 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE pod, theCUBE podcast, episode 42, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is our weekly podcast where we review everything we're looking at, analyzing and talking about and mainly looking out in the future and the trends, bringing together the CUBE research, formerly Wikibon, CUBE video and network and community. And of course, SiliconANGLE's coverage all kind of discussed the days and weeks ahead. Dave got a lot of action. Great to see you. Happy New Year. First pod of 2024. And wow, what an end of year. How was the snow in Tahoe? Literally on the West Coast is no snow. I saw some tweets and posts from black home whistler, British Columbia. It's like mud flowing everywhere. Really? Tahoe had about two feet of base roughly and then they got eight inches. So we had good one, good day there. Nice. I heard even in Vermont, there's nothing up there. The brooks, the lakes aren't frozen. Nothing's happening, except it's coming out here on your side. You get a little storm coming. Yeah, we're going to finally get some snow. But so the skiing was pretty good then. We had, I had one good day skiing and I really took a break with the kids coming home. My daughter, Jacqueline and her boyfriend in Manhattan. A lot of good New York stories coming up on the CUBE. So I can't wait to talk about that. But just great new year to reflect. Really kind of did a detox, Dave. After re-invent, took some time, not a lot of tweeting, although some targeted tweets I put out there, mainly because I saw some news I wanted to comment on and identify some of the trends that a lot of people have been talking about. So other than that, took a little detox, kind of zoomed out, took a perspective, trying to put the goals together for 2024. In the landscape of media right now, it's a bloodbath. I mean, Cheddar just had a furlough, companies going under in the digital media area. Thankfully, our business is robust in our investment in free content, network effect, high quality analysis, community, and real hardcore data and analysis has been paying off. Not a lot of the companies can pull that off. And so we've been doing well. So I was very thankful this year that we got a great team. Our 13 years of the CUBE going on our 14th season and Silicon Angle, I'm super thankful for our team, our customers that support us and sponsors and our audience who over the holiday did a lot of outreaching, little testing with. And I think it's going to be a year of the community for us this year. And so I'm very thankful to reflect on that. And I'm super excited to gas it up in 2024 with the CUBE. Go out and change how we do event coverage. And I'm pumped. I have this calendar on my wall. It's like a little calendar, you can write on it and erase it, it's like an eraser calendar. And I took down last years and put up like last week, just before New Year's, I put up the new one and I started filling it in. And it's like already, it's this sea of black ink. I'm like, oh boy. My wife did, I was like, when are you traveling again next? I'm like, let's not have that conversation. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things going on. What's interesting is that, you know, one of the things I did over the holidays was really personally reflecting on our 13 years together with the CUBE and you and I partnering. Just it's almost like a whole nother inflection point. This whole AI wave has brought our business to an inflection point. And it reminded me of that Andy Grove talk he gave at MIT in 1996. The Adams are not yet clear and they're going to come together. And, you know, I saw a Matt Baker's post at Dell about RAG and some of the things we've been seeing early. You know, this AI everywhere all the time, everywhere all the time moment is early compelling for our business, what we've invested in. And so I had a lot of personal reflection and I think this year my personal goal is to lean into AI heavily, go deeper into that rabbit hole and bring that expand that in from our business perspective, but also do more out and talking about going to New York and having a good presence there, get great feedback there. CUBE Global is looking good again back on the table. So we're kind of post the COVID back to 2019. It feels like kind of the things that we were thinking about in 2019 are on the table. And so I'm super excited. I think it's going to be a year of reinvention for the CUBE. It's going to be a year of new things and AI has been the hype. And again, the news is all over the place. Again, it's AI everywhere, platform, media scale. And it's going to be interesting. A lot of fake data coming out, fake content, AI is being likely predicted. It's going to start polluting the market. I did my look back, you know, like you say, it's time of the year to reflect and one of my personal big goals in 2023 was to just do more research, you know, non-paid editorial research, like I've done with breaking analysis. I was really stoked that we hit almost 650,000 downloads this year. We had great guests. I think the fact that we did, would we do four super clouds this year and three super studios. And what I liked about them is even though the super studios were paid, they were industry events, community events, thought leadership, you know, but with sponsors, you know, like IBM, like Vast and