by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
AI is supercharging coding — and developers are embracing it.
In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers said that they use AI tools as part of their development processes now and 26% plan to soon. Gartner estimates that over half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-driven coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use coding assistants in some form by 2028.
Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’ t use AI in their workflows. “Software engineering remains a difficult and all-too-often tedious and frustrating job, particularly at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “AI can improve software quality, team productivity and help restore the joy of programming.”
So Ostrovsky decided to build the AI-powered coding platform that he himself would want to use.
That platform is Augment , and on Wednesday it emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding at a near-unicorn ($977 million) post-money valuation. With investments from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs including Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment aims to shake up the still-nascent market for generative AI coding technologies.
“Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile, complex and expensive to maintain with development teams bogged down with long backlogs for feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades,” Ostrovsky said. “Augment has both the best team and recipe for empowering programmers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software quicker.”
Ostrovsky spent nearly seven years at Microsoft before joining Pure Storage, a startup developing flash data storage hardware and software products, as a founding engineer. While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system the company never released but whose concepts have made their way into other Microsoft projects over the last decade.
In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify.
Augment remains a strangely hush-hush operation.
In our conversation, Ostrovsky wasn’t willing to say much about the user experience or even the generative AI models driving Augment’s features (whatever they may be) — save that Augment is using fine-tuned “industry-leading” open models of some sort.
He did say how Augment plans to make money: standard software-as-a-service subscriptions. Pricing and other details will be revealed later this year, Ostrovsky added, closer to Augment’s planned GA release.
“Our funding provides many years of runway to continue to build what we believe to be the best team in enterprise AI,” he said. “We’re accelerating product development and building out Augment’s product, engineering and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for rapid growth.”
Rapid growth is perhaps the best shot Augment has at making waves in an increasingly cutthroat industry.
Practically every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has AWS’ CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded from Duet AI for Developers.
Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic , Tabnine , Codegen , Refact , TabbyML , Sweep , Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released their own . So did Sentry (albeit with more of a cybersecurity bent).
Can they all — plus Augment now — do business harmoniously together? It seems unlikely. Eye-watering compute costs alone make the AI coding assistant business a challenging one to maintain. Overruns related to training and serving models forced generative AI coding startup Kite to shut down in December 2022. Even Copilot loses money , to the tune of around $20 to $80 a month per user, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Ostrovsky implies that there’s momentum behind Augment already; he claims that “h undreds” of software developers across “dozens” of companies, including payment startup Keeta (which is also Eric Schmidt-backed), are using Augment in early access. But will the uptake sustain? That’s the million-dollar question, indeed.
I also wonder if Augment has made any steps toward solving the technical setbacks plaguing code-generating AI, particularly around vulnerabilities.
An analysis by GitClear, the developer of the code analytics tool of the same name, found that coding assistants are resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases, creating headaches for software maintainers. Security researchers have warned that generative coding tools can amplify existing bugs and exploits in projects. And Stanford researchers have found that developers who accept code recommendations from AI assistants tend to produce less secure code.
Then there’s copyright to worry about.
Augment’s models were undoubtedly trained on publicly available data, like all generative AI models — some of which may’ve been copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Some vendors have argued that fair use doctrine shields them from copyright claims while at the same time rolling out tools to mitigate potential infringement. But that hasn’t stopped coders from filing class action lawsuits over what they allege are open licensing and IP violations.
To all this, Ostrovsky says: “Current AI coding assistants don’t adequately understand the programmer’s intent, improve software quality nor facilitate team productivity, and they don’t properly protect intellectual property. Augment’s engineering team boasts deep AI and systems expertise. We’re poised to bring AI coding assistance innovations to developers and software teams.”
Augment, which is based in Palo Alto, has around 50 employees; Ostrovsky expects that number to double by the end of the year.
by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
JioCinema, the popular Indian on-demand video-streaming service, introduced a new monthly subscription plan on Wednesday, with the lowest tier costing just 35 cents. The revamp in the pricing strategy comes as the market-leading service seeks to exert greater pressure on rivals including Netflix and Prime Video and “redefine the narrative of premium entertainment.”
