Microsoft reported better-than-expected earnings on Wednesday fueled by growth in its Azure cloud business, as five of the "Magnificent Seven" tech megacaps roll out quarterly earnings this week. "AI-driven transformation is changing work, work artifacts, and workflow across every role, function, and business process," the company's CEO, Satya Nadella, said in a press release. "We are expanding our opportunity and winning new customers as we help them apply our AI platforms and tools to drive new growth and operating leverage." All eyes were on Azure, Microsoft's fastest-growing division that has received billions of dollars of investment as the company focuses attention on artificial intelligence. Revenue from the division increased by 22%, according to a press release. A day earlier, Google's parent, Alphabet, reported that its cloud business grew nearly 35% from a year earlier to 11.35bn, beating analyst estimates.

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here's a handy roundup of the last week's stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn't cover on their own. The biggest news of the last week (we politely withdraw our Anthropic story from consideration) was the announcement of Bedrock, Amazon's service that provides a way to build generative AI apps via pretrained models from startups including AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI. Currently available in "limited preview," Bedrock also offers access to Titan FMs (foundation models), a family of AI models trained in-house by Amazon. It makes perfect sense that Amazon would want to have a horse in the generative AI race.

Bharti Airtel Ltd and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will join forces to develop the Indian telecoms firm's cloud business, allowing it to offer a wider range of products to its enterprise clients, the two companies said on Wednesday. Airtel Cloud currently provides data centre and cloud services to companies and governments via different partnerships. "AWS with the depth and breadth of our platform, and Airtel with its deep reach and expertise and focus, I think together we can build a set of really differentiated cloud products and go serve customers at scale in India," Puneet Chandok, President, India and South Asia at Amazon Internet Services told a virtual news conference. New products could include data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and security services among others, the two companies said.

The Google online search business is slowing. Search sales rose 15 percent in 2019 slower than the 22 percent pace of 2018. The stock's been on a little bit of a roller coaster this week thanks to those numbers but is still on pace to finish the week higher. I had a chance to sit down with Ruth Porat the company's CFO and we talked about how Alphabet split its advertising revenue into its three buckets for the first time . I often say that we've been on a journey and we've been expanding disclosure over time whether it was providing more insight into what's our geographic breakdown or one time run rates.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella imagines a world with an ever-expanding set of connected devices that process data locally and work in tandem with the cloud – and his company has designed its entire multibillion-dollar cloud business around that concept. Nadella revealed the company's strategy for edge computing during Microsoft's recent shareholders meeting. Edge computing is a buzzword, but it basically means processing data on the devices themselves, instead of offsite in the cloud. Think of a self-driving car. It needs to be able to process data and make split-second decisions without the delays that would come if that data had to be processed far away in the cloud.

Microsoft is losing a key executive who helped the Redmond-based company turn artificial intelligence research into products just as its AI business is getting off the ground. Harry Shum, who runs Microsoft's AI and Research group, is leaving in February after 23 years at Microsoft. He has already shifted his group and responsibilities to Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, which include overseeing the company's AI strategy, research and development on infrastructure, services, and apps, and AI-focused product groups including Bing. The news was first reported by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, and confirmed by Microsoft to Business Insider. Shum's departure comes at a time when Microsoft is making big investments in AI.

Microsoft is one of the few companies in history to fetch a $1 trillion valuation. But Satya Nadella, the CEO who led Microsoft to this astronomical milestone, says he sees plenty of opportunities for new ways to grow the business. "What's next?" he said on an investor call after Microsoft reported first-quarter fiscal earnings on Wednesday, "What's next for us is in the apps and infra(structure) to go the first inning to the second inning. For data and (artificial intelligence), to start the first innings." Microsoft, once known primarily as the maker of the software on people's desktop and laptop PCs, is now competing against a much wider range of foes in cutting edge businesses like artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) may be rocking, but if so, Alphabet is keeping it a closely guarded secret. As ZDNet's Larry Dignan has posited, maybe "GCP's revenue doesn't stack up to its rivals yet." No one would be surprised by this, given the lead of several years that AWS, in particular, has had. What would be a nice surprise is to have Google substantiate that its machine learning strength in cloud is paying off with mainstream customers. Sadly, to echo Dignan, we know very little about how Google's cloud business is doing.

Alphabet is broken out into its core Google business and a number of other subsidiaries, which it deems "Other Bets." The majority of Google's business comes from advertising revenues, which the company generates through its search engine as well as a number of other Google-affiliated and partnership websites. Outside of search and advertising, Google generates revenue from products including cloud and enterprise, consumer hardware, mapping, and YouTube. In addition to Google, Alphabet encompasses a host of other subsidiaries called "Other Bets." These companies are more experimental in nature, and as a result are not material to Alphabet's bottom line.

Recently, analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research wrote in an investor note that Wal-Mart Stores (NYSE:WMT) will ramp up its focus on deep neural networks for its OneOps cloud business and that the retailer will tap NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) graphics processing units (GPUs) to make this happen. Deep neural networks are used in artificial intelligence processing to allow computers to understand the relationships between pieces of information without having to be specifically programmed to understand that the information is related. Deep neural networks, and the broader deep learning segment, are part of a growing artificial intelligence market. Chowdhry thinks the ramp-up of Wal-Mart's cloud will happen over the next six months and will be "incrementally positive" to NVIDIA's GPU business. These rumors come after reports surfaced in June that Walmart was asking some of its technology customers to move off of Amazon's Web Service (AWS) cloud business.