Welcome to above the clouds
GCP – How CME Group builds a faster, smarter exchange on Cloud SQL
Editor’s note: The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group) has evolved from a nineteenth-century commodities exchange into one of the most advanced financial market infrastructures in the world. To support real-time trading and risk management at a global scale, the company launched a strategic partnership with Google Cloud. By migrating to Cloud SQL and adopting AI-powered […]
AWS – Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports checkpointless training
Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports checkpointless training, a new foundational model training capability that mitigates the need for a checkpoint-based job-level restart for fault recovery. Checkpointless training maintains forward training momentum despite failures, reducing recovery time from hours to minutes. This represents a fundamental shift from traditional checkpoint-based recovery, where failures require pausing the entire […]
GCP – Sanctioned but Still Spying: Intellexa’s Prolific Zero-Day Exploits Continue
Introduction Despite extensive scrutiny and public reporting, commercial surveillance vendors continue to operate unimpeded. A prominent name continues to surface in the world of mercenary spyware, Intellexa. Known for its “Predator” spyware, the company was sanctioned by the US Government. New Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) analysis shows that Intellexa is evading restrictions and thriving. Intellexa […]
AWS – Announcing TypeScript support in Strands Agents (preview) and more
In May, we open sourced the Strands Agents SDK, an open source python framework that takes a model-driven approach to building and running AI agents in just a few lines of code. Today, we’re announcing that TypeScript support is available in preview. Now, developers can choose between Python and TypeScript for building Strands Agents. TypeScript […]
AWS – New serverless model customization capability in Amazon SageMaker AI
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces a new serverless model customization capability that empowers AI developers to quickly customize popular models with supervised fine-tuning and the latest techniques like reinforcement learning. Amazon SageMaker AI is a fully managed service that brings together a broad set of tools to enable high-performance, low-cost AI model development for any use case. […]
GCP – Building Conversational Genomics
aside_block <ListValue: [StructValue([(‘title’, ‘D I S C L A I M E R’), (‘body’, <wagtail.rich_text.RichText object at 0x7f6ea37cd850>), (‘btn_text’, ”), (‘href’, ”), (‘image’, None)])]> Modern genomics has made remarkable progress in automating the early stages of analysis. Sequencing technology continues to improve in both cost and throughput, and variant calling pipelines reliably identify millions of […]
AWS – Amazon Bedrock now supports reinforcement fine-tuning delivering 66% accuracy gains on average over base models
Amazon Bedrock now supports reinforcement fine-tuning, helping you improve model accuracy without needing deep machine learning expertise or large sums of labeled data. Amazon Bedrock automates the reinforcement fine-tuning workflow, making this advanced model customization technique accessible to everyday developers. Models learn to align with your specific requirements using a small set of prompts rather […]
AWS – Introducing elastic training on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod
Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports elastic training, enabling organizations to accelerate foundation model training by automatically scaling training workloads based on resource availability and workload priorities. This represents a fundamental shift from training with a fixed set of resources, as it saves hours of engineering time spent reconfiguring training jobs based on compute availability. Any […]
GCP – GKE Turns 10 Hackathon: Announcing the winners and highlights
The GKE Turns 10 Hackathon was an electrifying showcase of developer ingenuity! Building on the excitement from our initial announcement, the hackathon challenged participants to build powerful AI agents that interact with microservice applications using the robustness of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and the intelligence of Google AI models like Gemini. The goal was to […]
AWS – Announcing Amazon EC2 General purpose M8azn instances (Preview)
Starting today, new general purpose high-frequency high-network Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M8azn instances are available for preview. These instances are powered by fifth generation AMD EPYC (formerly code named Turin) processors, offering the highest maximum CPU frequency, 5GHz in the cloud. The M8azn instances offer up to 2x compute performance versus previous generation […]