like Dell, who weren't just trying to pimp their products. They were really putting forth thought leadership for customers and talking about transformation and disruption and so that was really good. And of course, the super clouds continue. We've already got our next super cloud scheduled for February 13th, John. Yeah, it's got to be exciting. I want to go through some of my high-level prediction areas that's coming up. I know you got a prediction breaking analysis just did, but let's just go through a quick rundown of what I want to talk with you about today. I got the AI all the time. We'll get into the predictions. I got some summary buckets forming that you'll see us folks on this year, but let's get into some cool news dates. So just do a quick rundown. Microsoft just unveiled their co-pilot keyboard key. First keyboard change in 30 years. That's huge. That is personal because it's our generation of it. And then open AI, again, more hype coming from open AI. They're revenue is talking about 1.6 billion and they're going to launch their GPT store next week. That got delayed because of the whole debacle in the leadership crisis. And that was supposed to happen in November. And then also open AI is offering media companies one to five million to license the content on the heels of the New York Times suing them for content. So you're going to start to see training sites being paid for. That's notable because we talked about on the QPod and the QBAI, we'll come to that. Our perplexity, which was on stage at Reinvent, company we talked about on theCUBE a lot has just got huge funding. They just raised 74 million out of $520 million valuation. Actually, I think that's kind of low. I think they could have probably got more, but that's a good round for those investors. And then Intel and, I mean, we're know all, we know a lot about and been following. And a CUBE alumni that was on SuperCloud 4, the one that you quoted about that thought exercise, Darun, he's now the CEO of Intel's new independent enterprise gen AI software firm called Articulate AI. So great to see CUBE alumni formed and another CUBE alumni, Justin Hotard, has been picked up from HPE to move to Intel to run their data center AI group to replace another CUBE alumni, Sandra Riviera. So that's a CUBE alumni on the move action there. So that's super exciting. Bitcoin went over 45 as ETF is approvals have gone through anticipating that. And then just more doom and gloom on the startups scene. Again, as we had predicted on the CUBE, startups are going to fall out of the sky and new ones are going to be born. Yet the seed funding rounds are significantly strong in AI and other areas. So again, transformation shift, this cultural revolution is happening. That's going to be our focus section at the end of the pod, as I've said many times. And we've talked about a digital revolution is coming. It's, I call it the digital hippie revolution. What happened in the sixties is going to happen kind of from a digital perspective. And you're already seeing that with AI. It's a complete generational shift. This is not your father's internet anymore. And there's some stories that came out. I want to talk about that. So that's the rundown date AI everywhere, any anywhere all the time. That's what's happening. And AI is everywhere all the time. So that's again, more of the same. So, you know, you mentioned that Matt Baker post, which caught my attention. I didn't see it actually when it got posted, but I was doing some back-channeling emails with him today. And he said, yeah, like I said in my post, so I went to his LinkedIn and I saw you had commented. So I commented on your comment. And basically his premise was all about, you know, really I thought aligned well with the power law that theCUBE research put out of LLMs on really the long tail of smaller models. You can do so much more with smaller models. I think he said it's like putting a dollar in a machine and getting $2 back. And so, and then somebody from Google chimed in and said, hey, you know, I'd like to debate you on some of the assumptions that you're making here. And I'd love to have that debate publicly. You know, Matt Baker, for those of you who don't know, he was the Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning at Dell for a number of years. And so, you know, even that job, I mean, you got to have quite an observation space. And they put him on the head of strategy for AI now at Dell. So he goes deep, he's super smart guy. He's, I like Matt because he doesn't let you get away with bullshit. He'll call BS on you. And but I thought his post was thoughtful. I know, and my comment, John, was you and you have been on that from early on in the cycle. And so I was pretty, pretty, pretty confident that you guys are in the right direction, my view. Well, I mean, you know, we, he and I both talked about LinkedIn, but when we had the big analysts review with all their top execs, I think I was contrarian from all the other analysts out there that said, you know, all the large language models. At that time, all the top analysts were seeing the value. Other ones were poo-pooing it or just like not understanding it, the fake analysts. But the real analysis was that it was a lot brewing in the open source because the canary in the coal mines and open source is the developers. And so when you see the