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Cloudcast Media presents from the Massive

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Studios in Raleigh, North Carolina. This

0:04

is the Cloudcast with Aaron Delb

0:06

and Brian Gracely, bringing you the

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best of cloud computing from around

0:10

the world. Good

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morning. Good evening, Webinar. Welcome back to

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the Cloudcast. We're coming to you live from our Massive

0:17

Cloudcast Studios here in Raleigh, North Carolina. And

0:19

it is Aaron for a quick programming

0:22

note for this week. We are starting

0:24

our conversion of the podcast from audio

0:26

only to include video as well. By

0:29

the time this is out, or maybe

0:31

shortly after, the main segment

0:33

should also be published on our YouTube

0:35

channel. Now, you'll see

0:37

us phase this in over the next month

0:40

or so as we convert all of our

0:42

process and workflows to our new tools. You

0:45

should also see and hear

0:47

an upgrade in the audio

0:49

quality of the interviews going forward as well.

0:51

We're on a mission in 2024 to update

0:53

your listening experience. And as always,

0:55

we'd love to hear your feedback. So

0:58

with that, let's move on to

1:00

Cloud News of the Month for March. And

1:06

we're back. And Aaron, we are trying something

1:08

new, man. I know. I

1:10

know. After all these years of kind of

1:12

having the same tools and the same workflows,

1:14

we're branching out. Yeah.

1:16

Now, we

1:18

are actually recording this on April 1st. This is not an

1:20

April Fool's joke. For the

1:23

first time, we're going to start doing this in video.

1:25

And we talked about this a little bit on

1:27

the year-end show about do we switch the

1:29

show over to video? And I think while

1:32

we got some feedback for a number of people that said, hey, I

1:35

listen to it as audio only, you guys don't need to

1:37

do it in video. I think what we found is a

1:39

couple of things. Number one is some of

1:42

the tools that people are using to record

1:44

podcasts, combination of audio and video are vastly

1:46

superior than everything that we've been using. So

1:48

we're excited about trying to improve the quality

1:51

of the show. But number two, we

1:53

realize that we don't have to pick just one or

1:56

the other. We can really kind of do a combination

1:58

of both. So we will continue. to

2:00

publish the show through all the regular

2:02

podcast channels as audio only and

2:04

then we're going to start using some of the

2:07

video just because it does

2:09

allow us to get into some new channels that allow

2:11

us to grow the audience and that's something we've been

2:13

trying to do for a while so. I'm

2:15

sorry about this new thing man you and i have

2:17

to make sure that we clean up and look decent

2:19

for video. I know i know that was

2:21

the one of the things to i was like oh gosh we

2:24

gotta figure that out now. Well

2:27

and i think the other thing we've been hearing as we've

2:29

been doing guest shows as well is that our

2:31

audience is constantly like oh we're only doing this

2:33

as audio because i think people have become so

2:35

used to you know with zoom calls and everything

2:37

they. They feel fine doing

2:39

stuff is video as well so we're

2:42

going to start with that so today's today's first show

2:44

happens to be our cloud news of the month so

2:46

we're going to do cloud news of the month looking

2:48

back at march of 2024 do you want to jump

2:50

in and get a start again. Yeah

2:54

i'll jump right in so we kind of you

2:56

know it's funny when we started this we

2:58

figured the format would kind of develop over

3:01

time a little bit and i think we've.

3:03

Developed into this rhythm that is kind of gone

3:06

into like hey let's do the old fashioned news.

3:09

Let's do an AI speed round and then let's

3:11

hit a couple big trends yeah yeah and i

3:13

didn't need it we didn't necessarily force them into

3:15

like X number of trends every month

3:17

right like i think last month was a pretty busy

3:19

month and so we did like five trends this month.

3:23

It's a little slower than say that happens three

3:25

trends this month yeah that happens that happens so

3:27

why don't you jump in you can at least

3:29

take a few of the we call good old

3:31

fashioned cloud news. yeah absolutely so good

3:33

old fashioned cloud news and i'm not necessarily going

3:35

to go into a mall in super depth because

3:38

there's actually well gosh probably upwards

3:40

of 10 of them right now but. we'll pick out

3:42

a couple of them we'll talk about them, but he

3:44

just a list of all here real quickly red has

3:46

changes their licensing in addition to

3:48

that Linux foundation creates a fork off of

3:50

that. SPF

3:53

from the ftx fame. sentence

3:56

to 25 years in prison. crypto

4:01

continues but not ftx. Bitcoin

4:06

is up and so is the years in

4:09

prison for sbx. Exactly.

