In our top story this week, contributing writer Taryn Plumb analyzes how highly regulated industries like telecom are able to use synthetic data to train their generative artificial intelligence models. Who knew that artificial data would be a fast-growing trend in 2023?

Our second most popular story this week is also about genAI; Dell and Nvidia have partnered on a suite of products that "aims to help enterprises with AI inferencing, strategy, implementation and scaling; support workloads locally on device; and provide training and other critical tools."

Lest you think we're all AI; the other three top stories are about networking (have you had your MEC fix yet this week?) and security (well, and AI in security).

We try to keep things balanced in our reporting each week, but AI is creeping into more and more stories. Judging by your response, it seems to be a popular topic. Here's this week's top 5 stories as chosen by you: our non-artificial readers (as far as we know).

“We have to make sure that customer data is completely kept private, that nothing is leaking out,” said Guenter Klas, senior manager for R&D, research clusters, AI and quantum at telecom giant Vodafone, which is beginning to leverage synthetic data.

Also, “we cannot wait for data to accumulate in one of our local markets and start projects,” he told SDxCentral. “We can fill the gap by generating artificial, synthetic data.”

This comes as more and more enterprises are exploring the evolving technology. A recent survey by Deloitte found that more than one-third (37%) of CEOs are implementing some form of genAI, while more than half (55%) are evaluating or experimenting with the technology. Furthermore, 79% of CEOs believe genAI will increase efficiencies and 52% believe it will increase growth opportunities.

U.K.-based telecom giant Vodafone is expanding its work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Spain, providing enterprise customers in that country with access to low-latency services using the AWS Wavelength multi-access edge compute (MEC) platform.

Analysts have noted near-term challenges to AI-related spending, but still expect the market to surge over the next several years. Dell’Oro Group, for instance, is predicting AI infrastructure spending will bolster data center capex to more than $500 billion in sales by 2027.

Cisco unveiled a new ransomware recovery function designed to enhance the response capabilities in its extended detection and response (XDR) platform. The vendor taps Cohesity to automatically take snapshots and help restore business-critical data when signs of ransomware are detected.