large language models come up, it was apparent to us that this long tail was going to emerge or the power laws we published it. That to me was around April, May timeframe when the hallucinations just started to emerge. It was very clear that the hallucinations were all not, we're not going to go away. They were going to be managed by more data, but we had identified hence now our new set of research that you're driving, this data layer or this new super cloud data modeling going on is changing the game because hallucinations are directly result of bad data, right? Not enough data or the wrong data in the wrong place or the right data, not in the right place. And so Matt Baker was on this too. So he and I were riffing. And then so when we saw that the smaller models were emerging in open source, you only had to be a little bit smart to realize, what if CPU and GPUs on chips got better on the devices? So to me, that was very similar to the telecom wave and the web where transit got faster, everyone got faster bandwidth, internet got faster. So he and I were riffing and others were saying, hey, if you assume that Nvidia is going to do their job and Intel is going to get back in the game, which they are, and Amazon is going to step up more compute, more GPUs, more systems on chip, more stuff happening at the silicon layer, then that advancement will only power the ability to do the training and inference on any device. So that's kind of what the thesis was. And that was not contrarian. That was kind of just obvious. Now, you're seeing Lama playing out on smaller devices. So if you're Dell, you're in the PC world, you're looking at our Armageddon, unless a new thing comes along like AI, which makes your hardware more valuable, which is happening on, so, you know, we called that. It was good to see it, but, you know, they have an opportunity. Dell, HPE, Lenovo, the folks making PCs and devices are in an opportunity to create a renaissance in their business of saying, look at same game, new processing, new architecture. In Microsoft, obviously, I want to mention something else about the power law. And I take a lot of credit for the power law, but you're the one who gave me the idea and a lot of the background. You worked on it very closely with me and Rob Streche. But one of the things that you pointed out, which was your sort of innovation, was that torso getting pulled up to the right 45 degree angle by open source. And I have some brand new data that's not been released, but I'll share it here just as a teaser from ETR. They're going to be, they're in quiet period right now, and they're going to release their results in a couple of weeks. But Lama 2 has, in a survey, the latest survey of 1700 enterprise IT decision makers, Lama 2 has about 17% more installations than Anthropic, which I found really interesting. And oh, by the way, OpenAI has about 7x the installations over those two. So, but the point being exactly what you said that torso being pulled up to the right by open source and Lama 2 getting a lot of traction and to Matt Baker's post being applied in situations that are smaller. The other data point is at the Dell Tech Summit, I met somebody from Metta, he was like cornered him on the bus ride about how much of their installations of Lama were on-prem. And they said, we don't really know, but we can infer from who's downloading them. And based on the ETR data, I've calculated about 30% are on-prem. He said it could be as high as 50%. Now, I'm pretty confident that the ETR data doesn't include three letter of, you know, like the NSA agencies and supercomputer installation. So that number could be much higher. It's probably somewhere between 30, 40, maybe even as high as 50%. So that we're starting to get data that validates some of the anecdotal information that we had been talking about before. I just wanted to share that. Yeah, and I think that points to the thesis that you're going to see models on devices. And again, I think I can't say this loud enough. I've been shouting it from the mountaintop for years and even this past year. The entire data business is going to be upside down in the next 24 months. You cannot operate the data strategies you've been doing, companies been doing for decades with the new model. Data needs to be available for any app at any time, anywhere. And that means either co-locating the data because you can't change the laws of physics. Data's got to move around or be there when you need it. How do you make data available and highly addressable for every application, every inference? If that's a new indexing change whether it's vector databases or something else, the entire data marketplace industries are going to be completely radically changed. This has to happen. It's not going to happen with data warehouses and just Snowflake and Databricks. Yeah, data lakes will be around. Everyone's predicting that another year. Data lakes, it's the year of the data lake. It's been that way for years. The data architecture has to be very agile, very accessible. But think about how complicated that is because you've got all these stovepipe data platforms whether it's within AWS, you've got multiple stovepipes within Microsoft, Google, you've got Snowflake, you've got Databricks, so you've got all this data and you're not going to move that data. You're going to bring AI to that