4:13

Observe raises 150 million in

4:15

a series B for more observability and

4:17

actually instead of reading them I do

4:19

want to stop and talk about this one real quick. I

4:22

was probably of any of the old

4:24

fashioned cloud news ones this one really. I'll

4:27

say surprise me i will say shocked but surprise

4:30

me a little bit. There's

4:34

still money in observability

4:36

and there's still hundreds of

4:38

millions. Yeah. What was your

4:40

thoughts on that when you read

4:43

it i was like well i mean first off

4:45

jeremy bert is the ceo is a friend of

4:47

you were always excited when people forgot about that

4:49

yeah absolutely excited when folks are. I was excited

4:51

when folks get new rounds of funding yeah i

4:54

was surprised for two reasons one it

4:56

felt like funding just as a whole was sort

4:58

of down so you know good

5:00

good to see you know we're always happy

5:02

to see funding or at least money flowing out

5:04

of the season to create pockets but or at

5:06

least into their bank accounts but

5:09

yeah i mean it's one of

5:11

those things where i think monitoring observability

5:14

and maybe there'll be a future name

5:16

for observability. It's it's

5:18

something that's never going away and i

5:20

think it's it's a perpetual it's

5:23

a perpetual problem it feels like

5:25

it's never solved completely and you

5:27

know i think maybe there will there will always be

5:30

funding for people who are saying look we we think

5:32

we've got a better mousetrap. And

5:34

you know data dog has had an incredible run

5:36

for a while i think they're continuing to do

5:39

very very well but

5:41

yeah maybe there there is some i mean i

5:43

mean observes thing is really sort of built

5:46

on a very different. Data

5:49

store i mean so they build on top

5:51

of cloud top of snowflake so

5:53

you know there's there's some of that there's some there's some

5:55

technology there they're trying to do sort of an all in

5:57

one which is different and i think they're starting to build

5:59

in. some AI stuff. So I imagine

6:02

some of the VCs are looking at and they're

6:04

going, okay, maybe there is a different mousetrap that

6:06

can be built. Fair. Fair.

6:08

Well, and you mentioned stuff like Snowflake relates to

6:10

the next story. You want to go, Brian? Yeah,

6:13

they, they're, so

6:15

I don't know if we covered this last month, their CEO

6:17

left, he announced his

6:20

retirement, which, you know, we were joking on one

6:22

of the Slack channels that there should be, there

6:24

should be like a whole conference for people who

6:26

just decide like, Hey, I've had enough as being

6:28

a high level executive, I'm just taking the money

6:30

and running and I'm going to go hopefully just

6:32

lay out a beach, which is kind of our

6:35

ambition at some point in time. But yeah, Frank

6:37

Flutman left not too long ago, month,

6:39

month and a half ago, and the market has just

6:41

killed it. No, like, I mean, down

6:44

like 35, 40% or something like that,

6:46

even though they've announced, you know, their earnings

6:49

or numbers are pretty good and so forth.

6:51

But yeah, they basically, they got

6:53

sort of killed at the end of the pandemic,

6:55

because everybody moved from storing their data five or

6:57

six times to only going to store it two

7:00

or three times. So you know, their revenues were

7:02

down. And then yeah, the market

7:04

is essentially like, we're not sure who this

7:06

new CEO is, because the last guy was

7:08

was so good. So that one's, that was

7:10

gonna be interesting. You know, we don't, we

7:12

don't like to sort of give stock picking

7:15

advice or anything, but it doesn't feel like

7:17

fundamentally, Snowflake is a really different company. So

7:20

you know, who knows, maybe this is just a

7:22

dip in an opportunity for them to come back. Yep,

7:24

absolutely. Next couple that

7:27

are on here are all sort of Kubernetes

7:30

or CNCF related. So the

7:33

CNCF is not CNCF, Kubernetes is celebrating

7:35

10 years. So 10 years. Do you

7:37

remember the very first time we had

7:39

like Joseph Jax, and there

7:41

was another guy and they came on and they

7:44

were like, hey, we're doing an event called cube

7:46

con. And we're like, you're doing an entire event

7:48

around the scheduler? Are you like, are you crazy?

7:50

And now there's 12,000 people in Paris last week

7:54

were at were at cube con. So, you know,

7:56

they had some vision. Congratulations to them. But yeah,

7:58

10 years. of Kubernetes.

8:01

KubeCon Paris had 12,000 or more

8:03

than 12,000 people, so the biggest show ever. So

8:06

that space is thriving,

8:08

although we still wonder

8:10

what exactly is driving it. But it does

8:12

feel like it's sort of in the sort

8:15

of stabilization stage and mainstream stage.

