Showing posts with label news World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news World. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Stock futures are little changed after S&P 500 posts a fourth losing day: Live updates

 Stock futures are little changed after S&P 500 posts a fourth losing day: Live updates


Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., November 16, 2023. 

Stock futures traded near the flatline on Wednesday evening after the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite logged a fourth straight day of losses.

Futures tied to the S&P 500 added 0.04%, while Nasdaq 100 futures gained 0.1%. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were little changed.

In extended trading, credit bureau Equifax declined more than 9% on disappointing second-quarter guidance that missed Wall Street estimates. Shares of Las Vegas Sands slipped nearly 3% after first-quarter revenue narrowly beat analysts' forecasts.

Tech stocks struggled on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite registering their fourth consecutive losing session. Nvidia pulled both indexes lower, as the artificial intelligence play dropped nearly 4%. The 30-stock Dow fell for its seventh session in eight.

Wednesday's market pullback adds to a more difficult second quarter on Wall Street. All three major indexes are lower so far in April, in stark contrast to the stronger-than-expected market performance seen in the first quarter. The Dow, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq have also closed below their respective 50-day moving averages.

"The initial support for the S&P on that breakdown was 5000 or just below," JPMorgan head of technical strategy Jason Hunter said on "Closing Bell" Wednesday. "Now the question is: Does a bounce develop from there … and if it does, is it able to get back above the breakdown levels — the 50-day moving average, the area where it gapped down from?" He said he's watching the 5,150 to 5,200 level of the S&P 500 as key resistance.

On the economic front, initial jobless claims data will be due on Thursday morning, and the existing home sales report for March is also out.

Earnings season also heats up with Alaska Air Group and KeyCorp reporting results before the bell, followed by Netflix in the afternoon.

Saturday, April 13, 2024

Google goes all in on generative AI at Google Cloud Next

 Google goes all in on generative AI at Google Cloud Next



Image Credits: Google

This week in Las Vegas, 30,000 folks came together to hear the latest and greatest from Google Cloud. What they heard was all generative AI, all the time. Google Cloud is first and foremost a cloud infrastructure and platform vendor. If you didn’t know that, you might have missed it in the onslaught of AI news.

Not to minimize what Google had on display, but much like Salesforce last year at its New York City traveling road show, the company failed to give all but a passing nod to its core business — except in the context of generative AI, of course.

Google announced a slew of AI enhancements designed to help customers take advantage of the Gemini large language model (LLM) and improve productivity across the platform. It’s a worthy goal, of course, and throughout the main keynote on Day 1 and the Developer Keynote the following day, Google peppered the announcements with a healthy number of demos to illustrate the power of these solutions.

But many seemed a little too simplistic, even taking into account they needed to be squeezed into a keynote with a limited amount of time. They relied mostly on examples inside the Google ecosystem, when almost every company has much of their data in repositories outside of Google.

Some of the examples actually felt like they could have been done without AI. During an e-commerce demo, for example, the presenter called the vendor to complete an online transaction. It was designed to show off the communications capabilities of a sales bot, but in reality, the step could have been easily completed by the buyer on the website.

That’s not to say that generative AI doesn’t have some powerful use cases, whether creating code, analyzing a corpus of content and being able to query it, or being able to ask questions of the log data to understand why a website went down. What’s more, the task and role-based agents the company introduced to help individual developers, creative folks, employees and others, have the potential to take advantage of generative AI in tangible ways.

Google Cloud Next 2024: Everything announced so far





But when it comes to building AI tools based on Google’s models, as opposed to consuming the ones Google and other vendors are building for its customers, I couldn’t help feeling that they were glossing over a lot of the obstacles that could stand in the way of a successful generative AI implementation. While they tried to make it sound easy, in reality, it’s a huge challenge to implement any advanced technology inside large organizations.

Big change ain’t easy
Much like other technological leaps over the last 15 years — whether mobile, cloud, containerization, marketing automation, you name it — it’s been delivered with lots of promises of potential gains. Yet these advancements each introduce their own level of complexity, and large companies move more cautiously than we imagine. AI feels like a much bigger lift than Google, or frankly any of the large vendors, is letting on.

What we’ve learned with these previous technology shifts is that they come with a lot of hype and lead to a ton of disillusionment. Even after a number of years, we’ve seen large companies that perhaps should be taking advantage of these advanced technologies still only dabbling or even sitting out altogether, years after they have been introduced.

There are lots of reasons companies may fail to take advantage of technological innovation, including organizational inertia; a brittle technology stack that makes it hard to adopt newer solutions; or a group of corporate naysayers shutting down even the most well-intentioned initiatives, whether legal, HR, IT or other groups that, for a variety of reasons, including internal politics, continue to just say no to substantive change.

Vineet Jain, CEO at Egnyte, a company that concentrates on storage, governance and security, sees two types of companies: those that have made a significant shift to the cloud already and that will have an easier time when it comes to adopting generative AI, and those that have been slow movers and will likely struggle.

custom model, says Andy Thurai, an analyst at Constellation Research. “While implementing either solution, companies need to think about governance, liability, security, privacy, ethical and responsible use and compliance of such implementations,” Thurai said. And none of that is trivial.

Executives, IT pros, developers and others who went to GCN this week might have gone looking for what’s coming next from Google Cloud. But if they didn’t go looking for AI, or they are simply not ready as an organization, they may have come away from Sin City a little shell-shocked by Google’s full concentration on AI. It could be a long time before organizations lacking digital sophistication can take full advantage of these technologies, beyond the more-packaged solutions being offered by Google and other vendors.

custom model, says Andy Thurai, an analyst at Constellation Research. “While implementing either solution, companies need to think about governance, liability, security, privacy, ethical and responsible use and compliance of such implementations,” Thurai said. And none of that is trivial.

Executives, IT pros, developers and others who went to GCN this week might have gone looking for what’s coming next from Google Cloud. But if they didn’t go looking for AI, or they are simply not ready as an organization, they may have come away from Sin City a little shell-shocked by Google’s full concentration on AI. It could be a long time before organizations lacking digital sophistication can take full advantage of these technologies, beyond the more-packaged solutions being offered by Google and other vendors.