280: Evidently, The Cloud Pod Was Always Right

Welcome to episode 280 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are your hosts as we travel through the latest in cloud news. This week we’re talking more about nuclear power, some additional major employee shakeups, Claude releases, plus saying RIP to CloudWatch Evidently and hello to Azure Cobalt VMs.   Titles we almost went with this week: ☢️The cloud providers are colluding on Nuclear Power I fear our AWS AI nightmare might get worse without Dr. Matt Wood. I’m a glow with excitement about nuclear cloud power ⚛️Plainly no one else knew what “CloudWatch Evidently” did either We sing a Claude Sonnet about Nuclear Power ✅Evidently, The Cloud Pod was always right Amazon goes nuclear while their AI VP goes AWOL A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: 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. AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes All It’s Money   00:53 Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku Anthropic is announcing the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new Model Claude 3.5 Haiku.  Claude 3.5 Sonnet delivers across the board improvements over its predecessor, with particularly significant gains in coding — an area where it already leads the field (per anthropic).   Claude 3.5 Haiku interestingly matches the performance of Claude 3 Opus, the prior largest model, on many evaluations at the same cost and similar speed to the previous generation of Haiku.  Claude 3.5 Sonnet also includes a groundbreaking new capability in beta: Computer Use.   Available today as an API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do – by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons and typing text.   Claude 3.5 is the first frontier AI model to offer this capability.  Anthropic warns the feature is still experimental – at times cumbersome and error-prone. As well as things that are effortless for a human are still difficult including scrolling, dra...