The service — backed by Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani — introduced two monthly tiers: 89 Indian rupees ($1), featuring support for four simultaneous screen access, and Rs 29, with single-screen access. Apart from the simultaneous viewing, both tiers offer identical features, including an ad-free experience, as well as the ability to stream in 4K and download for offline viewing.
JioCinema Premium also includes access to everything else on the platform, which includes a vast library of content from Peacock, HBO, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery .
Ambani’s JioCinema secures NBCUniversal titles, escalates Netflix and Disney rivalry
JioCinema had launched an annual premium tier with the international catalog at Rs 999 last year. Viacom18, the parent firm of JioCinema, is discontinuing the earlier tier, and those who had subscribed to it will be automatically switched over to the new plan, according to the spokesperson.
Sports content, including the ongoing cricket tournament Indian Premier League, will remain free to stream, but with ads. (The premium tier will not remove ads from the live sports content.)
The revamp in the pricing follows Ambani’s Reliance — which owns the majority of Viacom18 — merging its media business with the local unit of Disney earlier this year. The joint venture, whose value has been pegged at $8.5 billion, stands to capture 85% of India’s on-demand streaming service audience and about half of the TV viewers, according to analysts. Disney operates the popular streaming service Hotstar in India and Southeast Asia.
JioCinema is also undercutting rivals Netflix and Prime Video with its new 35-cent premium tier, a fraction of their cheapest plans priced at $2.40 and $2.15, respectively, in India.
Reliance and Disney also agreed two years ago to spend about $6 billion on the five-year streaming and broadcasting rights of Indian Premier League. Though Viacom18 plans to continue to offer an ad-supported Indian Premier League streaming experience at no charge to consumers, it does plan to recover much of the investment it has made in the next three years.
“Creating and building an entertainment ecosystem with a product that is made for every Indian household, is not just a business strategy, but a vision to empower our country and users with an unmatched entertainment experience,” said Kiran Mani, CEO of Viacom18 Digital, in a statement. “JioCinema Premium aims to redefine the narrative of premium entertainment for every Indian while building a daily viewing habit.”
Disney’s Hotstar tops 50 million concurrent viewers in India-New Zealand cricket clash
by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
If there’s one overarching takeaway from last night’s Rabbit R1 launch event, it’s this: Hardware can be fun again. After a decade of unquestioned smartphone dominance, there is, once again, excitement to be found in consumer electronics. The wisdom and longevity of any individual product or form factor — while important — can be set aside for a moment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.
Despite flying out of an airport on a monthly basis, last night was my first night at the TWA Hotel nestled among the labyrinthian turnoffs of JFK’s Terminal 5. One rarely stays at hotels where they live, after all. The space is a nod to another era, when people dressed up to board flights and smiling chefs carved up entire legs of ham .
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Image Credits: Brian Heater
A rented DeLorean decked in Rabbit branding was parked out front, serving as a postmodern homage to the event’s decade-agnostic embrace of the past. Less glaring was the Ritchie Valens song sandwiched between Motown hits on the elevator speakers as we rode three floors down to the subterranean event space.
Hundreds of attendees were already lined up by the time I arrived at the space. Familiar faces from the world of tech journalism mulled about, but a considerable number were excited early adopters. The two groups were distinguished with “Press” and “VIP” lanyards, respectively. A man standing in front of me in the queue volunteered that he had flown out from Los Angeles specifically for the event.
Like Humane, the team at Rabbit is clearly invested in spectacle. The approaches are similar, but different, with the former investing a good deal of funding into viral videos, including an eclipse teaser that clearly fancied itself a kind of spiritual successor to Apple’s famous “1984” spot. One gets the sense, however, that Rabbit genuinely didn’t anticipate just how much of a buzz the company’s CES 2024 debut would generate.
“When we started building r1, we said internally that we’d be happy if we sold 500 devices on launch day,” the company posted on X . “In 24 hours, we already beat that by 20x!”
