When it comes to artificial intelligence, are Oracle and Microsoft rivals or partners? Both, judging by the latest announcements.
oracle
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Recent financial results reported strong demand for cloud services, solidifying the company's claim to be an AI winner. That boosted the company's stock price and led to an upgrade to “buy from hold” by analysts at Argus Research on Thursday.
Oracle is now looking to build on that platform, with a flurry of AI announcements Thursday across its software suite, adding the technology to finance, supply chain, human resources, sales and marketing products. The company says this is planned.
It looks like a challenge to Microsoft
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Various AI-powered Copilot features for enterprise software. Microsoft has backed OpenAI financially and used its technology to attract customers, and Oracle is hoping for a similar virtuous cycle by investing in Cohere, a generative AI company also backed by Nvidia. In other words, the two companies are rivals.
However, nothing is that simple.
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Also on Thursday, Microsoft and Oracle jointly announced an expansion of their partnership. The deal gives customers access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure hardware, but deployed in Microsoft's Azure data centers, and access to its AI services. The companies announced that they will expand the service to five more regions, making it available in 15 regions around the world.
As companies increasingly abandon the idea of locking cloud computing customers into their own services, AI is likely to follow the same path.
Meta to stop tools used to track disinformation
meta platform
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announced Thursday that it plans to shut down a data tool that allows users to monitor the spread of content across Facebook and Instagram. It's a move that could limit embarrassing headlines, but also raises questions about its transparency at a time when it hopes to benefit from TikTok's political woes.
Meta has announced that CrowdTangle, a tool you can use to see how specific content has spread, will be retired within five months. It has been used by news organizations to highlight how misinformation is shared on social media.
Meta said it will replace CrowdTangle with an alternative service called Meta Content Library. The library will be available only to academic and non-profit researchers, not most news organizations. That could avoid unwanted coverage in the final months of the U.S. election campaign.
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To be fair, Meta may wonder why it would have to share such information with impatient journalists anyway, especially if its rivals aren't even more aggressive. But the timing is questionable, at least given that one of the complaints against TikTok is the spread of misinformation on the video platform.
If Meta wants to be seen as one of the good guys when it comes to social media, it may think it's important to be more transparent.
Email Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com.
