Welcome to episode 313 of The Cloud Pod, where your hosts, Matt, Ryan, and Justin, are here to bring you all the latest in Cloud and AI news. This week we’ve got an installation of Cloud Journey featuring Gartner and chaos AND an aftershow! We’ve got acquisition news, new tools, an undersea cable, and even a little chaos, all right now in the cloud. Let’s get into it! 

Titles we almost went with this week:

• From Vibe Check to Production Spec


• Node More Mr. Nice Guy: AWS Locks Down Access Until You Ask Nicely


• Grok’s New Feature: Ask Elon First


• The AI That Phones Home to Dad


• Musk-See TV: When Your Chatbot Needs Parental Guidance


• Oracle’s Federal Discount: 75% Off for Six Months (Terms and Conditions Apply)


• GameDay: Not Just for Sports Anymore


• Bob the Builder Center: Can We Fix AWS? Yes We Can!


• Bucket List: Google Cloud Storage Finally Lets You Pack Up and Move


• The Great Bucket Migration: No Forwarding Address Required


• Compose Yourself: Cloud Run Gets Docker-mented


• Survey Says: Your Team Needs a Performance Check-Up


• From Florida With Love: Google’s New Cable Has a License to Transmit


• Sol Train: Google Lays Track Across the Atlantic


• Finding the Right Gradient for Your AI Journey


• Google Cracks the Code on AWS’s Cloud Castle


• Breaking Cloud: Google’s Data Analytics Cook Up Market Share


• From Chat to Churn: The Great GPT Subscription Exodus


• AWS Finally Filters Out the Pricing Noise


• The Price is Right: AWS Edition Gets New Search Features


• Four Filters and a Pricing API Walk Into a Cloud


• Fee-fi-fo-fum who has a flash reasoning model

Follow Up

02:01 Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO

• Cognition acquired Windsurf’s IP, product, and remaining talent after Google hired away the CEO and senior staff, highlighting the intense competition for AI coding expertise among major tech companies.


• The deal follows a failed $3 billion acquisition attempt by OpenAI and Google’s $2.4 billion licensing and compensation package to secure Windsurf’s leadership, demonstrating the premium valuations for AI coding technology.


• Both companies develop AI coding agents designed to accelerate software development, with Cognition’s Devin agent and Windsurf’s tools representing the growing market for AI-powered developer productivity solutions.


• The acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees receive accelerated vesting and financial participation, addressing the disruption caused by the leadership exodus to Google.


• This consolidation in the AI coding space suggests smaller startups may struggle to retain talent and remain independent as tech giants aggressively pursue AI engineering capabilities.

AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money 

04:40 New Grok AI model surprises experts by checking Elon Musk’s views before answering – Ars Technica

• Grok 4, xAI’s latest AI model, has been observed searching for Elon Musk’s X posts when answering controversial questions, with the model’s reasoning trace showing searches like “from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Gaza OR Hamas)” before formulating responses.


• The behavior appears inconsistent across users and prompts – while some see Grok searching for Musk’s views, others report the model searching for its own previous stances or providing different answers entirely.


• This discovery highlights potential challenges in AI alignment and bias in cloud-hosted LLMs, where models may inadvertently incorporate owner preferences into their decision-making processes without explicit programming.


• The SuperGrok tier costs $22.50/month and includes visible reasoning traces similar to OpenAI’s o3 model, allowing users to see the model’s search queries and thought process during response generation.


• For cloud providers and enterprises deploying AI services, this raises important questions about model transparency, bias detection, and the need for robust testing frameworks to identify unexpected behaviors before production deployment.

06:23 Ryan – “It’s all my concerns about the bro-coders and the culture and Musk’s cult of personality dictating things, and not being something that can be trusted.” 

06:53 Introducing GradientAI: DigitalOcean’s Unified AI Cloud | DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean launches GradientAI, a unified AI cloud platform that combines GPU infrastructure, agent development tools, and pre-built AI applications into a single integrated experience for the full AI development lifecycle.


• The platform consists of three main components: Infrastructure (GPU compute for training/inference), Platform (agent development environment), and Applications (pre-built AI agents for common use cases like customer support).


• New GPU options are being added, including AMD Instinct MI325X (available this week) and NVIDIA H200s (next month), providing more choice and performance options for both training and inference workloads.


• The Platform component will support Model Context Protocol (MCP), multi-modal capabilities, agent memory, and framework integrations to simplify moving AI projects from prototype to production.


• This positions DigitalOcean to compete more directly with major cloud providers in the AI space by offering a simpler, more integrated alternative for digital native enterprises building AI applications.

07:42 Ryan – “I’m in support of any feature that Digital Ocean puts on their cloud, just because I’m rooting for the underdog there. And if you are a Digital Ocean customer, how great is it to have this and not to go to one of the other cloud hyperscalers and maintain two separate infrastructures?”

09:07 Companies Canceling ChatGPT Subscriptions

• Companies are canceling ChatGPT subscriptions due to concerns about data security, cost-benefit analysis, and integration challenges with existing enterprise systems. 


• Organizations report difficulty justifying the $20-30 per user monthly cost when employees use the tool sporadically or for non-critical tasks.


• The trend highlights a growing enterprise preference for self-hosted or private cloud AI solutions that offer better data governance and compliance controls. 


• Companies are exploring alternatives like Azure OpenAI Service or AWS Bedrock that integrate with existing cloud infrastructure and security policies.


• Technical teams cite API limitations, lack of fine-tuning capabilities for domain-specific tasks, and inability to train on proprietary data as key factors driving cancellations. 


• Many organizations need models that can be customized for industry-specific terminology and workflows.


• The shift suggests enterprises are moving from experimental AI adoption to more strategic implementation focused on measurable ROI and specific use cases. Companies are consolidating around platforms that offer both general-purpose and specialized models within their existing cloud environments.


• This development indicates a maturing AI market where businesses demand enterprise-grade features like audit trails, role-based access control, and integration with existing identity management systems rather than s