Welcome to episode 290 of The Cloud Pod – where the forecast is always cloudy! It’s a full house this week – and a good thing too, since there’s a lot of news! Justin, Jonathan, Ryan, and Matthew are all in the house to bring you news on DeepSeek, OpenVox, CloudWatch, and more.

Titles we almost went with this week:

The cloud pod wonders if azure is still hung over from new years
Stratoshark sends the Cloud pod to the stratosphere
Cutting-Edge Chinese “Reasoning” Model Rivals OpenAI… and it’s FREE?!
Wireshark turns 27, Cloud Pod Hosts feel old
Operator: DeepSeek is here to kill OpenAI
Time for a deepthink on buying all that Nvidia stock
AWS Token Service finally goes cloud native
The CloudPod wonders if OpenAI’s Operator can order its own $200 subscription

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor:

We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our slack channel for more info.

AI IS Going Great – Or How ML Makes All Its Money

01:29 Introducing the GenAI Platform: Simplifying AI Development for All

If you’re struggling to find that AI GPU capacity, Digital Ocean is pleased to announce their DigitalOcean GenAI Platform is now available to everyone.
The platform aims to democratize AI development, empowering everyone – from solo developers to large teams – to leverage the transformative potential of generative AI.
On the Gen AI platform you can:
- Build Scalable AI Agents
- Seamlessly integrate with workflows
- Leverage guardrails
- Optimize Efficiency.
Some of the use cases they are highlighting are chatbots, e-commerce assistance, support automation, business insights, AI-Driven CRMs, Personalized Learning and interactive tools.

02:23 Jonathan – “Inference cost is really the big driver there. So once you once you build something that’s that’s done, but it’s nice to see somebody focusing on delivering it as a service rather than, you know, a $50 an hour compute for training models. This is right where they need to be.”

04:21 OpenAI: Introducing Operator

We have thoughts about the name of this service…
OpenAI is releasing the preview version of their agent that can use a web browser to perform tasks for you.
The new version is available to OpenAI pro users.
OpenAI says it’s currently a research preview, meaning it has limitations and will evolve based on your feedback.
Operator can handle various browser tasks such as filling out forms, ordering groceries, and even creating memes.
The ability to use the same interfaces and tools that humans interact with on a daily basis broadens the utility of AI, helping people save time on everyday tasks while opening up a new engagement opportunity for business
Operator is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA). Combining GPT-4o’s vision capabilities with advanced reasoning through reinforcement learning, CUA is trained to interact with a GUI
Justin was going to try it, but he forgot that the Pro plan is $200 dollars a month – so our listeners have to wait on his review of that one.

06:52 Jonathan – “I like Operator. What I really like to see though is I don’t want to have to have it open in the browser. I don’t want to watch it doing its work.”

08:09 Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download

DeepSeek panic triggers tech stock sell-off as Chinese AI tops App Store

There’s a lot of jokes here, but we’re going to keep it professional – you’re welcome or we’re sorry, depending on your maturity level.
DeepSeek has turned the AI world upside down over the last week.
Last week, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT License, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters.
The company is claiming that the model performs at the levels comparable to OpenAI’s o1 simulated reasoning model on several math and coding benchmarks.
In addition to the main deepseek-r1-main and deepseek-r1 models, they released 6 smaller distilled versions ranging from 1.6 billion to 70 billion parameters.
These distilled models are based on existing open source architectures like Qwen and Llama, trained using data generated from the full R1 model. The smallest version can run on a laptop, while the full model requires far more substantial computing resources.
This stunned the AI market, as most open-weight models which can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardware, have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI o1 in so called reasoning-benchmarks.
Having these capabilities available in a MIT licensed model that anyone can study, modify or use commercially potentially marks a shift in what’s possible with a public model.
The stock market panicked in response, with companies like Nvidia down 17% percent on Monday this week – based on the fact that DeepSeek jumped to the top of the app store free downloads, and the fact its low-cost and freely available.
The three things that have investors and researchers shocked:
- The Chinese startup that trained the model for only $6 million (reportedly 3% of the cost of training Open AI o1) as a so-called “side-project” while using less powerful NVIDIA H800 AI acceleration ships due to US export restrictions on cutting-edge GPU.
- It appeared just four months after OpenAI announced o1 in September 2024.
- Released them under MIT license.
This led investors to see that American Tech companies – which have thrived on proprietary and closed models, have “no moat,” which means that any technological lead led by cutting-edge hardware or impressive bankrolls doesn’t protect them from startup challenges.
The question is it really any good, and can they scale to continue to maintain this with limited access to future GPUs.

10:57 Ryan – “The impact the story has had this week has been a roller coaster. Like, and I don’t know if that’s just because I’ve been busy and sort of half paying attention. And, now, it wasn’t really until we were preparing for the show that I really dove in to figure out what, what this was after seeing it. Like, you know, first it was like a Chinese app taking over the phones. I thought it was security concerns and all this stuff, especially with all the Tik Tok stuff that’s going on. And then to find out it wa...

290: Open AI to Operator: There is a DeepSeek Outside the Door