It’s that time of the year… Aaron and Brian answer emails and questions for the second half of the year.

SHOW: 882

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #882 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

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Question 1 - There was a lot of talk about Broadcom’s changes to VMware at the beginning of the year, but not as much since then. What’s going on in the world of virtualization?

Question 2 - Both of you have talked about working remotely for quite a while. What’s your take on RTO mandates? Any suggestions for remote workers?

Question 3 - Have either of you found any valuable uses of AI in your day-to-day job?

Question 4 - Now that the US elections are over, how do you expect the US Gov’t to be involved with the tech industry (anti-trust, CHIPS ACT, AI regulation, etc..)

Question 5 - AI models and GPUs  seem to get all the attention in the news. Are there other areas of AI that you think are really important but aren’t getting much attention right now?

Question 6 - Are cloud skills still considered valuable? Do certifications matter anymore?

Question 7 - What’s going on in the open source communities like the CNCF?

Question 8 - What surprised you the most this year?

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In the late 70s and early 80s, a music revolution started because a bunch of talented musicians played on 100s of albums, behind the scenes. Would the AI startup community benefit from a similar infrastructure of experts?

SHOW: 881

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #881 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• Yacht Rock Documentary (HBO Max - Trailer)

WHY DON’T WE HAVE EXPERTS BEHIND THE SCENES OF EVERY STARTUP?

• History of the interactions between bands like Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, etc..
• Why do VCs allow startups to hire their own back-office people? 
• Why aren’t there services that offer startup backend services, not just one off SaaS services?
• AI could be used to scale those services. 

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The 2024 AWS re:Invent happened, with a new CEO, and an appearance by a previous CEO. What were the big announcements, trends and stories coming out of the keynote?

SHOW: 880

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #880 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS" 

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SHOW NOTES:

• AWS re:Invent 2024 - CEO Keynote with Matt Garman
• Top Announcements of 2024 AWS re:Invent
• What hath AWS wrought? (Forrest Brazzeal newsletter)
• Prince guitar solo during George Harrison tribute

Overall Takeaways:

• The new CEO
• The overall themes
• Andy Jassy’s appearance

Brian’s Top 5 Takeaways:

• The focus is now all ARM and GPUs/AI Accelerators (goodbye Intel)
• AWS is getting back to basics on Cloud - a focus on primitives
• AWS is trying to get ahead of startup and enterprise usage of GenAI with a focus on Inferencing costs (trying to make it a game of compute costs vs. model capabilities)
• What are the 1000 GenAI apps that Amazon has built? (Rufus, Robot package loading? NFL Blitz predictor?

Brandon’s Top 5 Takeaways:

• Amazon is the “Everything Store,” AWS is the “Every Service Store”
• Garmon is the legacy AWS CEO, Jassy is the AWS AI CEO
• AWS wants everyone to build a chatbot and/or call center app using AWS Bedrock 
• The NOVA foundation models are the AWS answer to OpenAI and Anthroptic. 
• AWS is attempting to build both the models and the AI Chips to run them. Tenuous partnerships with Nvidia and Anthropic. Neither was on stage. 
• AWS will never stop telling us about “Working Backwards”
• AWS marketing still wants talk about the how rather than the benefit. A long lecture on Nitro and Amazon Aurora DSQL with a lot of discussion about synchronizing clocks.

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How are the largest VCs viewing the early stages of the AI Era, from the perspective of investment, technology moats, economics, early adoption and future use-cases.  

SHOW: 879

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #879 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• AI Eats the World (Presentation - Benedict Evans)

IS SILICON VALLEY STILL THE CENTER OF TECH INNOVATION?

• Companies are investing tons of money
• Breakthrough results haven’t emerged yet (business models, profits)
• It’s not clear that there is a technology moat; but maybe a capital moat
• Model training costs are expected to rise 5x to 10x - worse economics??
• Lots of VC investment and vendor 2nd-order investments
• LLM costs are creating marginal cost of software (been since the mainframe)
• Model quality vs. price is improving, but price of the services (e.g. ChatGPT-Pro) is increasing - how much extra value is being delivered?
• How will open source impact AI? 
• “If anything in life is certain, semiconductors are cyclical, commodity tech goes to marginal cost, and every new tech produces a bubble.”
• Today’s GenAI question - is it accurate and useful? How can we tell, and how can it improve (or does it need to)?
• Start with a simple concept - AI gives us unlimited interns - how can you extrapolate that? How would this have been extrapolated for the original internet (create content, translate language, write code, etc.)
• Use cases are still not easy to see beyond Chatbots (and variants), Coding Assistants
• Consulting revenue from GenAI is bigger than technology - and still most/many projects still in trials. 
• Technology can take a long time to adopt - Cloud still only has 30% of workloads (15yrs old)
• 66% of CEO’s don’t expect their first GenAI app in production until sometime in 2025, 50% at least 2H of 2025.
• [Shadow AI] SaaS AI will accelerate adoption, if it follows Cloud pattern - external forces are more motivated to attack business “change” than internal teams
• [Build vs. Ecosystem] Do the LLM vendors become the application vendors? Where does the LLM start and stop (infra, platform, API, apps, etc.)
• [Learning from the customers] Do the LLM vendors use their knowledge advantage to build the apps? 
• GenAI Apps Categories - Make something better, Replace something, Just do the thing
• “AI is just whatever is wrong/broken now” - How well does AI understand “broken”
• Will people be the biggest problem in AI progress? 
• [Decoupling] Looks at global markets for Internet today - ecommerce/retail, food delivery, advertising, media, autonomous driving, 
• [Elevator Example] Automation gets rid of people
• No real conclusion

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Brian Gracely, Aaron Delp, and Brandon Whichard discuss the top stories in Cloud and AI from November 2024 including the breaking news of Pat Gelsinger's Thanksquitting departure from Intel.