It would have been difficult to time the release better. Generative AI hype had reached a fever pitch. Humane had unveiled but had yet to release its Ai Pin. Intel was declaring 2024 the year of the AI PC and soon enough, Samsung would be doing the same for the smartphone. Apple, meanwhile, was promising its own big news on that front in the coming months .
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Image Credits: Brian Heater
When putting on a big show, a tech company also needs to dress the part. The focus on product design is another key parallel between Rabbit and Humane. While the form factors are vastly different, both the Ai Pin and R1 are testaments to value of industrial design. For its part, Rabbit took a page out of the Nothing playbook , contracting the stalwarts at Teenage Engineering to create a wildly original-looking product. Indeed, the R1 looks as much like an art piece as anything. It’s a squat, orange object — something you might want to mount to the handlebars of your bicycle for inclement weather.
While the Ai Pin’s defining physical characteristic is its absence of a display, Rabbit embraces the screen — if only modestly so. The display is a mere 2.88 inches and at times feels almost incidental to the cause. That goes double for its touch functionality. While, much like the Ai Pin, a bulk of your interactions are performed with voice, a combination analog scroll and button mostly fill in the gaps.
Beyond entering a Wi-Fi password, there aren’t a ton of reasons to touch the screen. That’s for the best. The most monumental and ongoing task facing the nascent AI device space is justifying its existence outside of the smartphone. After all, anyone with a half-decent mobile device (and plenty of non-decent ones) has access to generative AI models. These are largely accessed via browsers or stand-alone apps at the moment, but models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini will be increasingly baked into mobile operating systems in the months and years to come.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Image Credits: Brian Heater
When I posed the question to Humane, co-founder and CEO Bethany Bongiorno offered the following anecdote: “[Humane’s co-founders] had gone to this dinner, and there was a family sitting next to us. There were three kids and a mom and dad, and they were on their phones the entire time. It really started a conversation about the incredible tool we built, but also some of the side effects.”
The Ai Pin’s absence of a screen is, in essence, a feature. Again, there’s plenty of cause to question the wisdom and efficacy of that design decision, but regardless, it’s crucial to the product. It’s worth noting that at $199, the barrier of price justification is significantly lower than the Ai Pin’s asking price.
Brian Heater
Brian Heater
The truth is that, at this early first-gen stage, novelty is a massive selling point. You either see the appeal of a devoted LLM accessing device or you don’t. Rabbit’s relatively affordable price point opens this world quite a bit. You should also consider that the R1 doesn’t require a monthly service fee, whereas Humane is charging you $24/month for functionality. That, coupled with the (albeit limited) touchscreen and really stellar design, and you can understand why the product has taken a good bit of wind out of the Ai Pin’s sails.
Neither of the devices trade in apps the way modern smartphones do. You interact exclusively with the onboard operating system. This can, however, be connected to other accounts, including Spotify, Uber, Midjourney and DoorDash. The system can take voice recordings and do bidirectional translations. The system can also gain environmental context via the onboard camera.
The Rabbit R1’s AI vision feature is a mixed bag. It also varies quite a bit from capture to capture, including the details it recognizes and the context it offers. (Apologies for the construction noise) pic.twitter.com/lf7WcOt8Rz
— Brian Heater (@bheater) April 24, 2024
Among the first tests I threw at it was offering a description of my bookshelf. I pointed the camera at a row of four hardcovers: “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville; “The Barbary Coast” by Herbert Asbury; “Understanding Media” by Marshall McLuhan; and “Dodsworth” by Sinclair Lewis. It universally had difficulty with the last book — understandably, as it was the least clear of the group.
It largely spotted and understood what it was seeing with “Moby Dick,” calling it a “classic” and sometimes offering a brief synopsis. It recognized the middle two books 50% to 75% of the time. It also attempted to offer some context as to the curatorial choices and sometimes went out on a limb to compliment said curation.