8:18

So probably a lot more focused

8:20

on customers, maybe less on some of the new

8:23

incubating technologies. Well, and I'll add

8:25

this to maybe a quick

8:28

opinion, maybe borderline hot take on all

8:30

of this is, and it

8:32

relates to another article that's in Cloud News, which is why

8:35

Kubernetes needs an LTS, which

8:37

I thought was a super fascinating article. But

8:41

why is KubeCon so popular? Like

8:43

it really does feel like this

8:47

is putting a bad label on it, but

8:49

it's become the premier infrastructure plumbing

8:51

conference that VMware used to be

8:54

in. And all

8:56

those people that went to shows needed somewhere to

8:58

go, and so now they all go to KubeCon.

9:01

The last KubeCon, I didn't go to KubeCon EU, but the last

9:03

one I went to, it's like you go

9:05

there and you see the same folks in the

9:07

same booths, they're just working for different companies. A

9:10

lot of folks have just migrated from

9:13

one area to another. Yeah, it'll be

9:15

interesting to watch. I did a Sunday

9:17

perspective this past week on Broadcom and VMware,

9:19

and it seemed to get a lot of

9:21

traction from folks. It will be interesting to

9:23

see if VMware continues

9:25

to have their event of Broadcom's like, nope,

9:27

that's just another expense that we can

9:29

get rid of. We sort of have captive customers, we

9:32

can send a press release out with the new

9:34

thing. So it'll be

9:36

interesting. I will say for anybody who

9:39

is a Kubernetes customers, we don't tend to do

9:41

a whole lot of like plugging our day job.

9:44

OpenShift, if you are interested in an LTS has

9:46

had Kubernetes LTS for four or five

9:48

years, even though the community can't figure out

9:50

how to do it. Red Hat has been

9:52

doing it for four or five years and

9:54

they'll do like three or three plus years

9:56

LTS. So if you need that, just it's

9:58

out there. Don't you don't. may not have to

10:00

wait for the community to get it. Yeah, and I'll

10:02

just add this too. Again, it's a really good

10:04

article to go read. It's really fascinating and all

10:06

the reasons why and the release schedules and it

10:08

goes into a good bit of detail on all

10:10

of it. Complicated. I mean, it's funny. Yeah, and

10:13

here's the thing though. I've talked to a bunch of

10:15

customers recently about it again with my day job and

10:18

almost everyone universally they're like, no, we just,

10:21

anytime we have to migrate, we just build

10:23

entire new. We never migrate or

10:25

upgrade anything. They just build new. Yeah.

10:27

Move over and I'm like, whoa. Yeah, from

10:30

being around Kubernetes for a while, there is

10:32

two sets of kinds of

10:34

people. There's the people that just blow up the cluster and

10:36

move it over to a new one. And for them, they

10:38

don't need LTS. But there are

10:40

a lot of services that

10:43

run your day to day life that are on clusters

10:45

that are still, I mean,

10:47

they are many, many, many years old. That

10:51

people upgrade the application but they don't necessarily

10:53

upgrade the Kubernetes or they leave it for

10:55

a long time. So yeah, it

10:58

is the craziest thing. We've talked about it forever. VMware

11:01

used to put out a release once, a main release

11:03

every once every year and then a minor every six

11:05

months. So it was like, maybe

11:07

every 18 months you would talk your touch,

11:09

your virtualization infrastructure and Kubernetes came

11:11

along and was like, nope, every three months you

11:13

get a new release. Boom. Boom.

11:16

Boom. Yeah. Well, I

11:18

think as far as good old fashioned

11:20

news, I think we covered a bunch of stuff. I mean, basically it's

11:22

like, there's lots of projects that are

11:25

still going through licensing changes. You'll

11:27

see a few of them in there. HashiCorp

11:30

went through it, Redis is going through it. I

11:33

saw MariaDB is potentially getting acquired by a private

11:36

equity company. So there's a lot going on in

11:38

that space. And then the CNCF sort of has

11:40

their, one of their pillar things for the year.

11:42

So it's good to kind of see all the

11:44

videos from CNCF were already posted.

11:46

So congratulations to that team for getting all of those

11:48

out so quickly. Yeah, absolutely.

