Failover Weekly: The War for AI Talent
Everyone is fighting over the same pool of people who actually know how to deploy AI in production. Gartner released an AI Governance Magic Quadrant. Amazon made a movie about Sam Altman and then decided they didn't want to release it. The forward-deployed engineer is now apparently the most important job in enterprise software, depending on who you ask. And I showed up on a podcast to argue that most companies are getting played into hardware refreshes they don't need. Busy week.
From the Network
The Enterprise AI Show – A Day in the Life of a Forward-Deployed Engineer
"Forward-deployed engineer" is showing up in every AI vendor's job listing right now. This episode actually explains what the role is — part solutions engineer, part researcher, part operations — and why it's becoming the primary way enterprise AI gets into production. More useful than any job description you'll read.
Software Defined Talk 578 – War for Talent
Fable follow-up, Gartner's AI Governance Magic Quadrant, and the intensifying fight to hire AI engineers at any cost. Plus Matt and I watched and reviewed Disclosure Day. We had some thoughts.
The Cloud Pod 358 – AI Spend Limits Because Frontier Models Aren't Free Therapy
Justin, Matt, and Ryan dig into why spend limits are showing up on frontier model APIs, Anthropic's call for a global AI pause, GitHub crossing 1.4 billion monthly commits, and the usual full sweep of AWS, Azure, and GCP announcements.
Podcast of the Week
I was on the Tech Field Day Podcast this week making the case that the race to buy new AI hardware is a trap for most organizations. The gap between what smart software can do on existing infrastructure versus what you'd get from a new GPU cluster is closing fast — and most enterprises haven't come close to maxing out what they already have. Biased pick obviously, but I think the argument holds up.
Non-Tech Pod of the Week
The Town – Amazon Won't Release Its Sam Altman Movie. Will Anyone?
Luca Guadagnino made a movie about Sam Altman. Amazon funded it, screened it, and now wants to quietly hand it off to someone else to distribute. Keach Hagey — who wrote the definitive Altman biography — joins Matt Belloni to explain why, what the script actually says about Altman, and whether any major studio will touch it. The part about how Amazon's relationship with OpenAI factors into all of this is where it gets genuinely interesting.
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