This Week in Enterprise Technology, Hyoun Park and Charles Araujo critically assess last week’s biggest tech news:
- NVIDIA Makes AI More Accessible with Project Digits
- NVIDIA Nemotron: Advantage or Market Tension?
- NVIDIA, Google, and the Future of AI-Powered Robotics
- KPMG: 2025 is the Year of AI Deployment
- Open AI’s Pro Pricing Dilemma: How We’d Fix It
- Half of CIOs Struggle to Own Enterprise AI Responsibilities
- Nékojita FuFu Revolutionizes Coffee Ecosystems
NVIDIA Makes AI More Accessible with Project DIGITS
Project DIGITS provides the Blackwell GPU chip to developers starting at the relatively low cost of $3,000. Given the promise of AI and the need to understand AI, it’s hard to ignore the appeal for developers to develop and tune AI models on their own desktops without dependence on cloud-based costs. Charles and Hyoun ask if this is too good to be true.
NVIDIA Project DIGITS Press Release: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/project-digits/
NVIDIA Nemotron: Advantage or Market Tension?
NVIDIA announces a new family of models based on Meta Llama with a focus on agentic tasks and designed to support models from edge devices to data centers. Hyoun and Charles discuss their use as reference technologies and their importance in supporting NVIDIA’s leadership AI role.
Emilia David’s coverage on VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/ai/nvidias-ai-agent-play-is-here-with-new-models-orchestration-blueprints/?utm_source=AmalgamInsights
NVIDIA Nemotron Blog: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nemotron-model-families/
NVIDIA, Google, and the Future of AI-Powered Robotics
Google seeks to simulate the physical world with a new set of world models, a hot area in the startup world, but also an area where Charles and Hyoun believe Google has some unfair advantages that could lead to relatively quick success in creating interactive media and realistic simulations to support contextualized digital twin use cases.
Jess Weatherbed on The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/7/24338053/google-deepmind-world-modeling-ai-team-gaming-robot-training
KPMG: 2025 is the Year of AI Deployment
KPMG’s latest AI Quarterly Pulse Survey provided an interesting snapshot of enterprise activity associated with AI. Perhaps the most interesting data point here, which got Charles’ attention, was about the expectation of investing between $50 million and $250 million on generative AI next year. Hyoun was more interested in the adoption intentions. But all roads lead to the increasingly obvious conclusion that 2025 will be an important year for AI deployments.
Gyana Swain on CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3778320/enterprises-willing-to-spend-up-to-250-million-on-gen-ai-but-roi-remains-elusive.html?utm_source=AmalgamInsights
KPMG AI Quarterly Pulse Survey: https://kpmg.com/us/en/media/news/kpmg-ai-quarterly-pulse-survey.html
Open AI’s Pro Pricing Dilemma: How We’d Fix It
Kyle Wiggers from TechCrunch covers how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reveals that the ChatGPT Pro plan at $200 per month is not profitable. Hyoun and Charles identify several reasons why this should be expected and discuss whether OpenAI should care about having profitable products, given their inability to accurately price and structure their technologies as products.
Kyle Wiggers on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/openai-is-losing-money-on-its-pricey-chatgpt-pro-plan-ceo-sam-altman-says/
Half of CIOs Struggle to Own Enterprise AI Responsibilities
Based on a study of 125 Chief Data and AI officers, Randy Bean and Tom Davenport find that the majority of Fortune 1000 companies surveyed are not putting technology leaders in charge of AI, preferring to have this in the hands of the business or with a transformation team. Charles and Hyoun discuss the dangers of CIOs being out of the loop when it comes to leading AI efforts, both for the CIO and for the company’s AI goals
Paul Barker at CIO.com: https://www.cio.com/article/3800869/study-probes-trends-around-ai-in-the-enterprise.html
Nékojita FuFu Revolutionizes Coffee Ecosystems
Perhaps one of the most transformational technologies of our generation, Nékojita FuFu revolutionizes the world of coffee by providing multiple modes of blowing on hot food and drink. At $25, Hyoun is sold on the notion that this device will be more profitable than many AI deployments this year. Charles is more skeptical.
Brian Heater on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/this-tiny-robot-cat-will-blow-on-your-coffee-to-cool-it-off/