May rundown: Google Cloud’s nightmare and OpenAI’s ambition

After a pension fund had its entire cloud subscription deleted by accident, experts say enterprises should plan for the unthinkable

Rory Bathgate's avatar
By
Published In Features
The words ‘May rundown: Google Cloud’s nightmare and OpenAI’s ambition’ overlaid on an image of dark clouds. Decorative: the words ‘Google Cloud's’ and 'OpenAI's' are in yellow, while other words are in white. The ITPro podcast logo is in the bottom right corner.
(Image credit: Future / Unsplash - Lucie Morel)

One of the most unexpected things to happen in May was a sudden outage at the Australian pension fund UniSuper.

After days of confusion and concern that the fund may have been hit by a cyber attack among its customer base, it emerged that Google Cloud had accidentally deleted UniSuper’s entire cloud subscription. We dive into what lessons businesses can learn from this freak event.

Also in May, OpenAI trumpeted its goal to unlock so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) through new advancements. But is such a thing even possible, and who would it benefit?

Highlights

“This is obviously something that is a nightmare scenario for any company. But in fairness to both UniSuper and Google Cloud, it was rectified fairly quickly. I can imagine there were a few people at Google Cloud and both UniSuper that were scrambling and tearing their hair out for several hours over this.”

Latest Videos FromIT Pro

“In our coverage of the story, we spoke to a few people in the industry who emphasize the importance of multi-cloud. It’s something that's been really growing in importance at enterprises over the last couple of years, the ability to mix and match cloud providers and hedge your bets in that regard.”

“Sam Altman, towards the end of last month revealed that they've started trainingit's next frontier large language model. Think the way that OpenAI described it was – to quote – ‘bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to artificial general intelligence’, which sounds equally exciting and ominous.”

Footnotes

Subscribe

Rory Bathgate
Rory Bathgate
Features and Multimedia Editor

Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory at rory.bathgate@futurenet.com or on LinkedIn.

Latest
You might also like
View More ▸