11:51

All right, man, this is sort of your

11:53

baby. The innovation speed round. What's

11:56

new, you know, shoot. By the time people watch

11:58

this, there'll probably be 25 other. new things, but

12:00

what's new in the AI space? Well, it's so funny

12:02

too, you mentioned that because one of the articles and

12:04

actually I put it in the Microsoft section, I

12:07

literally popped it in before we hit record

12:10

because this stuff is pretty amazing

12:12

how much there is, and this is

12:14

just highlights, right? And this is where too, I would say,

12:17

tell everyone if you ever get really

12:19

bored, go to the weekly Cloud News

12:21

of the Week doc, which is again,

12:23

I don't know, it's up to 70,

12:26

80 pages now where we just keep adding links

12:28

that we find interesting week after week, but most

12:31

of them are AI, that like we've already admitted

12:33

on the Cloud News of the Month, and most of

12:35

them are AI related, but here's kind of the quick

12:37

rundown and quick speed around. There's

12:39

a really good article, and it's a really long article

12:41

by the way, about

12:43

the engineers that created the transformer paper,

12:46

the one that kind of changed all

12:48

of this, and really, really

12:50

good read, I would definitely recommend everyone go

12:52

check that one out. Amazon, Amazon seems to

12:54

have picked, and we've talked about this before,

12:56

picked who they wanna be investing in,

12:59

they've invested in, Anthropic is

13:01

now up to almost $3 billion.

13:05

Saudi Arabia plans a $40 billion push to

13:11

sovereign investment into AI. There's

13:15

also, this was interesting,

13:17

good friends of the show, Acorn Labs,

13:21

we had them on not too long ago. And

13:25

by the way, there is one or two folks out

13:28

there too, that still have listened to every show, or

13:30

plan to listen to every show, it's getting harder and

13:32

harder with over 800 shows now. Hey,

13:34

you don't need to listen to that one, because they pivoted.

13:37

They basically came on and said, we're

13:39

gonna reinvent PaaS, and

13:42

then like two months later, they're like, nope. We're

13:44

not doing that. Yeah, so they released something

13:46

called GPT Script. So I

13:48

imagine applying the existing technology, but more into

13:50

an AI use case than a PaaS use

13:52

case. And then

13:54

as things always get smaller and easier,

13:57

GPT too can now be squeezed into

13:59

an ex... Excel spreadsheet, which I

14:01

thought was pretty crazy. And

14:04

then CNCF publishes, and this was hot off the

14:07

press, CNCF publishes a cloud

14:09

native AI white paper. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

14:11

yeah. The buzz around KubeCon was everything

14:13

was sort of AI, platform engineering or

14:15

something else. I think we're gonna talk

14:17

about that in just a bit. I

14:19

was sort of surprised that a few of the numbers, and

14:22

this is the crazy thing, is like we're talking about numbers

14:24

in the billions in terms of investment,

14:26

but I was sort of surprised the

14:29

Amazon investment in anthropic

14:31

wasn't necessarily net new. I mean, they had

14:34

pledged, like previously, they were gonna do 4

14:36

billion. This was just sort of

14:38

like truing up the previous four, to

14:40

get them to 4 billion. They

14:42

didn't buy them. They're just sort of making yet another

14:45

sort of tranche of an investment. I'm

14:48

a little bit surprised. I don't

14:50

know if I'm surprised or if it's something that we should keep an eye

14:52

on, but like it seemed fairly low

14:54

to me, given the stakes

14:56

that are between, even

14:59

between Microsoft and Google and AWS, it

15:01

felt fairly low. And it is

15:03

one of those things where you sort of wonder, does

15:06

Amazon know something more than we do? Because they

15:08

did come out with, they did come out maybe

15:10

like a week or so ago, and

15:13

Adam Cielicki sort of said, hey, we've got

15:15

X thousands of people using bedrock, or

15:17

are they zero behind

15:20

the level of investment they've

15:23

got to make? I think it's an interesting thing

15:26

to look at. The other thing that was interesting,

15:28

I thought the Saudi Arabia number, Saudi

15:30

Arabia has this gigantic wealth fund, sovereign wealth

15:32

fund. I thought $40 billion

15:34

seemed a little bit low, because I think they

15:36

are trying to, from

15:39

what I've heard, they're trying to become like

15:41

a third place where chips are

15:43

being built. Obviously, they're trying

15:46

to reestablish something. They know that

15:49

what's going on in APAC has concerns with

15:51

what's going on in China. The US has

15:53

to figure out how to build up manufacturing

15:55

again. And they have

15:57

so much money, and $40 billion actually seems

15:59

to be seems sort of low, especially when

16:02

you consider that the

16:04

folks that run, what's the Japanese

16:06

SoftBank is talking about? Like $100

16:08

billion. And

16:11

we talked earlier, like Sam Altman's

16:13

thrown around some $7 trillion number,

16:15

which, or $7 trillion number, which

16:17

seems obscene. But $40

16:19

billion seems sort of low for, if they're

16:22

really trying to transform from being

16:25

completely oil-based or petroleum-based

16:27

to something completely different. But

16:29

maybe just me. No, makes

16:32

sense. Absolutely. All right. Let's

16:34

get into, we got three trends this month. Which one

16:36

do you want to jump on first? Let's do CubeGone.

