Welcome to episode 294 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!Ilya Boy, do we have a news packed week for you! Sutskever raised $30B without a product, Mira Murati launched her own AI lab, and Claude 3.7 now thinks before it speaks. Meanwhile, Microsoft casually invented new matter for quantum computing, Google built an AI scientist, and AWS killed Chime (RIP). At this rate, AI is either going to save the world or speedrun becoming Ultron. Let’s all find out together – today on The Cloud Pod!

• Ding – Chime is Dead
• Does your container really need 192 cores
• Quantum is the new AI
• AI is now IN the robots

02:41 Ilya Sutskever’s Startup in Talks to Raise Financing at $30 Billion Valuation

• It’s been a minute since we talked about former OpenAI executives and what they’re up to.
• Let’s start with Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, post Open AI career
• The Information reports that Ilya Suskevers’ startup “Safe Superintelligence” is in talks to raise $1Billion in a round that would value the startup at $30 Billion.
• The company has yet to release a product, but based on the name we can guess what they’re working on…

03:22 Ryan – “It’s so nuts to me that they can raise that much without – really just an idea. Doesn’t have to have any proof or POC…”

07:07 Murati Joins Crowded AI Startup Sector

• Mira Murati confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in AI, by revealing her lab Thinking Machine Labs.
• Murati has lured away two thirds of her team from OpenAI.
• We’ll be waiting to see how the funding goes for this one.

08:02 Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code

• Anthropic is releasing their latest model Claude 3.7 Sonnet, their most intelligent model to date and the first hybrid reasoning model on the market.
• Claude 3.7 sonnet can produce near instant responses or extended, step by step thinning that is made visible to the user.
• API users also have fine grained control over how long the model can think for.
• Claude 3.7 shows particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development.
• In addition to the new model they have introduced a command line tool for Agentic Coding, Claude Code.
• Claude code is available as a limited research preview and enables developers to delegate substantial engineering tasks directly from the terminal (Justin reall...

Welcome to episode 293 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’ve got a lot of new and, surprise, a new installment of Cloud Journey AND and aftershow – so make sure to stay tuned for that! We’ve got undersea cables, Go 1.24, Wasm, Anthropic and more.

• Lets Go!
• Under Sea cables make AI go BRRRRRR
• The CloudPod says it will grow the listeners by 10x by 2027

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01:30 Go 1.24 is released!

• Go 1.24 has been released with a bunch of improvements!
• Go now fully supports generic type aliases.
• It also includes several performance improvements to the runtime that have reduced CPU overhead by 2-3% on average across a suite of representative benchmarks. (Say that 5 times fast.)
• Tool improvements around tool dependencies for a module.
• The standard library now includes new mechanisms to facilitate FIPS-140-3 compliance. And you know we love some good FIPS-140-3 compliance.
• Lastly, it includes some improved WebAssembly support – which we’ll talk about later.

04:46 Unlocking global AI potential with next-generation subsea infrastructure

• Meta announced their most ambitious subsea cable endeavor: Project Waterworth.
• Once the cable is completed, the project will reach five major continents and span over 50,000 KM (longer than the earth’s circumference) making it the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available.
• It will bring connectivity to the US, India, Brazil, South Africa, as well as other key regions.
• Waterworth will be a multi-billion dollar, multi-year investment to strengthen the scale and reliability of the world’s digital highways by opening three new oceanic corridors with the abundant, high-speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation around the world.
• Meta has apparently developed 20 subsea cables over the last decade, including multiple deployments of industry leading subsea cables of 24 fiber pairs, compared to the typical 8 to 16 pairs of other new systems .
• They are also deploying a first of its kind routing system, maximizing the cable load in deep waters at depths up to 7,000 meters and using enhanced burial techniques in high-risk fault areas, such as shallow waters near the coast, to avoid damage from ship anchors and other hazards.
• They wrap up the article by basically saying they’re doing this for AI. Color us surprised.

06:25 Ryan – “I was sort of surprised that this is where Meta is investing. I don’t think of them in that space, like I do internet providers and cloud hyperscalers.”

07:50 Sam Altman lays out roadmap for OpenAI’s long-awaited GPT-5 mode...

Welcome to episode 292 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin and Jonathan are a dynamic duo, bringing you all the latest in news – and sound effects – because it’s earnings time! Plus we’ve got new from VS Code, Azure Data Studio, CodeBuild and more.

• The Cloud Pod Renames Cloud Earnings to ‘The Gulf of Capex’
• Sorry Elon, OpenAI Doesn’t Want Your Pocket Change
• MacOS gets into the Fastlane for Oil Changes

It’s earnings time!

01:29 Alphabet is planning to spend big on AI again this year, sending shares down

• Alphabet earnings were a bit of a let down with cloud revenue missing and their announcement of spending $75 Billion in CapEx (DeepSeek who?)
• Consolidated revenue rose 12% in the period to 96.5 billion.
• Capex investments of $75b shocked analysts who expected $57.9 billion.
• EPS was 2.15 vs 2.13.
• Revenue of 96.5 billion vs 96.62 expected.
• Ad revenue rose to 72.46 billion vs 71.3, Youtube advertising revenue was 10.47 billion vs 10.22 billion.
• Google Cloud was 12.0 billion vs expectation of 12.19 billion.

02:09 Jonathan – “I’m guessing ad revenue is gonna be down again, Q1, Q2 because I think a lot of ad revenue is driven by the election season. So that’s not looking too good for them.”

03:13 Microsoft GAAP EPS of $3.23 beats by $0.13, revenue of $69.6B beats by $790M

• Microsoft followed up with also weak growth in its Azure cloud computing unit.
• EPS was 3.23 beating expectations by 0.13
• Revenue of 69.6B beating by 780M
• Intelligent cloud revenue was 25.5 billion an increase of 19%
• Microsoft indicated they plan to spend 80 Billion in CapEx for AI and data center growth.

04:02 Justin- “Also international expansion still, I think a big area too, particularly for Azure and Google and even Amazon. Like they’re all announcing more and more regions, more expansion of data centers, lots of laws that are going to pass for data sovereignty that they have to deal with. there’s, there’s spend everywhere.”

04:23 Amazon earnings recap: Stock falls as guidance falls short, CFO indicates capex of more than $100 billion in 2025

• Amazon followed its peers by indicating they will invest $100B i...