data. That's a big theme. Okay, but if you've got co-pilots now operating on that data, which data does the co-pilots operate on that's coherent and current? How do you know what is the system of truth? So this is a real challenge. So that's why you're seeing things like metadata unification, unity catalogs, the attempts to eliminate data movement and ETL. So there's going to be a burgeoning market around data coherence and then brings up the governance issue. So it's a very complicated matter and one that we're going to pay a lot of attention to this year. The folks listening, if you're interested in what we're going to be covering this year, Dave's doing a breaking announcement predictions. We've got a lot of people from our cube collective weighing in, but to me, in summary, that the 2024 is going to be a pivotal year because of the realm of AI, right? The AI world's here and you're seeing it impacting VC investments, startups that are being funded, look at what's being funded, what's not being funded in AI and tech, plus the advances of AI impacting infrastructure, data technologies and security. So to me, data related technologies, platforms, tools, the picks and shovels, platforms are going to be the big focus, security, developers and investment. You're going to see those are the hot areas are going to be burning with energy, either burning down or firing up. And so look at the VC's series seed and series A fundings will be a marker. Look at the AI production workloads and then look at the data technologies and the apps that are the best in the Uber of the enterprise you've called it, Dave. And I think the shift in the VC investments already clear, you're seeing the data come in as they're predicting a worse year in 2024 in VC than 2023, mainly because the bulk of the market of the previous bubble is going to be impacted and squeezed and or core normalize, if you will. So I'm expecting infrastructure, old school players like Dell and new emerging chip players to benefit and then security, I think the security market is going to be huge this year. I think it's a great time to invest too for all the LPs out there. I'm going to invest in another fund coming up. I think 2024 is going to be a good time to launch new funds, valuations and getting squeezed a little bit. Of course, some of the AI valuations are a little bubble-ishish, but if you can pick the right companies, I think you can do really well. We talked about this in earlier Q-pods that there was zombie corns or whatever they call them that were getting crazy funding in 2021, really struggling now with the runways. And so, what is it? I think Michael Dell said at one time that he loves a good rainstorm because it cleans out the streets. Well, it's interesting rainstorm, that rain's got to collect somewhere and the data lakes, again, I'm joking earlier, but the data lakes are going to be huge. Again, I saw one prediction. Oh, data lakes are going to be the dominant data. Okay, I get that. But if you look at the business intelligence market and separate that from, say, what observability, where observability is going, you're seeing more cloud and distributed edge computing. So companies like Cloudflare are doing well. You're going to start to see edge inference, right? So I think one of the things that Matt Baker was talking about was inference is not so much the big deal because it's going to come from these models, but I think he's missing a key point. The smaller the devices to be able to hold two LLMs, the better inference you can do there. So, I think the edge piece is going to be big, set up. You think he's missing that? You think he's missing that or you used to call it out? I don't think he's missing that. I think he could have emphasized. He just didn't call it out as much as he could. It would have been the swan song to his post because it would have been like, hey, the ultimate will be to prove his point is on the silicon side is that my device, whether it's a Dell device or Dell-enabled device, at the edge, and it could be as small as a wearable. So, again, the small device. You know how I feel about that, John? It's going to be arm-powered. I mean, in a big way. I mean, it's going to be arm-powered. I mean, in a big way. Yeah. So, again, Dell's in the business of making PCs, and, again, they're resilient. We talk about Dell all the time because, remember, they had the web. The web was supposed to kill mail-order. So, we know what they did. They sold them online. They sold PCs online. Again, they were in the PC server business then. But if you look at Dell, they weren't really in the server business until the web. Until Michael Dell converted over from PC mail-order to the World Wide Web, where you can get online on a browser and order your own PCs, they really nailed their supply chain because of the internet. So, the internet was a disruptive enabler for Dell itself to create a supply chain advantage and build that supply chain. You know, the patent, their famous, put the suppliers around your area, which Dell did. And that's kind of a historic perspective. But Dell Technologies, Michael Dell's success was because of the internet, in my opinion. That enabled him to manage the order in ease of ordering, which made his supply chain more efficient, and the rest is history. They dominated the server business. Dell crushed the internet. There's