16:39

I mean, we already talked about it a little bit. Let's kind

16:41

of do, and neither of us were able to make it, first

16:43

of all. But I see

16:45

some kind of outside reflections. I'm sure

16:47

you have some impressions or everything. I

16:51

will simply say, again, we talked about more

16:53

than 12,000 employees, or attendees,

16:55

sorry. I feel a

16:57

little bit like AI-washing. What's

17:01

your thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean,

17:03

people came back to it and they said, hey, there was

17:06

a lot of AI talk. I

17:08

think the reality is, and people

17:11

can get cynical about this or not, like this

17:14

year, every

17:16

keynote is going to be, at least the day

17:18

one keynote, is going to be dominated by AI.

17:21

Because if you don't come out and

17:24

make a statement about where you are, right?

17:26

So this is the yin and yang of

17:28

timing of big events and so forth. You

17:31

could say, well, last year, AWS did

17:33

a lot at reInvent. Well, that was

17:36

in November, right? If you

17:38

had missed that cycle, remember, it was

17:40

sort of like the March-Aprilish timeframe was

17:42

when chat GPT sort of blew up

17:44

for the world and then something going

17:47

on. So they

17:49

missed the AI cycle last time

17:51

with CNCF. And there wasn't necessarily

17:53

a lot to talk about. So

17:56

You really had to make some sort of statement. You Had

17:58

to give people some sense of the AI cycle. Because

18:00

to a certain extent you know that

18:02

the Cncs and the Cnc of community

18:04

is competing for people's attention, and if

18:06

it they're perceived to be like we're

18:08

just the infrastructure people, you just the

18:10

cooper. Now these people, or whatever you

18:12

you do run the risk at the

18:15

border to be like, oh, they've. Immediately

18:17

overnight because relevance and he i think the

18:19

reality is like tons of the say I

18:21

stuff does run topic of burnett ease their

18:24

see other schedulers in some advancements have been

18:26

going on as space is probably good to

18:28

have folks like a video showing up and

18:30

infusing some new ideas and capital. Other stuff

18:33

so I don't worry about it. Been washing

18:35

so much as as being like this year

18:37

you're going to hear about it. You can

18:39

put whatever filter you want on just whether

18:41

you think it's Bs or not be as

18:44

but like you're not going to get around

18:46

that right? So. You have to sort

18:48

expect that. Come in and it'll be interesting

18:50

to see where you know how the Cncs.

18:53

Adopts, To this because I don't. I

18:55

don't know of any like net new projects that

18:57

are probably drop into the Cnc or for a

18:59

i will be a single watch. The

19:01

green agree. About in

19:03

I didn't have much to do with it. I

19:05

had a huge work work deadline for for Art

19:08

with you know, our user conference coming up in

19:10

May right? and it was like it was like

19:12

all the presentations were do and I was track

19:14

lead and I was like oh man I just

19:17

don't have time to keep up with it

19:19

this year. Yeah there's a there's a really good

19:21

write up. we've got a link in the show

19:23

notes. ah I'm you have somebody basically went through

19:25

Daniel Bryan's who's been around the Cncs for very

19:28

long time or in a lot of different areas.

19:30

infrastructure developer stuff it's of as he wrote a

19:32

bay. A really really good Ah,

19:34

I'm. Kind. Of a summary article

19:36

is probably four or five pages long. Been a

19:39

kind of walk through yes the I stuff that

19:41

sort of everything else and sir where the highlights

19:43

were and were areas are spending and not expand.

19:45

It's definitely worth a read. A few are you

19:47

trying to get get a good sense What happened

19:49

at the at you com Paris. Nice.

19:52

What's. next you want your soft smile minutes

19:54

we sat spent a little that before

19:56

but i think it the trend continues

19:58

microsoft is real really branching out from

20:00

just OpenAI as a partner. Three

20:03

different proof points on that this last month.

