Wednesday, December 25, 2024

2024 Year-End Review and 2025 Predictions

It’s that time of the year again. Brian and Aaron wrap of the year in Cloud and AI, and make predictions for 2025.

SHOW: 884

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #884 Transcript

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LINK TO TOPIC DETAILS


Predictions, or 2025 areas of focus?

Aaron

  • 2025 will be the year of AI ROI, and Agentic AI will make this worse
  • There will be at least one “SkyNet scare” of Agentic AI
  • 2025 will also be the year of inference (see ROI)

Brian:

  • Gov’t vs. AI (US Trump, EU, China)
  • Emergence of an AI Agent stack or standard?
  • Useful or killer AI apps? (new focus of Weekend Perspective)
  • AI pricing evolves based on usage patterns or just need for revenues?


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Sunday, December 22, 2024

Evaluating Market Changing Trends

If AI is going to be the next big trend in tech and impact every aspect of society, how do you go about trying to evaluate where it is today and where it might be in a few years or a decade?


SHOW: 883

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #883 Transcript

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HOW MIGHT YOU CONSIDER THE BEGINNING OF A TECHNOLOGY MARKET SHIFT?

  • What’s the landscape of players in the game?
  • What are the potential moats? (technology, economics, people, political policies, geographic)
  • What are the economics of the technology shift? Where will big changes happen? 
  • What are the usage patterns? Are they well defined? 
  • How long behind the consumer shifts will the enterprise shifts happen? 
  • What behaviors will need to change (significantly) for this to have wide adoption?
  • How might this impact my work, my family, my company, etc.?


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Wednesday, December 18, 2024

2024 Year End Mailbag

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

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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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Sunday, December 15, 2024

Does the AI startup ecosystem need Yacht Rock infrastructure?

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

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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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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Reacting to the AWS re:Invent Keynote

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

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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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Sunday, December 8, 2024

Reviewing "AI eats the World"

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

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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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Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Cloud News of the Month - November 2024

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

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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:

SEGMENTS COVERED IN THE SHOW:

  • Good Old Fashioned Cloud News
  • The AI Innovation Continues 

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Sunday, December 1, 2024

The Pros and Cons of Living in Silicon Valley during the AI Boom

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

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SHOW NOTES:


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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