Sunshine and moonbeams, motherfuckers
Sora, Willow, Reddit Answers, and what the hell is this C3.AI patent?
I dubbed today’s newsletter ‘Sunshine and moonbeams, motherfuckers’ because I want to emphasize that I am excited. The future is bright; we’re coming up with incredibly exciting things; and we’re going to new places. Hell yes.
📈 Trending Up: Stability at Stability … global internet traffic … being bigger than the bullies … bullshit legal theories … elder care …
Interest in Bluesky, at least amongst CO readers: Around two-thirds of y’all voted that we should only have a Bluesky account, one fifth of you want both, and just one in eight readers want CO only on X. Both. We’ll do both.
📉 Trending Down: Data center water demand? … buying new … Chinese imports, exports growth … Oracle stock, after earnings … Moxie …
That said, here’s Oracle CEO Safra Catz: “Record level AI demand drove Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue up 52% in Q2, a much higher growth rate than any of our hyperscale cloud infrastructure competitors Growth in the AI segment of our Infrastructure business was extraordinary—GPU consumption was up 336% in the quarter.”
Sora and Willow
We’re currently living in an age of wonders:
It’s never been cheaper and easier to get to space.
Our species is increasingly active and present outside of our gravity well.
Cars are starting to drive themselves en masse.
Humanoid robots at price points not too far out of the reach of middle-class consumers are maturing.
You can riff and chatter with you computer that is now also a research tool, buddy, and sous artist for free.
Put another way: we’re going further, faster, with more bolted-on intelligence than ever before. Mix in the species-impressive work of getting solar power to a price point competitive with legacy production methods and material (materials?) progress in energy storage, and the future is looking both bright and to, some degree, clean.
As a curmudgeon by nature, I am often too busy with my own thoughts and overwrought personal misery to appreciate the above facts. I wrote them down for both of us. And we’re not nearly done yet.
Yesterday two things happened that underscore the point:
OpenAI released Sora, its AI video creation service.
Google announced a major breakthrough in quantum computing thanks to its Willow chip.
The release of Sora is itself a corporate moment as much as it is a technological event; OpenAI is not the only AI company working on machine-generated video. But Sora has long held technologist attention thanks to its perceived quality. An overview by well-known technology noodler MKBHD goes over its current high and low points here.
I remain locked out from Sora, I think because I have not personally tried to invest $1 billion into OpenAI. Kidding aside, when I am deigned worthy of access, expect some reports from the front.
But soon, very soon, I will be able to log onto the same platform that I can use to draw and write and reason and also create my own videos. Having once made my beer and books money in college shooting and editing videos — poorly, if I am being honest — for my university, I am enthralled by what we, humans, have come up with. Team pride and all that.
Then there’s Willow
I won’t try to break down the importance of more physical qubits per logical qubit, nor precisely how error-correction works in quantum computing. I get the concepts well enough to explain them to you over coffee; not in print.
The gist of the news however, is that as quantum computers get bigger they become more accurate. Bigger is something we can do as a species. We’re good at bigger. Just ask my neighbor who spends much of this time trying to park a full-sized, modern American pickup on a street designed for horses. Therefore, we’re going to get more accurate quantum computing over time. That’s a big damn deal!
Sadly it appears that I was born too early to go to space, travel to a different planet, or leave the Solar System let alone the Local Group. But my kids’ kids? They should be out of this world. Literally.
What is this C3.AI patent?
Reading through C3’s earnings call transcript, the following bit of chatter from CEO Tom Siebel stood out (emphasis added):
It's still early days for Generative AI adoption, but the trajectory is clear. According to Gartner, by 2028, 33% of enterprise AI software applications will include Agentic AI, up from less than 1% today. This will be a massive shift and C3.AI is uniquely positioned to lead the way.
It's a major highlight of the quarter, and it is difficult to overestimate the importance of this is the award to C3.AI of U.S. patent number 12,111,859 covering Agentic AI, which strengthens our market position dramatically. This patent protects a sophisticated system and method for orchestrating multiple AI agents using multimodal foundation models. This patent technology is integrated into the Generative AI architecture, enabling independent AI agents to retrieve information across structured and nonstructured data, reason, take actions and actionable insights. I mean, you're listening all the results.
There is no enterprise software company that is not yapping, OK, about Agentic AI and the importance of generative -- these generative -- these AI agents to their future, OK? News flash, OK. All that is covered by a C3 AI patent dated January of 2023. That is our intellectual property people, and that is an important milestone in history of enterprise AI. This is a transformative time for C3 AI.
Uh, what now? The patent — here, if you want to look at it yourself — appears to cover the enterprise application of agentic AI in particular, but as few people are discussing AI agents in consumer contexts today, that is a distinction seemingly without difference. Does C3 intend to sue the world?
If it does, can it win? And if it can win, does it unlock a simply insane revenue stream from every single enterprise AI software company on the market today?
If you are a patent expert, hit reply and fill me in. I’ll share any useful notes later this week. Credited or anonymous, per your preference.
Also I love how Tom cannot do an earnings call without sounding exasperated that he’s forced to speak to mortals.
Reddit told us
Yesterday on TWiST Jason added a Reddit story to the docket. I’d scanned the headline, but the news item therein had not snagged my attention. Mistake! Reddit just declared war on Google.