20:07

Well they did an

20:09

interesting thing. Yeah, they

20:11

acquired InflectionAI, which

20:15

really brings in a team that's gonna run

20:17

almost consumer level AI, right? Right. And

20:21

then we can break these down a little bit more. But then I

20:23

thought this was super interesting. They hired a new

20:25

head of AI. So basically you almost think of

20:27

it as when

20:31

the OpenAI and Sam Altman stuff

20:33

kind of all went to crap and Sachi

20:36

was potentially gonna bring over Sam as head

20:38

of AI. Well that, they

20:40

decided not to keep that seat

20:42

warm for him. They actually went

20:44

and hired somebody. Well

20:47

the nuance of this one is, so, and we

20:50

talked about this last month as well, right? So last month

20:52

they made the investment in Mistral. And so that

20:54

was sort of the first time they were like,

20:56

hey, we need to hedge our bets. So

21:01

InflectionAI and hiring the new head,

21:03

those things are connected. So InflectionAI

21:05

was this sort of

21:07

consumer chatbot sort of company. And

21:10

we'll put some links in the show notes. There's some

21:13

really interesting behind the scenes of like who was their

21:15

investor. And they had bought like 24,000 GPUs for

21:19

this consumer service without really ever

21:21

scaling. Like it was a weird investment, I

21:23

think, and did he as an investor as

21:25

well. But they basically

21:27

hired the guy who was running it,

21:29

who was an, had been a big deal over

21:31

at Google Brain. And so

21:34

he's now in charge of consumer

21:36

AI for Microsoft. Now what that

21:38

means, whether it's like Xbox or

21:41

tied into GitHub or whatever, it

21:43

does sort of show them realizing

21:46

like, it's not

21:48

just technology. Like you almost have to like

21:50

buy the teams of people. And there's such

21:52

a small number of people. They're all either

21:54

ex-Facebook or Google people. And

21:56

so he's now, yeah, he's now the head of AI

21:58

for consumer. Now it'll be interesting. you see at some point

22:00

like does that sort of merge

22:02

together with the stuff happening in Azure and

22:04

is Azure considered consumer or enterprise or whatever

22:06

but they you know they

22:08

continue to put their money where

22:11

their mouth is now you know whether

22:13

or not they've over invested as we

22:15

talked about you know Amazon's level versus their level

22:17

will be interesting but yeah yeah it's

22:20

this is this

22:22

is for you know this is like a big

22:24

game of what's the what's the what's the board

22:26

game that's all about war where you just trying

22:28

to take people's land risk is it risk of

22:30

that one yet risk going on right now yeah

22:32

well in and along the lines that you mentioned

22:35

about building the last article

22:37

in this tune this trend is Microsoft and this just

22:39

happened or I just put this in right before we

22:41

hit record Microsoft might be

22:43

building a 100 billion dollar supercomputer

22:47

for AI I think

22:49

it was it Stargate was that the nickname of it

22:52

I apologize I didn't click into the link let

22:54

me do it real quick yeah Stargate um

22:57

so I mean hey who

23:00

knows you know now we were measuring supercomputers

23:02

in hundreds of billions which

23:05

it's a little crazy to me well that

23:07

and and that one that that concept is

23:09

is again it seems like

23:11

it's another hedge because on one hand you've

23:14

got Nvidia which we'll talk about next you

23:17

know has been talking about you know the

23:19

gigantic Nvidia systems and if he keeps talking

23:21

about we're not a chip company we're a

23:23

systems company I mean it does

23:25

that does almost feel like Microsoft is going

23:28

we we need to be smarter about what

23:30

these larger systems look like because it's very

23:32

possible that either we have to run them

23:34

highly efficient or our customers are

23:37

going to ask us to build that for

23:39

them so you know hundred billion dollars seems

23:41

like a gigantic investment unless they're

23:44

you know specifically going after like something like search

23:47

but you know the idea of building

23:50

large large-scale systems to hedge against Nvidia

23:52

or to potentially be a supplier for

23:54

your customers doesn't seem you know like

23:56

way out in left field yeah

23:58

then they say this could launch as soon as

24:00

2028. And

24:03

what I picture for those of the science fiction fans

24:05

out there who watch the West World show on what

24:07

used to be HBO, I just pictured

24:10

all it was in one of the seasons, I

24:12

think it was maybe third season, fourth season. They

24:14

had this entire building and it just had

24:17

this big red glowing ball inside it. Like

24:21

that's why, and it was their artificial

24:23

intelligence that ran the world basically. I

24:26

feel like that's what they're trying to build here.

24:28

You would think you literally need a

24:31

nuclear power plant right next to this thing to generate

24:33

enough power for it, right? Which is an article we

24:35

had in the past. They're actually

24:37

exploring exactly that. So maybe it is

24:39

all the threads coming together. Lots

24:41

of big thinking happening at Microsoft these days. All right,

24:44

last trend. NVIDIA had

24:47

their GTC event, which it

24:50

was interesting because I have

24:52

never really followed this thing because for the

24:54

longest time, NVIDIA to me was always about

24:56

gaming. Up until the real this

24:59

last year or so, it was like, yeah, they do GPUs, but

25:01

the use case is always sort of gaming and stuff. And so

25:03

I didn't really pay attention to it. Did

25:05

you see what GTC looked like?

25:07

It looked like a Taylor Swift concert.

