297: Save the Date So You Can Get Some Skills – In AI!

Welcome to episode 297 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Matthew have beaten the black lung and are in the studio – ready to bring you all the latest and greatest in cloud and AI news! We’ve got Wiz buyouts (that security, it’s so hot right now!) Gemma 3, Glue 5 (but not 3 or 4) and Gemini Robots – plus looking forward to AI Skills Fest and Google Next, all this week on The Cloud Pod. 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• Google! Yer a WIZ—Ard
• Google Announces Network Security Integration… and that must include WIZ
• Gemini Robots…. What could go wrong 
• ️AI Data Studios … So Hot Right Now
• I want 32 Billion dollars
• Azure Follow AWS in bad life choices – mk
• Wait Glue is more than v2
• What happened to Glue 3 and 4?
• 5th Try and AWS Glue still sucks

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

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Follow Up 

01:05 Microsoft quantum computing claim still lacks evidence: physicists are dubious

• A MS researcher presented results behind the company’s controversial claim to have created the first topological qubits – a long-sought goal of quantum computing. 
• Theorists said it’s a hard problem, and that it was a beautiful talk but the claims come without evidence, and people think they have gone overboard. 
• The Head of Quantum at Amazon was also highly skeptical:
  • https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-exec-casts-doubt-microsoft-quantum-claims-2025-3

02:09 Justin – “No one’s really buying Microsoft actually created a new topological qubit. There’s some doubt… basically they said that what they showed, which is a microscopic H-shaped aluminum wire on top of indium arsenide – a superconductor at ultra-cold temperatures, and the devices are designed to harness majoranas, previously undiscovered quasi-particles that are essential for topological qubits to work, and the goals for majoranas to appear at the four tips of the H-shaped wire emerging from reflective-behavior electrons, and these majorans in theory could be used to perform quantum computing that are resistant to informat...