There were times, however, when the context was a bit much. I asked the R1 when the Oakland A’s are playing (I added the city after an initial inquiry for just “A’s” showed up as “Ace”), and it gave me tonight’s game time, before running down a list of the next 10 or so teams they’re playing. But hey, I’m a lifelong A’s fan. I relish such defeats.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Something worth noting for all of these early-stage write-ups is that these sorts of devices are designed to improve and customize results the more you use them. I’m writing this after having only picked up the device last night. I’m going to send it off to Devin for a more in-depth write-up.
Having only played around with the R1 for a few hours, I can definitively tell you that it’s a more accessible device than the Humane Pin, courtesy of the touchscreen and price. It doesn’t solve the cultural screen obsession Humane is interested in — nor does it seem to be shooting for such grandiose ambitions in the first place. Rather, it’s a beautifully designed product that offers a compelling insight into where things may be headed.
by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
IBM wisely gravitated away from trying to be a pure cloud infrastructure vendor years ago, recognizing that it could never compete with the big three: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It has since moved on to helping IT departments manage complex hybrid environments, using its financial clout to acquire a portfolio of high-profile companies.
It began with the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition in 2018, continued with the Apptio acquisition last year and it kept it going on Wednesday when the company announced that it would be acquiring cloud management vendor HashiCorp for $6.4 billion.
With HashiCorp, Big Blue gets a set of cloud lifecycle management and security tools, and a company that is growing considerably faster than any of IBM’s other businesses — although the revenue is small by IBM standards: $155 million last quarter, up 15% over the prior year. That still makes it a healthy and growing business for IBM to add to its growing stable of hybrid cloud tools.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna certainly sees the value of this piece to his company’s hybrid strategy, and he even threw in an AI reference for good measure. “HashiCorp has a proven track record of enabling clients to manage the complexity of today’s infrastructure and application sprawl. Combining IBM’s portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp’s capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era,” he said in a statement.
HashiCorp made headlines last year when it changed the license on its open source Terraform tool to be more friendly to the company. The community that helped build Terraform wasn’t happy and responded by launching a new open source alternative called OpenTofu. HashiCorp recently accused the new community of misusing Terraform’s open source code when it created the OpenTofu fork. Now that the company is part of IBM, it will be interesting to see if they continue to pursue this line of thinking.
It’s worth noting that Red Hat also made headlines last year when it changed its open source licensing terms , also causing consternation in the open source community. Perhaps these companies will fit well together, both from a software perspective and their shifting views on open source.
Just this week, the company introduced a new platform concept with the release of the Infrastructure Cloud , a concept that should fit nicely inside IBM’s hybrid cloud product catalog. While they didn’t add much in terms of functionality, it did unify the offerings under a single umbrella, making it easier for sales and marketing to present to customers.
Why SUSE is forking Red Hat Enterprise Linux
If IBM treats HashiCorp in a similar way to Red Hat, the company would maintain its independence inside the IBM family of products. AVOA, a research firm run by former CIO Tim Crawford, says the company would be wise to keep it neutral.
“My reservation would be if IBM moves away from Hashicorp’s neutral stance in working with multiple cloud providers and focuses on IBM Cloud. I suspect that would not be the case as IBM has recently shown how they are more open with other cloud providers,” Crawford wrote in a recent blog post .
HashiCorp was founded in 2012 and raised almost $350 million before going public in 2021.
by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
Anduril Industries has taken another step forward in its quest to become the next great American prime, this time by beating out major defense companies to develop and test small unmanned fighter jet prototypes.
The venture capital darling beat out Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman on the deal, under the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. General Atomics was the other awardee out of the group of five.
Anduril and General Atomics will design, manufacture and test “production representative test articles” as part of the contract work, the Air Force said in a statement. Eventually, the Air Force will make a final, multibillion-dollar production decision in fiscal year 2026 and have fully operational aircraft from suppliers before the end of the decade. It is unclear if the Air Force will select more than one company to deliver production aircraft.
The deal could prove very lucrative for Anduril: Eventually, the CCA program aims to deliver at least 1,000 combat aircraft, which will fly in concert with manned platforms, like the F-35, and deliver their own weapons. The CCA program is part of an Air Force initiative called Next Generation Air Dominance; the aim is to modernize the entire fleet of flying systems, including piloted aircraft (Boeing and Lockheed are still in the running for manned system contracts).