25:09

Oh, yeah. And again,

25:12

I had known about them

25:14

in the past, but again, it was gaming or

25:16

it was the VDI and EUC. Those

25:20

are the two experiences I had with

25:22

NVIDIA previous to this. But yeah, suddenly

25:24

this is like, again,

25:26

we're talking about trade shows and conference

25:28

seasons and all that. I mean, this

25:30

is suddenly one of the trade shows

25:32

to be at now. And

25:35

it's a pretty amazing event and

25:37

it almost reminds me of the old splashy

25:39

days, right? Of like when you

25:41

had lots and lots of production go into

25:44

some of these trade shows and I think

25:46

as budgets tightened up, some of it left,

25:48

but NVIDIA, they did it all. Yeah,

25:50

I tried to keep up with that. I've watched

25:52

a few of the things. I've watched some of

25:55

the keynotes and so forth. And it seems to

25:57

me there's two sort of schools. thought.

26:01

There's the school of thought. I mean, what I mean by that

26:03

is like people writing up summaries of it and so forth. There's

26:06

the ones that are like breathless over, wow,

26:08

this is really big, and this is amazing

26:10

and so forth. And they tend to be

26:12

focused on, I think what NVIDIA did is

26:14

they said, this is our moment to

26:17

sort of kind of reinvent themselves as being

26:19

like our use cases AI as opposed to

26:21

in the past where I think

26:24

they were always kind of trying to find a use

26:26

case, you know, or you know, find a mega use

26:28

case. And so, you

26:30

know, apparently what they did was, you could

26:33

look at the you can look at the announcements and

26:35

so forth, and they're interesting. But what

26:37

they tried to do was sort of be

26:39

like, the world of AI now resides with

26:42

NVIDIA, right? They wanted to put themselves at the center of

26:44

the earth. And so there was a lot of people that

26:46

were sort of, you know, their write

26:48

ups were like breathless. They're like, Oh, look, they're doing

26:50

cars, and they're doing robots, and they're doing healthcare, and

26:53

they're doing all these things. And,

26:55

and to a certain extent, like those were there,

26:58

but not as in depth as people kind of

27:00

made them out to be. And then

27:03

there was some really interesting write ups. Ben Thompson

27:05

had a really interesting one. I put a link

27:07

in the show notes, Ben Thompson's the guy who

27:09

runs a strategy, strategy, does

27:11

a lot of coverage of like chips and hardware and

27:13

stuff, as well as some other internet stuff. And

27:16

he had a really interesting take that, up

27:19

until now, so everyone thinks of NVIDIA as

27:21

being like this GPU company, which obviously they

27:23

are. And right now, they're sort of cornering

27:25

the market because they're short supply. But

27:28

he said, you know, their their moat is

27:30

really been this thing called CUDA, which is

27:32

their their software stack, basically. And

27:34

he said, up until now, there's never been

27:36

anybody who's ever looked at CUDA as a

27:38

as an external competitor and said, we should

27:40

try and build like an alternative to that,

27:42

or like an open version of that, because

27:44

it just, you know, it was kind of

27:46

niched to gaming or niche to certain, you

27:48

know, certain kinds of use cases, but not not

27:51

massively horizontal. And his his argument

27:53

was basically, NVIDIA

27:56

is is a big dog right now, and they're

27:58

kind of setting the world. on fire, but

28:02

the level of competition that they're going to have

28:04

around CUDA for people that are like, we cannot

28:06

let one company dictate what this looks like, is

28:09

going to be really interesting. And that was that

28:11

was kind of his take is like they've, they've

28:14

unlocked the market to now go after their biggest

28:16

moat. And it'll be interesting to see if whether

28:18

it's like a bunch of open source, you know,

28:20

projects or, you know, one or two companies or

28:22

even one company trying to build an alternative. Because

28:25

if you look at all their announcements, they're

28:27

all tied to we only run on with

28:29

this hardware. And if we've seen anything

28:31

about the internet over the last 10 or 15 years,

28:34

like that, that is like

28:36

the magnet that is the, you

28:38

know, the mosquito, the moth to the flame,

28:40

if you will, for competition. Yeah, yeah. Well,

28:42

and yeah, and part of it

28:44

too, was I mean, their their latest, the latest

28:46

GPU, the Blackwell GPU, $30,000, right?

28:49

And so like,

28:51

again, if you're an Nvidia investor or

28:54

an Nvidia fan, hey, this is amazing.