no doubt about that. And so what Baker's getting at and what the strategy Vivek was running strategy when we had that meeting with them was, AI is their next wave. And they will play because they're in the hardware business and hardware matters. So, if you look at all the action right now from anyone who's aged 15 to 50 or higher, they want the fastest stuff because the developers are writing stuff for the new infrastructure. So, again, developers are driving the agenda on AI. If you look at the hugging face numbers, the leader boards, look at what's going on at Open Source. You mentioned Llama 2. The Llama 2 uptake based on your research you just put out in the pod here is direct result of Open Source. So, if you look at the data, hit a home run. I think we talked about that pod last year when they released Llama. We were like, hey, they missed the metaverse. Might as well get in with AI. But again, AI is only going to help the VR market, Dave, because AI will make VR better because if you go digital, you're going to have AI augmenting developers and the user experience for VR. I think the metaverse is going to get a huge lift. You just, well, it's funny. You just stated one of my 2023 predictions was that generative AI hits where metaverse missed. And you may say, okay, that's obvious, but I just did a predictions post with a bunch of cube collective guys known as the Datagang, Sanjeev Mohan, Tony Bear, Karl Alofsen, Dave Menninger, and Doug Henschen. And we did one in, this is our third in a row, third year in a row, we did 2023. No mention from those guys of gen AI. And of course, everything had gen AI this year. Now, because they're deep in the weeds of their data platforms. And of course, their rationalization was that open AI was a little bit early, a lot of experimentation going on. So they kind of walked that back. So I was actually happy that I made a call a year ago that gen AI was going to be, even though it seems kind of obvious, but I'm not down on metaverse. I'm picking up on what you said. But before I get off this, these guys came up with, I'm going to be posting tomorrow. They are so smart when it comes to data. Intelligent data platforms, simplifying database design, unifying and rationalizing metadata. Gen AI, Dave Menninger, gen AI is not going to replace traditional AI and all these use cases. And then Doug Henschen talked about how it's, we're going to completely sort of change the way in which we think about the whole data pipeline. So they did a really good job. We're going to go deep, publish all that tomorrow. We love collaborating with other really smart analysts. Well, I'm going to lay out right now what I see as the editorial agenda for SiliconANGLE and our coverage area that's going to be mainly my prediction post because these are the areas that are going to go deep for multiple years. And obviously they're going to reset the agenda in the industry landscape from venture capital AI and technology. Number one, the IPO market and M&A market. You're going to see maybe one or two IPOs, maybe data bricks, but not a lot of IPO action. Maybe the second half of the year for the ones that have missed the window, but for the most part. One trust, maybe. One trust might go. Stripe, data bricks, whatever. The ones that kind of missed it, but have massive power and traction and relevance that are going to be obvious home runs that are already successful. They should have been public anyway, but we'll go public. The rest is going to be M&A. You're going to see a lot of dying companies walking dead to actually completely shutting down to a roll up M&A market. So that's going to be one. We'll be covering a lot of that stuff. AI and data dominance. AI and data technology will continue to lead in the funding with some companies getting more exceptional growth rates. They hit the home run. They get the lightning strike. Consumer search will see a significant shift in the world. So big AI data dominance. New shit is going to come out of the woodwork. New companies, new brands are going to see just that next Google come up. Cryptocurrency, Dave, and Web 3. I'm watching this. You converted me last year. So with Bitcoin hitting 45,000 and the ETF on the horizon, I think you're going to start to see the foundation of legitimate action around funding. So I think the fraud side of the whole shit coins and the fraud going to go away. I think we're going to see decentralization and Web 3 come back with real crypto, not fake crypto. So I'm putting it out there. We're going to watch it. VC investment. Well, let me just follow up on that. You know, I think correctly pointed out a lot of the crypto developers went to AI and I said, hey, I think AI and crypto are going to come together. And I think this could be the year where we see that this year or maybe next year. I think you might see that. And you mentioned Bitcoin hit like 45,000. It dropped down. People sold. They were like, hey, let's take some profit. So I don't think it's quite ready to rock it back up to over 60,000. But I think you'll see legitimate action come back. And I don't mean that as to be a massive shift. But like you said, developers will oscillate between AI and crypto because there's synergies there, if done properly. Again, I pointed out some of the decentralized things on the last pod. But we're watching it carefully. VC