, the 3D-object platform, said its farewell yesterday. Google will shutter it “forever” in June 2021. 

But mixed reality isn’t entirely dead to Google: Yesterday, it also announced an AR-friendly update to its Street View app. 

• Android users with ARCore-compatible devices (Google’s AR tech platform) can “record a series of connected images” along their route. 

Big picture 

AR/VR has had its ups and downs in recent years—and not just the VR roller coaster kind. Covid-19 has lent it another chance to potentially succeed, but experts disagree on whether it’ll live up to the longstanding hype. 

Bottom line: Google’s likely playing it safe. Its rollout of AR for Street View—combined with its habit of shelving other projects in the space—suggests the company isn’t bowing out of AR. It’s just shifting toward applications that enhance already-successful products. 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Sany Heavy Industry, a Chinese industrial equipment manufacturer, sold almost 100 dump trucks during a three-hour Pinduoduo live-streaming session with 3.7 million viewers. 

Quote: “The swift development of all these vaccines could end up being the biggest scientific advance in decades—and it has been driven by people who, in another era, never would have had a chance.”—Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg Opinion. 

Read: Fintech “startup” Stripe launched Stripe Treasury, a new API that lets platforms embed financial services. Stratechery’s Ben Thompson analyzes how Stripe is integrating economic infrastructure across the internet. 

SPONSORED BY KIWICO

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Qualcomm unveiled the Spandragon 888, a flagship chip that will power most high-end Android phones in 2021. 
• Over 40 states will file a Facebook antitrust lawsuit next week, Reuters reports.
• Related: The Justice Department is scrutinizing FB’s VR business practices for anticompetitive behavior, per Bloomberg.  
• Microsoft is tweaking its 365 Productivity Score to anonymize users after an outcry that the new metric was simply a Trojan horse for workplace surveillance.
• S&P Dow Jones Indices will launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021. 

GOING PHISHING

Four of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

1. The FBI hired 140 robots for document retrieval. 
2. A restaurant chain is using AI to help make specialty sushi. 
3. A Chinese submarine reached the deepest place on Earth. 
4. Sony will deliver one lucky winner a PS5 via drone.
5. A third monolith appeared and then reportedly vanished in California. 

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For dunking on yourself: A programmer created a self-quoting tweet. 

For Google-Maps-is-becoming-a-super-app thought leadership: It is Ryan’s favorite pastime. This week, Google Maps launched a newsfeed and the crowdsourcing Street View tool described above.  

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• DeepMind’s breakthrough 
• Diem’s potential January launch
• Trends to watch in e-commerce 

GOING PHISHING ANSWER

No dice on PS5 drone delivery. Sorry we got your hopes up.