Welcome to episode 295 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!

Welp, it’s sayonara to Skype – and time to finally make the move to Teams. Hashi has officially moved to IBM, GPT 4.5 is out and people have…thoughts. Plus, Google has the career coach you need to make all your dreams come true.*

*Assuming those dreams are reasonable in a volatile economy.

• Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the cloud dreamers, and Me
• Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer
• You may say I’m a cloud dreamer, but I’m not the only one
• May the skype shut down
• Q can tell me that my python skills are bad
• How many free code assistance does Ryan need to be a good developer: ALL OF THEM
• Oops honey I spent 1M dollars on oracle
• Latest Cloud Pod Reviews: “It’s a Lemon”

01:04 On May 5, Microsoft’s Skype will shut down for good

• In what we swear is the 9th death for Skype, Microsoft has announced that after 21 years (with 13 of those years under MS Control,) Skype will be no more.
• For real this time. Really.
• May 5th is the official last day of Skype, and they’ve indicated you can continue your calls and chats in Teams.
• Starting now, you should be able to use your Skype login to get into Teams.
• For those of you who do this, you’ll see all your existing contacts and chats in Teams.
• Alternatively, you can export your Skype data, specifically contacts, call history and chats.
• Current subscribers to Skype Premium services will remain active until the end, but you will not be able to sign up for Skype at this time.
• Skype dial pad credits will remain active in the web interface and inside Teams after May 5th so you can finish using those credits.

03:37 Matthew – “I think there’s a lot of people and, you know, at least people I know in other countries to still use Skype, like pretty heavily for like cross country communications, things along those lines. So I think a lot of that is that there probably is still a good amount of people using it. And this is just, Hey, they’re trying to make it nicely. So how, you know, nice and clean cut over for people versus, you know, the Apple method of it just doesn’t work anymore. Good luck.”

04:41 HashiCorp officially joins the IBM family

• IBM has finished the acquisition of HashiCorp, which they had announced last year.
• Armon Dadgar wrote a blog post reflecting on the journey that Hashicorp has been on; he talks about the future and that his goal is to have Hashicorp in every datacenter.
• He says while they have made strides towards that goal, he feels incredibly optimistic with IBM, since they gain access to their global scale and increased R&D resources.
• There are also integration opportunities of IBM and the RedHat Portfolio....

Welcome to episode 294 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy!Ilya Boy, do we have a news packed week for you! Sutskever raised $30B without a product, Mira Murati launched her own AI lab, and Claude 3.7 now thinks before it speaks. Meanwhile, Microsoft casually invented new matter for quantum computing, Google built an AI scientist, and AWS killed Chime (RIP). At this rate, AI is either going to save the world or speedrun becoming Ultron. Let’s all find out together – today on The Cloud Pod!

• Ding – Chime is Dead
• Does your container really need 192 cores
• Quantum is the new AI
• AI is now IN the robots

02:41 Ilya Sutskever’s Startup in Talks to Raise Financing at $30 Billion Valuation

• It’s been a minute since we talked about former OpenAI executives and what they’re up to.
• Let’s start with Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, post Open AI career
• The Information reports that Ilya Suskevers’ startup “Safe Superintelligence” is in talks to raise $1Billion in a round that would value the startup at $30 Billion.
• The company has yet to release a product, but based on the name we can guess what they’re working on…

03:22 Ryan – “It’s so nuts to me that they can raise that much without – really just an idea. Doesn’t have to have any proof or POC…”

07:07 Murati Joins Crowded AI Startup Sector

• Mira Murati confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in AI, by revealing her lab Thinking Machine Labs.
• Murati has lured away two thirds of her team from OpenAI.
• We’ll be waiting to see how the funding goes for this one.

08:02 Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code

• Anthropic is releasing their latest model Claude 3.7 Sonnet, their most intelligent model to date and the first hybrid reasoning model on the market.
• Claude 3.7 sonnet can produce near instant responses or extended, step by step thinning that is made visible to the user.
• API users also have fine grained control over how long the model can think for.
• Claude 3.7 shows particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development.
• In addition to the new model they have introduced a command line tool for Agentic Coding, Claude Code.
• Claude code is available as a limited research preview and enables developers to delegate substantial engineering tasks directly from the terminal (Justin reall...

Welcome to episode 293 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week we’ve got a lot of new and, surprise, a new installment of Cloud Journey AND and aftershow – so make sure to stay tuned for that! We’ve got undersea cables, Go 1.24, Wasm, Anthropic and more.

• Lets Go!
• Under Sea cables make AI go BRRRRRR
• The CloudPod says it will grow the listeners by 10x by 2027

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

01:30 Go 1.24 is released!

• Go 1.24 has been released with a bunch of improvements!
• Go now fully supports generic type aliases.
• It also includes several performance improvements to the runtime that have reduced CPU overhead by 2-3% on average across a suite of representative benchmarks. (Say that 5 times fast.)
• Tool improvements around tool dependencies for a module.
• The standard library now includes new mechanisms to facilitate FIPS-140-3 compliance. And you know we love some good FIPS-140-3 compliance.
• Lastly, it includes some improved WebAssembly support – which we’ll talk about later.

04:46 Unlocking global AI potential with next-generation subsea infrastructure

• Meta announced their most ambitious subsea cable endeavor: Project Waterworth.
• Once the cable is completed, the project will reach five major continents and span over 50,000 KM (longer than the earth’s circumference) making it the world’s longest subsea cable project using the highest-capacity technology available.
• It will bring connectivity to the US, India, Brazil, South Africa, as well as other key regions.
• Waterworth will be a multi-billion dollar, multi-year investment to strengthen the scale and reliability of the world’s digital highways by opening three new oceanic corridors with the abundant, high-speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation around the world.
• Meta has apparently developed 20 subsea cables over the last decade, including multiple deployments of industry leading subsea cables of 24 fiber pairs, compared to the typical 8 to 16 pairs of other new systems .
• They are also deploying a first of its kind routing system, maximizing the cable load in deep waters at depths up to 7,000 meters and using enhanced burial techniques in high-risk fault areas, such as shallow waters near the coast, to avoid damage from ship anchors and other hazards.
• They wrap up the article by basically saying they’re doing this for AI. Color us surprised.

06:25 Ryan – “I was sort of surprised that this is where Meta is investing. I don’t think of them in that space, like I do internet providers and cloud hyperscalers.”

07:50 Sam Altman lays out roadmap for OpenAI’s long-awaited GPT-5 mode...