trends will be huge. I think you're going to see the continued rise of solo venture partners coming out with solo funds. Solo GP will be a continued... Explain what that means, a solo venture partner. What do you mean by that? A solo GP is a individual person who basically acts as their own venture capital firm. They raise between five to 20 million. And they're either a domain expert, subject matter expert, or a former entrepreneur or a VC from another firm. And there's only one partner. And there's only one person. They make all the decisions. There's no big partnership. And the thesis behind that is they can get in the deals early and they go into areas where they see the smoke before the fire so to speak as things start to blow up good. Because the bigger firms are replacing the traditional VC Series A, Series B, are going to end up doing the bigger rounds now that the private equity guys are dropping out of that financing. So it's just been proven that a lot of these solo general partners have been very successful. Zacharias is one I know hitting the valley here. There's many more. And also it's very democratized. You can have anyone become a VC. If they just make the right bets. Again, you know my philosophy too. I think VC investing is easy. No, I mean, seeing what's going to win, that's pretty obvious to us. Why do you think this is a successful model? It's just because they're more focused. Because they can get ROIs better because they know the bets early and they can get in early deals. So they can hit of the right deals, the right set. If they have the right amount of capital. If they're spraying and paying, that's one thing. But a solo GP can make decisions very quickly. And they're usually trusted and usually have more value add. And again, they don't, they usually stay within their realm of expertise. They don't, they have out of scope factors. In other words, they take a very narrow scope and they say, I'm only going to invest in this area through these colleges. I'm going to watch this herd of entrepreneurs come up, I'm going to know what a winner looks like. And I'm going to have the vision to connect the dots. That's a winning formula. Versus a firm of 12 partners have internal politics. They had one guy didn't fund the other guys deal. Those females aren't represented. There's no underrepresented minorities. It's all white guys. It's like, it's like the old VC metaphor. You know, a bunch of guys sitting around the room and they, it's slower and they are bigger. They got a billion dollars under capital. So the bigger firms want these scout funds. They used to be called scout funds. Now it's like just invest and you start to see curriculum form again. It's, it's a trend because a big firm has to put all this capital to work. They don't want to spend the time to write a $30,000 check or a million dollar check. They want to write a $20 million check or $50 million check. And so that's where the economics change. So that's a VC capital trend. And also I think the startups on the AI side right now are the canary in the coal mine. And we're going to, we're going to do a lot of coverage with startups. You're going to see us doing a lot more cube videos around AI startups. And that's the big area. Again, the next area is AI regulation and productivity. We cannot ignore the regulation. In fact, there's a lot of stuff going on over the holidays around the, the political article that was going around saying that this whole Silicon Valley culture of pessimists and, you know, D cell are infiltrating the politics, which is complete BS. And first of all, I thought the article was a great article by Politico. I'll put the link in the show notes. But their premise was, is that there's a huge Silicon Valley AI contingent in DC putting the doom and gloom into the political realm around AI. And it's not optimistic. It's not positive, at least in my opinion. So I don't, I didn't, I didn't like that article. I think we're going to watch this regulation game because it's game-plated on policy makers. Policies are basically lobbyists. So if you're in policy, you're a lobbyists. Lobbyists aren't adding value. They are lobbyists. They don't build anything and usually are on the payroll of someone trying to set an agenda. And so when you start getting into a world where you have agenda setting and obfuscation and politics and lobbying, you have a lot of misinformation, a lot of astroturfing going on, and a lot of misinformation campaigns. So do you think it's always, you think lobbying, I mean, I'm definitely not a fan either because there's a lot of waste that goes on. But do you think it's always a negative? Is there any positive outcomes of lobbying? I mean, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about like in the 80s with the semiconductor industry association, you know, going after, you know, lobbyists trying to compete with Japan when they were dumping, you know, DRAMs on the market and, you know, hurting Intel and others and you remember that. And so, I mean, they do play a role. But there's, you know, but a lot of times, you know, they go too far, right? And it's just, you have unintended consequences, I'll say. Yeah. Well, there are examples. And again, like I always say, you rain in the chaos after you let it rain. Let chaos rain then rain in the chaos. Sorry, G thought you could say