Jen Larsen

AI regulation has always been a hot topic. But with AI guardrails set to be dismantled by the incoming U.S. administration, regulation has also become a big question mark. It’s more complexity and a great deal more volatility for an already complicated compliance landscape. The VentureBeat AI Impact Tour, in partnership with Capgemini, stopped in Washington D.C. to talk about the evolving risks and surprising new opportunities the upcoming regulatory environment will bring — plus insights into navigating the new, uncertain normal.

What sets VB Transform apart: It brings together over 400 corporate leaders across industries and S&P 500 companies, explores the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, and the edge we haven't invented superlatives for (yet).

Intuit had a blip of a bad moment, at the end of May, when the IRS said “free tax prep software for everyone!” But with 45 million of the 160 million total IRS returns processed last year using Intuit's TurboTax, while QuickBooks handled $300 billion in payroll, the company isn’t in any danger of vanishing into irrelevance. In fact, Intuit’s recent swings at AI are underlining, staring and italicizing its already prominent place on the map as a major player in the industry, according to Barrons, which slapped the company with an Overperfoming rating and predicted a 15% rise in stock prices.

Factfulness is not a real word, but it’s a really great one. It’s also the promise of Perplexity and its very buzzy “answer engine.” “Factfulness and accuracy is what we care about,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told The Verge back in March, and isn’t that all we ever wanted in an AI search engine? It’s got big name big fans like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who reportedly uses it almost every day, and Tobi Lütke, Shopify CEO, who has kicked Google to the curb in favor of Perplexity. Tech CEOs seem excited. Some even say Perplexity is giving Google a run for its money -- and Perplexity Chief Business officer Dmitry Shevelenko will be dishing about that during the third day of VB Transform 2024.

The health care industry generates just about 30% of all the data in all the world -- of course it’s the target of a vast number generative AI dreams from freshly founded startups ready to reap the rewards of a gen AI tool that performs medical miracles to the C-suite visionaries at major hospitals, predicting that AI will not only save lives but help sort out that tricky profit versus patients balance sheet.

Operating systems are variously defined in as many shades nuance as there are stars in the sky, because we’re all nerds here -- and this is important, stick with me. It can be defined as software that identifies and configures physical and logical devices, or defined as software with assistant, management and monitoring capabilities, or defined as a revolution in the history of computing, abstracting away low-level details to put the power directly in the user’s hands, or any of a dozen other descriptions. Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of VAST Data (and speaker at VB Transform 2024), says AI requires a whole new kind of OS revolution in the enterprise — one that starts with a scalable data platform that can handle vast amounts of structured and unstructured data.

Honestly, the question was never “will AI take over software engineering?” but “when?” Is that a bad thing? The convo is ongoing, with online free-for-alls and in-depth executive discussions at VB Transform and all. But like all tricky-complicated AI topics and to everyone’s great shock, it hasn’t pumped the brakes at all, on the endless development of new AI-powered coding tools.

Surfing the waves that Nvidia’s kicking up comes Supermicro, a company that’s long had much of its destiny (and stock prices) tied to the fortunes of the chip making giant. Data centers need server rack solutions; processors need to be mounted. In the middle, Supermicro is making bank. This last quarter, its revenue shot up 200% over last year. Analysts are breathlessly predicting that the company’s top line might even double over the next fiscal year or two, while enterprises pound on the doors, demanding the AI servers that’ll help them grow, transform, revolutionize and other buzzwordy AI verbs, expanding the market at a compound annual rate of 25% through 2029.

Nvidia has just gone ahead and become the world’s most valuable company, raking in massive revenue from the GPUs it sells at truly a tremendous markup, thanks to scarcity of resources and the magic of capitalism. It’s giving continued juice to the refrain “Where are we going to get the revenue to buy the GPUs we need, and how are we going to fuel our workloads?”

The “o” in GPT-4o stands for omni, which means OpenAI has a lock on every communication channel with the release of its new flagship model. And while their new model is out here reasoning across audio, vision and text in real time, the company keeps making headlines. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly considering going for-profit, while ChatGPT is helping cure cancer and former chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever lurks in the shadows, leaving to work on his own “safe superintelligence” company, that appears to be a competitor to OpenAI. 

Uljan Sharka, founder and CEO of iGenius, has spent the last seven years working on language models and generative AI. To this point, it’s been all about the technology, from the size of the model to how much training data it uses to inference times. And what he’s learned over the past seven years, and three different development cycles, is that it’s not about the technology – it’s about how we serve human needs. And that takes a whole new way of looking at LLMs.

Within a week of being launched, ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI, had over 1 million users, growing to 100 million users in the first month. The flood of attention from the press and consumers alike comes in part because of the software's ability to offer human-like responses in everything from long-form content creation, in-depth conversations, document search, analysis and more.