28:56

But if you're outside looking in, like

28:59

there's so many people now,

29:02

either trying to build competitive

29:06

GPUs or something

29:08

that is a chip that's not

29:10

a GPU, but is, you know,

29:12

specialized for AI or all these

29:14

other things, right, there is so

29:16

many competitive forces coming from so

29:18

many different directions. Yeah, I mean,

29:21

it is, it is one of the fascinating things

29:23

about our industry. And what makes it really interesting

29:25

is, anytime you put a large bag of money

29:27

out somewhere, I mean, just everybody, I

29:29

mean, if you know what the old thing, like

29:32

one person's profit is the next

29:34

person's business model. Yeah, I mean, that's everybody

29:36

is, everybody's looking at Jensen

29:39

Wong, they're jealous of his, you know, coat, you

29:41

know, rack full of

29:43

black leather jackets, and they are, they're

29:46

coming out, you know, and everything's everything's gonna be

29:48

timing, because the stuff they built has been built

29:50

up for a long, long time. Yeah,

29:52

they played a long game and they're reaping the

29:55

benefits of it. But now

29:57

it'll be interesting to see how quick

30:00

the bullseye moved to them and

30:03

how long they can keep it up. Well,

30:05

and I think the other thing is like

30:07

timing is always everybody's worst enemy in technology, right?

30:09

Like the longer you, I don't

30:11

know, you can't manipulate the market or shape

30:13

the market to your will or invent new

30:16

things. And I mean, they've got

30:18

a market who is sort of captured. Everybody

30:20

wants their GPUs, but like if you can't

30:22

get them for a couple of years, like

30:24

it does create a lot of

30:26

people going like, well, what alternatives available to

30:28

me? Because nothing isn't an

30:31

acceptable answer. And so like

30:33

you said, like I think we're gonna find maybe

30:35

not on purpose, but just out of necessity,

30:39

you know, what is, what do they call it? It's

30:43

how it's the innovator's dilemma, right? It's the,

30:45

you know, I'm gonna build from the bottom.

30:48

It'll be limited feature set, but it's cheaper.

30:50

It's simpler, right? It's the stuff that Clayton

30:52

Christian Gen has written about for years and

30:54

years. So it's gonna be fascinating stuff. So

30:56

yeah, not a super, super busy March. Like

30:59

you said, it felt a little more balanced of cloud

31:01

and AI and so forth. So that's a good

31:04

thing. But yeah, any last thoughts

31:06

for March now that we are into April

31:08

and it's starting to warm up everywhere? Well,

31:11

we gotta talk about basketball. I mean,

31:13

for all of our non-American fans or

31:15

non-sports fans, we have to apologize real

31:18

quick, but we do have to talk

31:20

about March Madness. Sorry about your team,

31:22

man. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. But I

31:25

mean, it's a pretty crazy

31:27

tournament. Is it crazy?

31:29

Well, a lot of great basketball going on

31:31

this year. Yeah, and the local team, NC

31:33

State here in Raleigh, major the final four,

31:35

they are the Cinderella for this

31:38

year. So that's kind of cool, you

31:40

know, just for the local area. So yeah,

31:42

I think we are, we're getting into Q2. Q2

31:46

is gonna be, you know, we'll see

31:48

earnings here in a few weeks for

31:50

what Q1 look like. Q1

31:53

always seems to set what people's Q2,

31:55

three and four budgets look like, depending on how well

31:57

or not as well as it went. So. I

32:00

think while the first quarter is always a

32:02

little bit slow, I think we're going to see a little

32:05

bit of build up for April and May. Summer

32:07

will be summer as it always is and then

32:09

it'll probably be sort of fast and furious for

32:11

Q3 and Q4. But

32:14

this video I think is not so hard, man. I think we

32:16

can do this. I think we can do this. You think so?

32:19

We'll see. I think we'll give it a try.

32:21

We haven't published it yet, so this may be one we bury. You never know.

32:23

But the good news is lots of smart people

32:25

are making these tools easier for us. So yeah,

32:27

you'll start to see these on the

32:30

TikToks and the Instagrams and the YouTubes and all

32:32

the other places. So especially YouTube, we've always had

32:34

a really good following on YouTube. We just kind

32:36

of stop publishing stuff. So maybe it'll follow us

32:38

along. If you like video, hopefully you'll

32:40

like this stuff and we'll snip it up into some

32:42

things and go from there. So welcome to what? Cloudcast

32:46

2.0 in terms of our media profile. Still

32:49

doing audio, but now with more pixels. Yep,

32:54

exactly. All right, man. We'll

32:57

wrap it up, folks. Thanks for listening. Thanks for

32:59

watching. Thanks for telling a friend about the show. And

33:01

hopefully if you are still in the bracket, hopefully your

33:03

teams do well in the final four and we will

33:06

talk to you next month. Thank

33:09

you for listening to the Cloudcast. Please

33:11

visit thecloudcast.net to find

33:13

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