Welcome to episode 303 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan and exhausted dad Matt are here (and mostly awake) ready to bring the latest in cloud news! This week we’ve got more news from Nova, updates to Claude, earnings news, and a mini funeral for Skype – plus a new helping of Cloud Journey!

• Claude researches so Ryan can nap
• The best AI for Nova Corps, Amazon Nova Premiere JB
• If you can’t beat them, change the licensing terms and make them fork, and then
• reverse course… and profit
• Q has invaded your IDE!!
• Skype bites the dust

02:50 Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it

• OpenAI wrote up a blog post about their sycophantic Chat GPT 4o upgrade last week, and they wanted to set the record straight.
• They made adjustments at improving the models default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks.
• When shaping model behavior, they start with a baseline principle and instructions outlined in their model spec.
• They also teach their models how to apply these principles by incorporating user signals like thumbs up and thumbs down feedback on responses.
• In this update, though, they focused too much on short-term feedback and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve. This skewed the results towards responses that were overly supportive – but disingenuous.
• Beyond rolling back the changes, they are taking steps to realign the model behavior, including refining core training techniques and system prompts to explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy.
• They also plan to build more guardrails to increase honesty and transparency principles in the model spec.
• Additionally, they plan to expand ways for users to test and give direct feedback before deployments.
• Lastly, OpenAI continues to expand evaluations building on the model sync and our ongoing research.

04:43 Deep Research on Microsoft Hotpatching:

• Yes, they’re grabbing money and screwing you. Basically.

07:06 Justin – “I’m not going to give them any credit on this one. I appreciate that they created hotpatching, but I don’t like what you want to charge me for it.”

It’s Earnings time – cue the sound effects!

08:03 Alphabet’s Q1 earnings shattered analyst expectations, sending the stock soaring. Google’s CEO credits its AI efforts

Alphabet Q1 2025 earnings call: CEO Sundar Pichai’s remarks

Welcome to episode 302 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! This week Justin and Ryan are on hand to bring you all the latest in Cloud (and AI news.) We’ve got hotpatching, Project Greenland, and a rollback of GPT-4.o, which sort of makes us sad – and our egos are definitely less stroked. Plus Saas, containers, and outposts – all of this and more. Thanks for joining us in the cloud!

• The Cloud Pod was never accused of being sycophantic
• 2nd Gen outposts!?! I didn’t even know anyone was using Gen 1
• AWS Outposts 2nd Gen… not with AI (GASP)
• If you’re doing SaaS wrong, Google & AWS have your back this week with new Features
• Patching, so hot right now
• Larger container sizes for Azure…. You don’t say
• AWS Green reporting detects hotspots… surprisingly close to Maryland…..
• Visual pipeline for Opensearch… I want to like this… but I just can’t

01:37 Sharing new DORA research for gen AI in software development

• The DORA team at Google has released a new report, “Impact of Generative AI In Software Development.” The report is based on data and developer interviews, and the report aims to move beyond hype to offer a proper perspective on AI’s impact on individuals, teams and organizations.
• Click on the link in our show notes to access the full report. However, Google has highlighted a few key points in the blog post.
• AI is Real – A staggering 89% of organizations are prioritizing the integration of AI into their applications, and 76% of technologists are already using AI in some part of their daily work.
• Productivity gains confirmed: Developers using Gen AI report significant increases in flow, productivity, and job satisfaction. For instance, a 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with a 2.1% increase in individual productivity.
• Organization benefits are tangible: Beyond individual gains, Dora found strong correlations between AI adoption and improvements in crucial organizational metrics. A 25% increase in AI adoption is associated with increases in document quality, code quality, code review speeds and approval speeds.
• If you are looking to utilize AI in your development organization, they provide five practical approaches for both leaders and practitioners.
  • Have transparent communications
  • Empower developers with learning and experimentation
  • Establish clear policies
  • Rethink performance metrics
  • Embrace fast feedback loops

045:06 Ryan – “Those are really good approaches, but really difficult to implement in practice. You know, in my day job, watching the company struggle to get a handle on AI from all the different angles you need to, from data protection, legal liability – just operationally – it’s very hard. So I think having a mature program where you’re rolling that out with intent and being very specific with your AI tasks I think will go a long way with a lot of companies.”

08...

• (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod
• (00:01:07) - How to Write a 300-Episode Recap With AI
• (00:03:05) - We're Turning 300 Episodes Down
• (00:07:39) - Reinventing: The Future of the Podcast
• (00:13:52) - Google Wins Antitrust Case vs. DOJ
• (00:21:18) - Google's Proposal for the Antitrust Case
• (00:24:29) - OpenAI Launches OpenAI03 and O4 Mini
• (00:30:27) - GPT 4.1 and 4.0 Mini
• (00:34:25) - GitHub Cloud and Copilot Announcements
• (00:35:37) - Copilot for Business vs. Personal: Should You Buy Pro+
• (00:38:50) - Amazon VPC Route Server
• (00:42:32) - AWS Security Reference Architecture Code Examples for Generative AI
• (00:45:08) - Amazon Nova Sonic: New Gen AI Model for Voice-enabled Applications
• (00:46:55) - Thank You or No Thank You?
• (00:47:40) - Novasonic's Nova Real 1.1 security video
• (00:51:03) - Amazon AWS S3 Express 1 Zone Price Cut
• (00:53:07) - AWS STS now automatically serves all requests to the global endpoint in
• (00:56:13) - Gemini Cloud Assist: Spring Cleaning with FinOps Hub
• (00:58:23) - Google's New VM Store for Valkey
• (00:59:36) - Microsoft releases new capabilities to Azure AI
• (01:01:15) - Azure Storage Driver Update & New Capabilities for AI
• (01:02:06) - Llama 4 models now available in Azure AI
• (01:03:31) - Microsoft Azure OpenAI: GPT 4.1, 4.
• (01:04:43) - Copilot in Azure Announces General Availability
• (01:06:41) - Azure Cloud's Hybrid Connection Manager in Public Preview
• (01:07:38) - One-Bit AI Models Won't Need Supercomputers
• (01:09:46) - Microsoft's SQL Server Migration to hyperscale
• (01:12:42) - Oracle: My Public Cloud Was Hacked
• (01:14:49) - Oracle's PR for the Hacking
• (01:18:20) - A Week in the Cloud
• (01:18:57) - Week in Cloud: Cloud Apps