At the center of Anduril’s victory is Fury, an autonomous air vehicle that it acquired when it bought North Carolina-based Blue Force Technologies last year. Anduril moved from acquisition of the tech to winning a major defense award with it in less than a year.
Seven-year-old Anduril was valued at $8.5 billion by investors, including Founders Fund, in 2022, when it announced its $1.48 billion Series E. The outfit’s famous 31-year-old co-founder, Palmer Luckey, has been outspoken about reversing the zero-sum paradigm that has dominated defense spending — which is to say, the defense primes win and the taxpayer loses — by building cheaper assets at a much faster pace.
“Anduril’s work on this program is just beginning,” Anduril SVP Jason Levin said in a statement. “U.S. and allied success in the future requires CCAs to be delivered at a speed, cost, and scale to beat the pacing threat. We look forward to continuing our partnership with the U.S. Air Force to deliver this critical capability to our Airmen as quickly as possible.”
by tyler | Apr 25, 2024 | Tech
Advances in generative AI have taken the tech world by storm. Biotech investors are making a big bet that similar computational methods could revolutionize drug discovery.
On Tuesday, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs , an affiliate of Foresite Capital, announced that they incubated Xaira Therapeutics and funded the AI biotech with $1 billion. Other investors in the new company, which has been operating in stealth mode for about six months, include F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and SV Angel.
Xaira’s CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a former Stanford president and chief scientific officer at Genentech, says the company is ready to start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI. “We’ve done such a large capital raise because we believe the technology is at an inflection point where it can have a transformative effect on the field,” he said.
The advances in foundational models come from the University of Washington’s Institute of Protein Design, run by David Baker, one of Xaira’s co-founders. These models are similar to diffusion models that power image generators like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney. But rather than creating art, Baker’s models aim to design molecular structures that can be made in a three-dimensional, physical world.
While Xaira’s investors are convinced that the company can revolutionize data design, they emphasized that generative AI applications in biology are still in the early innings.
Vik Bajaj, CEO of Foresite Labs and managing director of Foresite Capital, said that unlike in technology, where data that train AI models is created by consumers, biology and medicine are “data poor. You have to create the datasets that drive model development.”
Other biotech companies using generative AI to design drugs include Recursion , which went public in 2021, and Genesis Therapeutics, a startup that last year raised a $200 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The company declined to say when it expects to have its first drug available for human trials. However, ARCH Venture Partners managing director Bob Nelsen underscored that Xaira and its investors are ready to play the long game.
“You need billions of dollars to be a real drug company and also think AI. Both of those are expensive disciplines,” he said.
Xaira wants to position itself as a powerhouse of AI drug discovery. However, some view bringing on Tessier-Lavigne as CEO as an unexpected move. Tessier-Lavigne resigned just seven months ago from his position as Stanford president following explosive reports — including in the Stanford Daily — that his laboratory at Genetech had manipulated research data.
Tessier-Lavigne was not himself accused of manipulating any data and denied knowing there was falsified research being published by his colleagues.
Indeed, after a special committee of Stanford’s Board of Trustees initiated a review related to Tessier-Lavigne’s scientific research, he let it be known that the panel concluded he “did not engage in any fraud or falsification of scientific data.” Still, as he wrote in his last public communication from Stanford last summer, “[a]lthough the report clearly refutes the allegations of fraud and misconduct that were made against me,” the investigation itself had become so big a distraction that he decided to step down “for the good of the University.”
Investors don’t seem bothered by the events. They say they’re confident that Tessier-Lavigne — who left Genentech in 2011 to lead Rockefeller University, then joined Stanford in 2016 — is the right person for the job.
“I have known Marc for many years and know him to be a person of integrity and scientific vision who will be an exceptional CEO,” Nelsen said in an email. “Stanford exonerated him of any wrongdoing or scientific misconduct.”
