The Pulse #68: AI Regulation is Happening – Fast
Also: how AWS prioritized enterprise customers with postmortems, learnings from Vercel’s customer incident, and the struggle to hire product-minded Android engineers in the US.
Programming note: today’s email was sent a bit later than usual – this was as I recently landed in San Francisco. I’ll be here for a week, and then New York the week after. Newsletter issues will go out as usual during this time.
Today's topics are:
Industry pulse. A roundup of recent events, with commentary. NASA sends a software update beyond the solar system, Spotify gives all staff the week off, Cloudflare steps in again as Okta’s missing security team, and more.
AI: fast to innovate, fast to regulate. It’s only a matter of time before an innovative, disruptive field gets regulated. This is now happening with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the US. It feels like incumbent, closed-model players could be the beneficiaries.
An update on AWS’s handling of a regional outage. A public post-incident review took more than 4 months to appear, but large enterprise customers received a detailed postmortem only two days after a regional outage. How come smaller customers and the general public did not?
When should a fast-growing company lock down access to customer data? A Vercel employee used customer contact information to settle a personal matter. As soon as Vercel found out, it let the employee go and confirmed its zero tolerance of such behavior. The incident highlights the question of when to put granular controls in place to guard sensitive business data.
Hiring product-minded Android engineers is challenging in the US. Linear has struggled to hire Android product engineers in the States. Judging from the response of other CEOs and Android engineers, Linear’s challenge is not unique.
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.