All posts tagged: stack

Google and AWS split the AI agent stack between control and execution

Google and AWS split the AI agent stack between control and execution

Published by skeptic

The era of enterprises stitching together prompt chains and shadow agents is nearing its end as more options for orchestrating complex multi-agent systems emerge. As organizations move AI agents into production, the question remains: “how will we manage them?” Google and Amazon Web Services offer fundamentally different answers, illustrating a split in the AI stack. Google’s approach is to run agentic management on the system layer, while AWS’s harness method sets up in the execution layer.  The debate on how to manage and control gained new energy this past month as competing companies released or updated their agent builder platforms—Anthropic with the new Claude Managed Agents and OpenAI with enhancements to the Agents SDK—giving developer teams options for managing agents.  AWS with new capabilities added to Bedrock AgentCore is optimizing for velocity—relying on harnesses to bring agents to product faster—while still offering identity and tool management. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini Enterprise adopts a governance-focused approach using a Kubernetes-style control plane. Each method offers a glimpse into how agents move from short-burst task helpers to longer-running entities …

Super foamy sneakers are everywhere. How do they stack up? | Fashion

Super foamy sneakers are everywhere. How do they stack up? | Fashion

Published by Sam Flores

Floaty foam-based footwear has been spotted on celebrities for years, from Aubrey Plaza in Hokas and Harry Styles in New Balance to Zendaya’s ongoing deal with On running shoes. A desire for “practical functionality” has driven technical sportswear to street pavements, says streetwear reporter Lei Takanashi from the Business of Fashion in New York. Aubrey Plaza wears a suit with Hoka sneakers to the Ulla Johnson fashion show during New York fashion week in February. Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images “Hoka, one of the largest purveyors of these types of shoes, elevated them among fashion consumers by releasing lifestyle sneakers with brands from Marni to Comme des Garçons,” he says. Another influence is the rise of “running club culture”, says Lucila Saldana, footwear and accessories strategist at trend forecaster WGSN. While the trend is firmly mainstream, its staying power is “tied to deeper behavioural shifts”, Saldana says. Hoka and On, in particular, have popularised stacked sports shoes as everyday “symbols of a wellness-driven, effortlessly functional lifestyle”. John DiZane, senior director of buying at sports retail chain …

The modern data stack was built for humans asking questions. Google just rebuilt its for agents taking action.

The modern data stack was built for humans asking questions. Google just rebuilt its for agents taking action.

Published by skeptic

Enterprise data stacks were built for humans running scheduled queries. As AI agents increasingly act autonomously on behalf of businesses around the clock, that architecture is breaking down — and vendors are racing to rebuild it. Google’s answer, announced at Cloud Next on Wednesday, is the Agentic Data Cloud. The architecture has three pillars: Knowledge Catalog. Automates semantic metadata curation, inferring business logic from query logs without manual data steward intervention Cross-cloud lakehouse. Lets BigQuery query Iceberg tables on AWS S3 via private network with no egress fees Data Agent Kit. Drops MCP tools into VS Code, Claude Code and Gemini CLI so data engineers describe outcomes rather than write pipelines “The data architecture has to change now,” Andi Gutmans, VP and GM of Data Cloud at Google Cloud, told VentureBeat. “We’re moving from human scale to agent scale.” From system of intelligence to system of action The core premise behind Agentic Data Cloud is that enterprises are moving from human‑scale to agent‑scale operations. Historically, data platforms have been optimized for reporting, dashboarding, and some …

Some cells are super speedy. Here’s how the fastest stack up

Some cells are super speedy. Here’s how the fastest stack up

Published by skeptic

algae: A group of single-celled and multicellular organisms, once considered plants (they aren’t). As aquatic organisms, they grow in water. Like green plants, they depend on sunlight to make their food. annual: Adjective for something that happens every year. bioengineer: Someone who applies engineering to solve problems in biology or in systems that will use living organisms. cell: (in biology) The smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. Typically too small to see with the unaided eye, it consists of a watery fluid surrounded by a membrane or wall. Depending on their size, animals are made of anywhere from thousands to trillions of cells. Most organisms, such as yeasts, molds, bacteria and some algae, are composed of only one cell. cilia: (singular cilium) Small hairlike features that occur on the surface of some cells and larger tissue structures. They can move and their wavelike motion can propel liquids to move in a particular direction. Cilia play an important role in many biological functions throughout the body. data: Facts and/or statistics collected together for analysis …

Oracle converges the AI data stack to give enterprise agents a single version of truth

Oracle converges the AI data stack to give enterprise agents a single version of truth

Published by skeptic

Enterprise data teams moving agentic AI into production are hitting a consistent failure point at the data tier. Agents built across a vector store, a relational database, a graph store and a lakehouse require sync pipelines to keep context current. Under production load, that context goes stale.  Oracle, whose database infrastructure runs the transaction systems of 97% of Fortune Global 100 companies by the company’s own count, is now making a direct architectural argument that the database is the right place to fix that problem. Oracle this week announced a set of agentic AI capabilities for Oracle AI Database, built around a direct architectural counter-argument to that pattern. The core of the release is the Unified Memory Core, a single ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability)-transactional engine that processes vector, JSON, graph, relational, spatial and columnar data without a sync layer. Alongside that, Oracle announced Vectors on Ice for native vector indexing on Apache Iceberg tables, a standalone Autonomous AI Vector Database service and an Autonomous AI Database MCP Server for direct agent access without …

Ai2 releases MolmoWeb, an open-weight visual web agent with 30K human task trajectories and a full training stack

Ai2 releases MolmoWeb, an open-weight visual web agent with 30K human task trajectories and a full training stack

