Amazon Right on Q 🤖💼

👀 TLDR:

In this week’s What’s Appening, we have all the latest from AWS re:Invent 2023. The biggest annual event in the cloud industry is in Vegas this week, and CEO Adam Selipsky put on a show by announcing Q, effectively Amazon’s (enterprise-focused) answer to ChatGPT. We also have news that Sam Altman is back as OpenAI CEO. That was quick! But what does it mean for OpenAI and its stewardship of ChatGPT? Also this week, we cast our beady eye on Bluesky, which is patiently playing the long game as it looks to build the go-to decentralized social media platform. We also have quick takes on X and the country with the fastest internet in the world. Our Stat is also from re:Invent, and What’s dAppening has a peek at the new cross-platform NFT wallet from Magic Eden.

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Takes 🎬

🤖💼 Amazon Q: The Chatbot for Work Unveiled at AWS Re:Invent

As we arrive in your inbox this week, Amazon is hosting AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas where their biggest event on the cloud calendar is celebrating its 12th year. AI was the talk of the town at the Keynote earlier today, where AWS CEO Adam Selipsky seized the moment to throw a little shade at Microsoft/OpenAI: "You don't want a cloud provider that is beholden to one model provider. The events of the past 10 days have made that very clear.” After nods of approval from some of AWS’s biggest customers including NVIDIA and Pfizer, we finally got the big unveil – Amazon Q. Amazon’s answer to ChatGPT, Q is a business-focused chatbot that can answer questions, search documents, analyze data, and connect with a host of applications and business tools, including your custom data and code within AWS. If you want to see a preview of Q, you can check it out here. There were other proclamations this morning - mostly related to how much better AWS is than everyone else 🤔 (check out our stat below!) and there’ll be more announcements as the week progresses. We’ll cover the pick of them next week, but till then, we’ll be mostly wrapping our heads around Q, this latest contender in the Chatbot wars. #AmazonQ Read more here.

🛞🔙 OpenAI – Sam Altman Agrees in Principle to Return as CEO

Mere hours after we sent last week’s edition of your favorite tech newsletter, leading with the story of Sam Altman’s explosive dismissal from OpenAI, a huge U-turn was announced (helped no doubt by a revolt by OpenAI employees), bringing Sam back to the fold. Most of the board that dismissed Altman will now be dismissed themselves, and the company itself will see major restructuring at the C-suite level. Yet, many questions remain unanswered, including the reasons for Altman’s dismissal in the first place. There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny on OpenAI in the coming weeks, and the rumor mill is in overdrive debating the direction of the company and its stewardship of ChatGPT. We don’t think we have seen the end of the OpenAI drama. #SamsBack Read more here.

🌼↗️ Bluesky – Decentralized Social Media Platform Starts to Bloom

Bluesky, the decentralized Twitter-like platform, hit a significant milestone this week – 2 million users. That might not seem much compared to the big players like Twitter and Facebook, but Bluesky remains invite-only. The patient roll-out is deliberate and strategic. Bluesky still lacks many of the basic features you’d expect from a social media platform – it’s still kind of in beta – but they are being added here and there. Soon that will include its “federation phase,” i.e., the ability for users to set up their own servers and communities through the AT Protocol (Bluesky’s open-source network). It might take a few years, but the patient approach by the Jack Dorsey-backed platform to provide the Twitter alternative many of us crave might pay off. #BlueskyMatures Read more here.

📰 Elon is bringing news headlines back. It was a terrible idea in the first place, but the decision to remove embedded headlines from Twitter/X posts from news organizations looks like it will be reversed. You can get the details here.

🥇China now has the fastest internet in the world. China achieved record breaking internet speeds, clocking in at 1.2 TB per second, enough to download 150 full-length movies in a jiffy. It has been achieved by a huge fiber-optic cable network stretching from Beijing to southern cities. Read about it here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 80%

🦄 📈 AWS Re:Invent: 80% of Unicorns Run on AWS

Hot off the press: Just a few hours ago, at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, CEO Adam Selipsky proclaimed that with over 3x the capacity of any other cloud provider, 80% of so-called unicorns (businesses worth $1B or more) run their technology on AWS infrastructure. Now, we’re not saying that this is the reason why AWS is our weapon of choice here at 3Advance, but we do keep great company. #UnicornsRoamOnAmazon. Read more here.

🕸️ What’s dAppening?

🪄🎨 NFTs – Magic Eden Launches Cross-Chain NFT and Crypto Wallet

Fragmentation is still one of the biggest challenges facing web3. Owning crypto and NFTs based on different blockchains might mean having several wallets. Magic Eden is looking to solve that problem with its unique self-custody wallet and browser extension, which can host NFTs from four different networks – Bitcoin (Ordinals NFTs really took off in 2023), Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon. The extension will arrive for Google Chrome first, followed by Safari. A mobile app is in the works and will probably arrive next year. #MagicNFTs Read more here.

Meanwhile at 3Advance...

Big shout out this week to one of our favorite clients, Boaturu! Boaturu is the all-in-one boat rental management software for marinas. The site went live earlier this year, promising to bring much-needed tech to an industry that’s underserved. As the season draws to a close for Boaturu’s current customers, last week, Co-founders Kent and Sebastian hit the conference circuit - first stop: Kentucky & Tennessee Marina Associations Annual Conference and Trade Show. 2024 is looking to be a big year for Team Boaturu, and we’re excited to be along for the ride. Nice work fellas!

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