Cisco & NVIDIA's AI Collab: Building a Fortress or Just a Really Expensive Sandbox?

Cisco and NVIDIA, those titans of tech, are at it again, promising to revolutionize AI infrastructure with their latest collaboration. They're talking about security, observability, and a whole lot of performance. But let's be honest, in the world of AI, 'secure' and 'scalable' often translate to 'expensive' and 'complicated.' As we've questioned before in our news section, is this AI boom a gold rush or just another bubble? Is this partnership truly democratizing AI, or is it just building a bigger, more exclusive playground for the tech elite?

The narrative, as usual, is one of boundless innovation. Cisco's AI Defense is now cozying up with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails, promising robust cybersecurity for AI applications. They are painting a picture of impenetrable fortresses protecting sensitive data. But who's going to build these fortresses? And who can afford to live in them? The devil, as always, is in the details.

Secure AI Factory: More Like a Gated Community?

Cisco is touting its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA as a 'comprehensive architecture for AI infrastructure.' It emphasizes security and observability, assuring enterprises of a protected and visible environment. The thing is it's based on Cisco AI PODs and Cisco Silicon One-powered Nexus switching. All of which sounds impressive, but also proprietary and potentially limiting. Are we truly securing AI, or are we simply locking it down within a walled garden, accessible only to those who can afford the key? source: Cisco

Furthermore, the integration of Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk Enterprise Security suggests a reliance on specific tools and platforms, potentially creating vendor lock-in and limiting interoperability. While these tools may offer valuable insights, they also come with their own costs and complexities. It seems that they may be adding observability for everything except the growing cost of maintaining the "innovation". Is it really more secure, or just more thoroughly monitored? After all, like we reported, most companies see zero returns on their AI investments. source: Splunk

Neocloud Dreams and Sovereign Clouds: Whose Vision Are We Building?

Cisco's new N9100 series switch is designed for 'neocloud and sovereign cloud customers,' offering a 'NVIDIA Cloud Partner-compliant reference architecture.' But what exactly are neoclouds and sovereign clouds? And who gets to define their architectures? The announcement is also aligned to the new NVIDIA AI Factory for Government, a full-stack end-to-end reference design for AI workloads deployed in highly regulated environments. source: NVIDIA Are we truly empowering diverse cloud providers, or are we simply reinforcing the dominance of a select few, guided by the principles of NVIDIA and catering to the demands of governments?

The promise of flexibility with NX-OS or SONiC operating systems sounds appealing, but it also raises questions about complexity and manageability. Maintaining a unified operating model across different platforms requires expertise and resources, potentially creating a barrier to entry for smaller cloud providers. The question then becomes, are we truly building infrastructure that makes AI real, or are we creating a system where only the biggest players can afford to participate? source: Cisco

The Ecosystem Expansion: Are We Building a Food Chain?

Cisco's ecosystem expansion includes partnerships with NVIDIA, Nutanix, and other telecom industry players, offering a range of solutions for AI workload orchestration and containerized inference services. This is all about interoperability. And all of the interoperable solutions from NVIDIA, Run:ai and Nutanix sound very helpful, but these partnerships invariably come with trade-offs, creating dependencies and potentially limiting choices. source: NVIDIA Are we building a collaborative ecosystem, or just a food chain where smaller companies are swallowed up by larger ones?

Ultimately, the Cisco-NVIDIA collaboration presents a complex picture of innovation and control. While their advancements undoubtedly offer valuable tools for enterprises and cloud providers, it's crucial to approach them with a healthy dose of skepticism. We must constantly question who benefits from these advancements, what trade-offs are being made, and whether we are truly building an AI-powered future that is accessible and beneficial to all, or one that merely reinforces the power of a select few. Because in the world of AI, as in life, it's always wise to look beneath the surface and ask: Cui bono? Who benefits? And as we've seen in our news section, the problem with AI often includes model collapse.source: Nutanix