AI Daily: Cantor initiates infrastructure, AI software names

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

SECTOR INITIATION: Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Thomas Blakey last night initiated coverage of 18 names in infrastructure and artificial intelligence software. Cantor’s discussions suggest that the value proposition of infrastructure software will increase, driven by the ongoing secular expansion of AI and generative AI, the analyst tells investors in a research note. The firm says these trends “fuel the need” for unified, secure, and highly integrated data systems, observable infrastructure, real-time computing and networking capabilities, and enhanced workflows and collaboration. The firm expects cloud infrastructure platforms to play a central role in consolidating these functions. The monetization of AI will primarily come from increased usage and consumption, it contends. Cantor’s top ideas are MongoDB (MDB), Oracle (ORCL), and Monday.com (MNDY). The firm’s other Overweight-rated names are Datadog (DDOG), Five9 (FIVN), Microsoft (MSFT), ServiceNow (NOW), and Snowflake (SNOW). The analyst put Neutral ratings on Commvault (CVLT), DigitalOcean (DOCN), Dynatrace (DT), Elastic (ESTC), Informatica (INFA), Cloudflare (NET), Nice (NICE), Palantir (PLTR), Atlassian (TEAM), and Zoom Communications (ZM).

APPLE TO DISABLE AI SUMMARIES: Apple (AAPL) plans to disable AI news summary feature following multiple complaints of inaccuracies in its summaries of news headlines, The New York Times’ Tripp Mickle reports. In addition to disabling news summaries, Apple will add a warning for users who opted in to receive notification summaries for other apps saying that the feature is still in development, and that there could be errors. The tech giant had been facing mounting pressure to withdraw the service, which sent notifications that appeared to come from within news organizations’ apps.

In a note to developers, Apple said it was working to improve summaries of notifications for news and entertainment apps. It plans to make the feature available again in a future software update.

SNOWFLAKE: Snowflake on Thursday introduced Meta Llama large language models optimized with SwiftKV that it said will improve model performance and lower the cost of developing generative AI tools. Snowflake first unveiled SwiftKV in December and has made it open source. In a blog post, Snowflake said SwiftKV-optimized Llama 3.3 70B and Llama 3.1 405B models, referred to as Snowflake-LLama-3.3-70B and Snowflake-Llama-3.1-405B, are now available for serverless inference in Cortex AI with an inference cost reduction of up to 75% compared to the baseline Meta Llama models in Cortex AI that are not SwiftKV optimized. The company said it is considering bringing the same optimizations to other model families available in Snowflake Cortex AI.