One of the most unexpected things to happen in May was a sudden outage at the Australian pension fund UniSuper.
After days of confusion and concern that the fund may have been hit by a cyber attack among its customer base, it emerged that Google Cloud had accidentally deleted UniSuper’s entire cloud subscription. We dive into what lessons businesses can learn from this freak event.
Also in May, OpenAI trumpeted its goal to unlock so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) through new advancements. But is such a thing even possible, and who would it benefit?
Highlights
“This is obviously something that is a nightmare scenario for any company. But in fairness to both UniSuper and Google Cloud, it was rectified fairly quickly. I can imagine there were a few people at Google Cloud and both UniSuper that were scrambling and tearing their hair out for several hours over this.”
“In our coverage of the story, we spoke to a few people in the industry who emphasize the importance of multi-cloud. It’s something that's been really growing in importance at enterprises over the last couple of years, the ability to mix and match cloud providers and hedge your bets in that regard.”
“Sam Altman, towards the end of last month revealed that they've started trainingit's next frontier large language model. Think the way that OpenAI described it was – to quote – ‘bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to artificial general intelligence’, which sounds equally exciting and ominous.”
Footnotes
- Google Cloud blames “combination of rare issues” for customer's mysterious outage
- ‘Multi-cloud all the way’: Why Google Cloud’s UniSuper fiasco shows you shouldn’t rely on a single cloud provider
- What is 'multi-cloud by design'?
- What is multi-cloud?
- Everything you need to know about GPT-4o, including pricing, features, and how to get access
- OpenAI says it’s charting a "path to AGI" with its next frontier AI model
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