Welcome to episode 246 of The CloudPod podcast, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’re discussion localllm and just why they’ve saddled us all with that name, saying goodbye to Bard and hello to Gemini Pro, and discussing the pros and cons of helping skynet to eradicate us all. All that and more cloud and AI news, now available for your listening nightmares. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

Oracle says hold my beer on Africa

The Cloud Pod Thinks the LLM Maturity Model has More Maturing To Do

There is a Finch Windows Canary in Fargate

New LLM Nightmares

The Cloud Pod Will Never Type localllm Correctly

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless this week! Interested in sponsoring us and having access to a very specialized and targeted market? We’d love to talk to you. Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack Channel. 

General News

It’s Earnings Time! 

01:42 Microsoft issues light guidance even as Azure growth drives earnings beat 

• Microsoft shares were up after they reported earnings of 2.93 per share vs expectations of 2.73 per share.  
  • Revenue was 62.02 billion vs 61.12 billion. 
• This represents a 17.6% year over year in the quarter. 
• The intelligent cloud segment produced $25.88 billion in revenue, up 20% and above the $25.29 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by Streets Accounts. 
• Revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 30%, when analysts only expected 27.7%.  
  • Six points are tied to AI as Microsoft now has 53,000 Azure AI customers and 1/3rd are new in the past year (per Microsoft.) 

02:46 Justin- “I don’t think the count the Open AI customers, do you? Because there’s way more people that have Open AI usage than 53,000. So I think this is legitimately Azure AI – which is Open AI under the hood – but specifically paying for that subscription.”

04:19 Alphabet shares slide on disappointing Google ad revenue  

• Alphabet reported better-than-expected revenue and profit for the fourth quarter, but ad revenue trailed analysts projections. 
• Earnings per share were 1.64 vs 1.59 expected. 
  • Revenue of 86.31 billion vs 85.33 billion expected 
• Google Cloud was 9.19 Billion vs 8.94 billion expected, according to Street. 
• That represents a 26% expansion in the fourth quarter. 

04:51 Justin- “…which is interesting, because you would expect that they’d have similar growth being tied to Bard and Gemini to be close to what Microsoft is doing.”

12:02 Amazon reports better-than-expected results as revenue jumps 14% 

• Amazon also exceeded analysis expectations.  
  • Earnings per share 1.00 vs 80 cents expected.  
• Revenue