SHOW: 878

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #878 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:

• Upgrade to the next generation of the cloud.  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

SHOW NOTES:

• Link to November 2024 news and articles

SEGMENTS COVERED IN THE SHOW:

• Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
• The AI Innovation Continues 

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As the AI era emerges, the debate about the best place to live to take advantage of it for your career has started up again. Is Silicon Valley still the best place to live when a new trend starts?

SHOW: 877

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #877 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:
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SHOW NOTES:

• The case against living in the Bay area (Forrest Brazeal) 
• Cost of living calculator
• Best quality of life cities (US) 
• Best quality of life cities (Europe)
• Best quality of life cities (Asia)
• Top 15 Wealth Creating Stocks of last 10 years (Vanguard)

IS SILICON VALLEY STILL THE CENTER OF TECH INNOVATION?

• Amazon, Microsoft, Space X , BYD, TSMC, are not in Silicon Valley

THE PROS AND CONS OF LIVING IN SILICON VALLEY DURING A BOOM?

• Density of ideas
• Density of people that obsess over technology
• Work from Office vs. Work from Anywhere
• Location of customers - and physical vs. digital
• Ability to make money vs. life changing money
• Non-work considerations (family, non-work activities, etc.)

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Andrew Manoske (@a2d2, VP Products @Kindo)  talks about the intersection of GenAI and DevSecOps, the WhiteRabbitNeo model, and learning adversary behavior.

SHOW: 876

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #876 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:

• While data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens Dialogues is shaping the conversation
• Follow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts

SHOW NOTES:

• Kindo (homepage)
• WhiteRabbitNeo (open source project)
• Open Source GenAI models advances support for CyberSecurity and DecSecOps teams

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background and your current areas of focus.

Topic 2 - You come from a security background. Every conversation we have with security teams is “attackers have more tools, more money and more time”. Is security an almost unwinnable game without a new way of thinking about the equation?

Topic 3 - It seems like AI has the potential to give Security teams (or anyone in IT) more of a chance, if used properly. How are you thinking about giving teams the right security AI powers?

Topic 4 - Let’s talk about WhiteRabbitNeo. “WhiteRabbitNeo is uncensored and trained to act like a modern adversary.” What does this mean in practical terms?

Topic 5 - Where is the potential for the right set of AI models + Agents to make a significant impact towards better on-going security?

Topic 6 - There will be lots of things aimed at being AI for Security. How would you tell someone how to sort through what is useful vs. AI-washed or not likely to be useful?

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In the Cloud Era, Netflix was held up as the lighthouse for what was possible with cloud. So who is the Netflix of the AI era, and are we learning enough about AI yet?

SHOW: 875

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #875 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW SPONSOR:
Love the insights from this episode? Make sure you never miss a beat with Chatpods! Whether you're commuting, working out, or just on the go, Chatpods lets you capture and summarize key takeaways effortlessly.
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SHOW NOTES:

• New research shows widespread adoption of GenAI
• NetflixOSS (homepage)

WHAT DID NETFLIX DO FOR THE CLOUD ERA?

• Provided a face for a new style of doing work
• Provided validation that a new model could work
• Encouraged people to explore older, “bad practices”
• Began to define metrics of what the new world could look like

WHY DO WE NEED A NETFLIX OF THE AI ERA?

• Because AI can apparently do everything, but what are some specific things?
• What are the new ways of thinking about old problems?
• Has it been proven to improve teams, or mostly individuals? 
• Do we need a Couch to 5k set of use-cases? Starting use-cases
• Or is AI going to be a big-bang approach?

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Sunil Mallya (@sunilmallya, Co-Founder & CTO @_FlipAI) talks about building AI models to help IT Operations teams simplify troubleshooting, incident response and pattern detection. 

SHOW: 874

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #874 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

• Flip AI (homepage)
• Enterprise AI Agents: Bringing LLMs to Enterprise Data

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show.

Topic 2 - Let’s begin by talking about your broader view of where IT Operations is today for large companies. What are their biggest challenges, and where are their opportunities for big improvements?

Topic 3 - One of the biggest challenges for IT Operations is so many systems, so many tools, so many data sources and the difficulty of coordinating (troubleshooting, incident response, pattern detection, etc.) across them. Is there a modern approach that’s emerging about how to make this better?

Topic 4 - Where does the potential of AI models come into play here? It is more focused on being able to ask the system for diagnosis, or can it start getting closer to taking independent actions?

Topic 5 - How do you train an AI model with so many different pieces of customer data?

Topic 6 - Let’s talk about AI Agents and what they can begin to accomplish within an Enterprise.

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It’s not a reach to say that we’re currently in a time of uncertainty, across technology, economic and political spectrums. But historically, times of uncertainty have often led to unexpected creativity. 

SHOW: 873

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #873 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET 

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

CHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SHOW NOTES:

STUFF THAT FEELS UNCERTAIN OR FRAGMENTED RIGHT NOW

• Transition of US political parties (regulation, leadership, reaction to the unknown, friend or foe of Silicon Valley)
• Stock market is somewhat bullish, but credit markets aren’t aligned
• Social media seems more fragmented (good & bad), so what does this do to information flows, learning, discussions, etc.
• Speculation is that AI LLM models are starting to plateau
• Cloud providers aren’t really talking about anything but AI
• VCs seem to be excited about the potential of acquisitions again, but who?
• Netflix can’t seem to figure out streaming live TV, at least at scale - but Amazon can?

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