Shubham Sharma

This article is part of VentureBeat’s special issue, “The Real Cost of AI: Performance, Efficiency and ROI at Scale.” Read more from this special issue.

Today, at its annual Data + AI Summit, Databricks announced that it is open-sourcing its core declarative ETL framework as Apache Spark Declarative Pipelines, making it available to the entire Apache Spark community in an upcoming release. 

For anyone in AI, it’s no big news that “data is the real prize.” If you have strong data foundations, your models and the applications powered by them will be right on the money.

German software giant SAP is pushing the bar on the data front to power next-gen AI use cases. The company today introduced Business Data Cloud (BDC), a new SaaS product that embraces lakehouse architecture to help teams enrich their SAP ecosystem data with external data assets from different source systems and drive long-term value.

The AI boom has set off an explosion of data. AI models need massive datasets to train on, and the workloads they power — whether internal tools or customer-facing apps — are generating a flood of telemetry data: logs, metrics, traces and more.

Data infrastructure major Snowflake today announced that it is making SnowConvert, its self-serve offering designed to help enterprises move into its data cloud ecosystem, entirely free of cost. The company also said it is expanding SnowConvert to support migrations from Amazon RedShift (in private preview).

Last week, Chinese startup DeepSeek sent shockwaves in the AI community with its frugal yet highly performant open-source release, DeepSeek-R1. The model uses pure reinforcement learning (RL) to match OpenAI’s o1 on a range of benchmarks, challenging the longstanding notion that only large-scale training with powerful chips can lead to high-performing AI. 

DeepSeek’s release of R1 this week was a watershed moment in the field of AI. Nobody thought a Chinese startup would be the first to drop a reasoning model matching OpenAI’s o1 and open-source it (in line with OpenAI’s original mission) at the same time.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, known for challenging leading AI vendors with open-source technologies, just dropped another bombshell: a new open reasoning LLM called DeepSeek-R1.

Last year, Cognition started the AI agent wave with a product called Devin — the world’s first AI engineer. The offering was under wraps for several months, but now it’s generally available and learning new chops very quickly. Case in point: the Scott Wu-led startup has just released Devin 1.2, which brings a bunch of new capabilities to take the AI engineer’s ability to handle entire development projects to a whole new level.

A few months ago, Google Cloud launched C4A as the virtual machine (VM) instances powered by Axion, its first Arm-based CPU. Now, as the next step in this work, it is debuting C4A with Titanium SSDs — its custom-designed local disks aimed at enhancing storage and performance.

Microsoft has been positioning Copilot as the “UI for AI.” The company has already launched several variants of the GPT-4o-powered assistant for business and personal users. Now, as the next step in this work, it is launching Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat — a rebranded version of its free AI chat experience for businesses, enhanced with agentic capabilities.