Top 5 stories of the week: Generative AI advancements, AIops, Web3 and tech spending

Generative AI continues to be a focus across industries. With developments that transform simple text prompts into imagery, video and even 3D animation — the technology opens up immense creative potential. 

Some of the excitement around generative AI is even surprising to Dave Rogenmoser, CEO of Jasper, one of the several companies now in the “text-to” space. He’s confident that generative AI will “impact every tool out there,” as its uses continue to progress.

Though many players are entering the generative AI race, one thing they all have in common is their use of diffusion models — which can enhance the technology’s creative outputs.  

On another end of the AI spectrum came news from Red Hat and IBM. The two announced plans this week to further automation and AIops via an open-source project. The companies claim it’s the first project to create an intelligent, NLP capability for Ansible and IT automation.

Another partnership emerged in the tech zeitgeist this week as well — one between Equifax and Oasis Labs. The two have partnered to use blockchain technology to verify Web3 identities, which some say may add credibility to the Web3 ecosystem overall.

All of this week’s news comes underscored by a recent survey from Battery Ventures revealed that despite the economic downturn, 54% of C-suite executives say they still plan to expand tech budgets for the coming year.

Here’s more from our top 5 tech stories of the week:

1. Red Hat and IBM team up to enhance AIops with an open-source projectRed Hat has new plans for Ansible with its other initiative, Project Wisdom. The company is aiming to take automation to the next level with IBM Research. Red Hat, which is owned by IBM, refers to Project Wisdom as the first community project to create an intelligent, natural language processing (NLP) capability for Ansible and the IT automation industry.

   Tom Anderson, VP and GM for Red Hat’s Ansible Business Unit, said Project Wisdom’s future is what he considers “real AIops, where decisions are being made and content and automation decisions are being created in real-time using AI.”

2. Generative AI will ‘impact every tool out there,’ says Jasper CEO

   For Dave Rogenmoser, CEO of AI content platform Jasper — which raised $125 million in funding last week — the level of enthusiasm around generative AI was unexpected. Jasper’s announcement came just one day after Stability AI, which developed its text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion and announced it had raised $101 million.

   “I didn’t know Stability was going to announce on Monday — and then ours stacking on that definitely hyped up the whole market,” he said.

   But Rogenmoser says that hype aside, generative AI — which describes artificial intelligence using unsupervised learning algorithms to create new digital images, video, audio, text or code — is no flash in the pan.

3. Oasis Labs and Equifax turn to blockchain to verify Web3 user identities

   This week, privacy blockchain provider Oasis Labs announced a partnership with Equifax to co-develop a Web3 ‘know your customer’ (KYC) solution, which will provide a blockchain-driven identity management and verification solution for companies adopting this new iteration of the World Wide Web.

   The partnership between Oasis and a prominent legacy financial provider like Equifax has the potential to add new credibility to the Web3 ecosystem, and this new identity verification service.

   “We are working to not only build a better, more efficient decentralized identity and on-chain KYC solution, but to help accelerate the adoption of Web3 and bring more trust to the industry,” said Dawn Song, founder of Oasis Labs.

4. How diffusion models unlock new possibilities for generative creativity
   
   Generative artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to gain popularity and recognition. The emergence of text-to architectures is fueling this adoption further, with generative AI models such as Google’s Imagen Video, Meta’s Make-A-Video and others like DALL-E, MidJourney and Stable Diffusion.

   A common denominator among all generative AI architectures is the use of a method known as the diffusion model. Using diffusion models for generative AI can aid in leveraging several unique capabilities, including creating diverse images and text rendering in different artistic styles, 3D understanding and animation.

5. Report: Tech spending is holding strong, though priorities shifting
   
   A recent survey from Battery Ventures of 100 technology buyers across industries revealed that while companies are changing their tech-buying habits, their overall budgets won’t shrink. In fact, most budgets are expanding or will continue to expand in the next year and beyond.

   Despite ongoing economic uncertainty, the majority of CXOs – 54% – plan to increase their total technology budgets next year.