it a lot. I could say it more than you on the queue. But here, regulation, man, I'll give you an example of policy. During the Internet days when the U.S. created the Internet, the policy standard by the government was, let's keep it open. And so it was an extra effort for the U.S. government and lobbyists around the tech industry at that time, network solutions and then became Verisign, they ran the DNS servers with the power of the Internet. There was an effort to take those away from the U.S. to make it completely fractured. And so there was a set of poly lobbyists and lobbyists or poly make policy gurus that was making an argument or educating people around the benefits of open. And that worked until it got too big where you start to have a little bit more, you know, sovereignty issues and then ICANN became more of a global organization. That's another history point there. So policy and lobbying should be about education. Not managing direction, per se. Invisible hand a little bit here but not over the top of the hammer. So to me, bad policies when you're basically, you know, taking a blunt instrument to lawmakers head and saying, I want to see it this way. I'm getting paid, I'll pay you quid pro quo, some dirty politics versus education on the value. And so policy should be open and transparent like it was with the domain name system. So again, that's one example. Other examples you mentioned. So, you know, AI regulation should match productivity and some philosophy, whether it's openness or safety in the sense of AI. So we're going to watch that. So regulation is going to be anything that's to do with government regulation and policy or and governance. Usually there's probably some hassles in their inefficiencies. Again, this is my personal opinion. It's a rant section item, but we're going to follow it this year heavily. We're going to have probably some DC folks covering it for us. And then the area next area is data distribution. I mentioned data lakes. We're going to be covering Amazon. Amazon announced some innovations in storage is seeing silicon. You got cloudflare. You got a lot of, you know, architectures around semantic web. You've been talking a lot about this next gen data platform, sixth platform. You know, this is real, this real change happening with the compute and processing power, TPU, GPUs. GROC has got an inference chip. Another great company we've been covering. So data architecture evolution heavy access to this one this year. Tons of content. It's going to impact DevOps, DevSecOps, everything. And then GenAI startups will cover them like the cows come home. We'll then do that no problem. And then multimodal models, David, AI operations. I think that's going to be huge. You're already starting to see it now. AI operations in cloud, not the old AI ops. It's the new AI ops. We're going to get into that. That's DevOps. And then DevOps, confidential computing and then emerging technologies like WebAssembly, Wasm and others is going to happen. So those are the areas. Last two were multimodal models and AI ops and DevOps adaptation, confidential computing. There's a lot there. I haven't done my predictions post yet. I'm going to do it end of the month with Eric Bradley. And we're going to look at the macro spending like we always do. I'm definitely going to hit on a six data platform. No question. We're going to have some kind of GenAI predictions. I have a stack. I'm sure you get them too, right? You get all these inbounds of predictions. Hey, John, you're doing predictions post this year and PR people sending in predictions. I literally have a stack like this. I mean, I have thousands and thousands and thousands of predictions. Maybe not thousands, but I bet you have a thousand predictions that it takes me a week to go through them. And I get out the highlighter and I don't use a lot of them, but I get ideas from them and I give credit to those that I think are both thought leading and can be measured. In other words, did it come true? My philosophy, John, with predictions is somebody, some independent should be able to look at your prediction and, you know, the detail around the prediction and say, okay, it's binary. It came true or it didn't or at least have some kind of ability to grade it. Part of it came true. Part of it didn't. So we always strive to make those predictions a little bit harder or to put some data points around them or percentages around them and then have ways whether it's, for instance, IDC data on how fast the market grew, although or Gartner data, whatever use that as the benchmark or even our own surveys, look back surveys. And so I feel like that's an important thing that's missing in many of the predictions. I think the predictions are actually most of the predictions, I would say 95% of them are trends. Okay, this is a trend. So you're noticing a trend and that's good. That's useful. But predictions should be like, this is going to happen. Did it happen? The patriots are going to, you know, get the first draft pick. Oh, that's my prediction. Or make the playoffs. Did it happen or not? Right? Yeah, I mean, I predictions are hard. I mean, what I what I try to do is I try to identify like, like where you plant your crops this year, right? Okay, what's going to happen this year in 2024? What's the fertile ground? So to me it's areas of interest to program