SXSW Interactive (South by Southwest): Austin, March 8-13, 2019
During the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) at SXSW Interactive has grown into a business enabler, however, this year there was significant social backlash against AI at the event. The backlash came in the form of presentations explicitly addressing AI and ethical challenges, as well as in the tone of questions asked during session Q&A. The potential is increasing for AI-based cloud services to be affected by consumer AI concerns or government AI regulation.Alibaba Cloud highlighted its DataV data visualization tool at SXSW Interactive.Google Cloud emphasized its relationships with the top four global systems integrators (SIs), SAP, and the next 25 largest regional SIs, as it has done in the past. There is a bit of a lag in Google Cloud’s new enterprise strategy showing up in its field sales messaging. Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit: San Jose, March 14-15, 2019
This year there was more cross-manufacturer collaboration than we’ve seen in previous years at OCP Summit events. Collaboration is occurring at all levels of the hardware design stack, from system-on-chip integration to data center cooling infrastructure, and extends into management, security, and other infrastructure software components, as well. Baidu joined OCP as a Platinum-level member, having already collaborated with Microsoft and Facebook on the OCP OAM specification (below). Huawei Cloud announced it will adopt OCP’s Open Rack standards across its new public cloud data center build-outs. Huawei also plans to adopt the OAM specification for its own AI processors and is working with third-party AI chip vendors to support the specification. Huawei joined OCP as a Platinum-level member in October 2018, less than six months ago. The Intel-lead Compute Express Link (CXL) standards group announced both its existence and the availability of its version 1.0 specification concurrently with OCP Global Summit. The group is targeting standardization of the processor to accelerator link across a wide swath of the cloud hardware ecosystem. CXL industry standards group members include a cross-section of OCP CSP, chip designers, and system manufacturers, in addition to Intel: Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, and Microsoft. However, AMD and NVIDIA are not yet members. Microsoft, Baidu, and Facebook announced a collaboration to define an OCP Accelerator Module (OAM) specification, specifically aimed at standardizing artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators for better hardware purchasing economies of scale. Microsoft also announced at OCP Global Summit that it is completely opening its Project Zipline data compression algorithms, hardware design specifications, and Verilog source code for register transfer language (RTL). It is a large initiative to standardize very low latency hardware-based data compression from chip to data center, and includes both Intel and AMD, as well as Arm server processor designers. | 