Published by skeptic

Engineers building browser agents today face a choice between closed APIs they cannot inspect and open-weight frameworks with no trained model underneath them. Ai2 is now offering a third option. The Seattle-based nonprofit behind the open-source OLMo language models and Molmo vision-language family today is releasing MolmoWeb, an open-weight visual web agent available in 4 billion and 8 billion parameter sizes. Until now, no open-weight visual web agent shipped with the training data and pipeline needed to audit or reproduce it. MolmoWeb does. MolmoWebMix, the accompanying dataset, includes 30,000 human task trajectories across more than 1,100 websites, 590,000 individual subtask demonstrations and 2.2 million screenshot question-answer pairs — which Ai2 describes as the largest publicly released collection of human web-task execution ever assembled. “Can you go from just passively understanding images, describing them and captioning them, to actually making them take action in some environment?” Tanmay Gupta, senior research scientist at Ai2, told VentureBeat. “That is exactly what MolmoWeb is.” How it works: It sees what you see MolmoWeb operates entirely from browser screenshots. It …

Nvidia’s agentic AI stack is the first major platform to ship with security at launch, but governance gaps remain

Nvidia’s agentic AI stack is the first major platform to ship with security at launch, but governance gaps remain

Published by skeptic

For the first time on a major AI platform release, security shipped at launch — not bolted on 18 months later. At Nvidia GTC this week, five security vendors announced protection for Nvidia’s agentic AI stack, four with active deployments, one with validated early integration. The timing reflects how fast the threat has moved: 48% of cybersecurity professionals rank agentic AI as the top attack vector heading into 2026. Only 29% of organizations feel fully ready to deploy these technologies securely. Machine identities outnumber human employees 82 to 1 in the average enterprise. And IBM’s 2026 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index documented a 44% surge in attacks exploiting public-facing applications, accelerated by AI-enabled vulnerability scanning. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made the case from the GTC keynote stage on Monday: “Agentic systems in the corporate network can access sensitive information, execute code, and communicate externally. Obviously, this can’t possibly be allowed.” Nvidia defined a unified threat model designed to flex and adapt for the unique strengths of five different vendors. Nvidia also names Google, Microsoft Security and …

Google’s Gemini Embedding 2 arrives with native multimodal support to cut costs and speed up your enterprise data stack

Google’s Gemini Embedding 2 arrives with native multimodal support to cut costs and speed up your enterprise data stack

Published by skeptic

Yesterday amid a flurry of enterprise AI product updates, Google announced arguably its most significant one for enterprise customers: the public preview availability of Gemini Embedding 2, its new embeddings model — a significant evolution in how machines represent and retrieve information across different media types. While previous embedding models were largely restricted to text, this new model natively integrates text, images, video, audio, and documents into a single numerical space — reducing latency by as much as 70% for some customers and reducing total cost for enterprises who use AI models powered by their own data to complete business tasks. VentureBeat collaborator Sam Witteveen, co-founder of AI and ML training company Red Dragon AI, received early access to Gemini Embedding 2 and published a video of his impressions on YouTube. Watch it below: Who needs and uses an embedding model? For those who have encountered the term “embeddings” in AI discussions but find it abstract, a useful analogy is that of a universal library. In a traditional library, books are organized by metadata: author, …

Claude didn’t just plan an attack on Mexico’s government. It executed one for a month — across four domains your security stack can’t see.

Claude didn’t just plan an attack on Mexico’s government. It executed one for a month — across four domains your security stack can’t see.

Published by skeptic

Attackers jailbroke Anthropic’s Claude and ran it against multiple Mexican government agencies for approximately a month. They stole 150 GB of data from Mexico’s federal tax authority, the national electoral institute, four state governments, Mexico City’s civil registry, and Monterrey’s water utility, Bloomberg reported. The haul included documents related to 195 million taxpayer records, voter records, government employee credentials, and civil registry files. The attackers’ weapon of choice wasn’t malware or sophisticated tradecraft created in stealth. It was a chatbot available to anyone. The attackers created a series of prompts telling Claude to act as an elite penetration tester running a bug bounty. Claude initially pushed back and refused. When they added rules about deleting logs and command history, Claude pushed back harder. “Specific instructions about deleting logs and hiding history are red flags,” Claude responded, according to a transcript from Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security. “In legitimate bug bounty, you don’t need to hide your actions.” The hacker quit negotiating with Claude and took a different approach: handing Claude a detailed playbook instead. That …

Microsoft Copilot ignored sensitivity labels twice in eight months — and no DLP stack caught either one

Microsoft Copilot ignored sensitivity labels twice in eight months — and no DLP stack caught either one

Published by skeptic

For four weeks starting January 21, Microsoft’s Copilot read and summarized confidential emails despite every sensitivity label and DLP policy telling it not to. The enforcement points broke inside Microsoft’s own pipeline, and no security tool in the stack flagged it. Among the affected organizations was the U.K.’s National Health Service, which logged it as INC46740412 — a signal of how far the failure reached into regulated healthcare environments. Microsoft tracked it as CW1226324. The advisory, first reported by BleepingComputer on February 18, marks the second time in eight months that Copilot’s retrieval pipeline violated its own trust boundary — a failure in which an AI system accesses or transmits data it was explicitly restricted from touching. The first was worse. In June 2025, Microsoft patched CVE-2025-32711, a critical zero-click vulnerability that Aim Security researchers dubbed “EchoLeak.” One malicious email bypassed Copilot’s prompt injection classifier, its link redaction, its Content-Security-Policy, and its reference mentions to silently exfiltrate enterprise data. No clicks and no user action were required. Microsoft assigned it a CVSS score of 9.3. …