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Greetings! Hopefully, everyone has digested their Thanksgiving leftovers. It’s going to be a busy week, tech event-wise. The biggest of them all is re:Invent, Amazon Web Services’ annual customer conference in Las Vegas that has become something like the Super Bowl of cloud computing. On Tuesday, AWS CEO Matt Garman is scheduled to take the stage for a keynote speech where he will almost certainly dwell on what the cloud giant is doing in AI. In the past, startups and software providers would duck for cover as they waited for AWS to announce new services at re:Invent that might make their own products irrelevant. But in AI, AWS doesn’t currently inspire that kind of terror. It’s still working to change the perception that it’s behind in the category. So far, it hasn’t made much of a mark with its in-house line of Nova AI models that it announced at last year’s re:Invent. At the same time, one of its biggest rivals in cloud computing, Google, has been winning praise for the quality of its new Gemini 3 model. In Vegas this week, it will be AWS’ turn to grab the mic. It’s expected to unveil the next generation of Trainium, its chip for training and running AI models, and it will likely have some new customers to talk about how they’re using it. It may also use re:Invent to announce updates to its Nova family of models. At the same time, expect to hear a lot of rhetoric from Amazon executives about how we’re still in the first innings of AI—the implication being that no one has won this race yet. Meanwhile, in sunny San Diego this week, thousands of AI researchers (and yours truly!) will gather for the 39th annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference—better known as NeurIPS. It’s one of the biggest conferences held each year for AI researchers, not to mention the countless companies that want to hire them and the investors who want to back them. It’s a confusing time for the AI industry, though. On one hand, the steady stream of investment flowing to AI startups hasn’t let up. But despite Google’s recent success in developing Gemini 3, there are more questions than ever about whether today’s most popular training techniques will lead to artificial general intelligence—the automated systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. That also raises the question of whether spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers to develop new models using those techniques will be the best use of that money in the coming years. Among the topics on their agenda, researchers at the event will likely discuss whether other types of AI could be better investments than large language models, which underpin today’s chatbots and AI agents.—Stephanie Palazzolo The C-suite at Anthropic seems like it will be pretty empty this week. On Wednesday, the AI startup’s CEO and co-founder, Dario Amodei, is among the speakers scheduled to appear at The New York Times DealBook Summit in New York. On Thursday, his sister—Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei—is on the docket at Wired’s The Big Interview event. And the company’s chief financial officer, Krishna Rao, will speak at the UBS Global Technology and AI Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., set to run from Monday through Thursday. There are a lot of topics for Anthropic’s executives to talk about. There’s cybersecurity: Last week, a House subcommittee summoned Dario Amodei to a hearing in Washington to testify about an AI-powered cyberattack on Anthropic that the company has said originated in China. There’s Anthropic’s sometimes contentious relationship with the White House over AI regulations and other topics. And there’s the company’s budget forecasts, which call for substantially less spending in the coming years than at OpenAI. Avoiding gaffes is likely to be a priority for Anthropic’s executives. Earlier this month, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar committed one when she said at a conference that the AI startup would like to see a federal government “backstop” to support its infrastructure investments. That led to a reproach of sorts from White House AI czar David Sacks and a lot of damage control from OpenAI executives. Anthropic would be wise to avoid such missteps.—Nick Wingfield and Anita Ramaswamy AI will also surely be on the lips of executives from Salesforce and Snowflake, both of which are reporting financial results on Wednesday. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff will likely give an update on the progress of Agentforce, the company’s agent-building service and main AI product. Benioff often uses his earnings monologues to reveal new customers, and he’ll likely have new figures for the number of customers using Agentforce. Similarly, Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, will get an opportunity to show shareholders how the database provider’s AI business is fairing. Snowflake already stores the data crown jewels for many of the world’s largest companies, and now it’s trying to get them to build AI apps and agents on top of that data. So, too, are many of its competitors. Here’s what analysts are expecting in revenue and profits from Salesforce and Snowflake, courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence: Salesforce Revenue: $10.271 billion +8.8% EPS: $1.64 +3.8% Snowflake Revenue: $1.183 +25.5% EPS: $(0.96) compared with $(0.98) —Kevin McLaughlin • Spending by U.S. shoppers on Black Friday was expected to increase more than 9% to between $11.7 billion and $11.9 billion from a year earlier, according to estimates from Adobe Analytics. Start your day with Applied AI, the newsletter from The Information that uncovers how leading businesses are leveraging AI to automate tasks across the board. Subscribe now for free to get it delivered straight to your inbox twice a week.
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