around as we set the agenda of a silicon angle and look at our community. We look, we take all those predictions and we kind of boil them up into saying, okay, here's the areas that we're going to dig into because one of the requests this year that we're going to do that we got a feedback on last year, Dave, as you know, is our CUBE alumni and our expert network of 18, 20,000 plus people have all been kind of chirping. Hey, do more unpacking like super cloud on camera. Bring people that are experts in on camera and unpack issues. Like, what's the future of DevOps? And you want to do those in areas that may be relevant and cool. So you know, the areas I just laid out were more kind of editorial areas we're going to dig into and they might be a couple layers deep and we set up not much there or it could be a big gusher. Like if crypto hits, we're going to be there. So you do enough surface area coverage, dig into it, see how it goes. But obviously, AI is undeniable. This is the year that AI starts to happen in a way that's going to be the transformative signals emerge. And those are to me, like I said, the investment climate, what's tracking? You're going to see the winners start to emerge quicker this year. The production workloads, you're going to start to see those emerge pretty quickly. So it's going to be the year of observation. What's popping, what's popping, what's not happening. That's going to be easy to hit. The second one is, what's the underlying infrastructure change? Because the infrastructure will set the agenda for the applications. That's what I'm hard core on the data. And it's changing. It's huge. The infrastructure requirements are changing pretty dramatically. Look, Microsoft just put a key on the keyboard. Co-pilot. On the keyboard. I think that's a pretty interesting trend line right there. Changing a keyboard to put a co-pilot key. So that's not a signal of relevance. Well, it's your theme of AI everywhere. It's true. It's going to be everywhere. You know, it's an interesting time, right? I've said this before. Solipsky reinvent said, I've seen worse times, I've seen better times. I've never seen such uncertain times. I think things are starting to calm down. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the market this year. The stock market actually did incredibly well. Everybody was predicting recession, recession, recession last year. And it never happened. And now people are like, oh, rate cuts, rate cuts, rate cuts. I'm not sure I would be predicting, you know, rate cuts. I think there's probably going to be less than people expect. And I think the market post-COVID is still very unpredictable. And, you know, and this just happens when you get these transitions. We've seen a lot of these wave transitions. What happens is the new stuff is not which is getting all the hype and all the valuations. It's not big enough, not nearly big enough to offset the old. And you're seeing this now with AI spending. AI experiments and spending definitely, you know, 30 or 40% of the spending is coming from other places. And so you're seeing a compression in other budgets. You're not seeing a huge top-line growth in IT spend. And as a result, you know, the new stuff's not paying back enough. And so you don't you get this weird sort of offset imbalance that creates dissonance and uncertainty in the marketplace. And that's I think what we're seeing now in a in a way that we've seen before, but we've never seen the pace of change happen this quickly. I predict that this year will be a year of optimism. Okay. I predict that you'll see more optimism than pessimism. That's my prediction. Mainly because the the scales already starting to tip a little bit. You start to see. I think the developers and open source drive that and also look at the narrative, some of the conversations. Okay. So here's the question then. So this past year, 2023 was a year of pessimism which was not founded. I mean, the result was you should have been an optimist from an investor standpoint, right? Do you feel like the optimism will be rewarded in 2024? In other words, I mean, you saw the S&P grew what 20% last year? It's very rare. If ever you see back, I mean, I think it happened in 1999. We had 98 to 99 or 90. Yeah, 98 to 99. I think you had back to back 20% S&P 500 growth. Very, very rare. Do you think that optimism will be rewarded in 2024? I do. I think you're going to see I think you're going to see the VCs who are going to recognize where the optimism is on that customer conversion. There's optimism enthusiasm in the startup community. You don't need more optimism there. I think the VCs are pretty bullish on where they're at there, the ones that are in the trenches. I think the optimism has to be more mainstream. That's why the DC thing caught my attention because they're saying the wrong narrative. It's not pessimism. It should be optimism. And there's an article that was written, I thought a great article around that from a successful entrepreneur this week. The issue on reward is going to come down to evaluation increases the payback on using AI to change either the value of your business or change your business will be one to watch if you're an existing company like ours. If you're a startup getting something product market fits going to be different. I think that's where the reward is going to be. I think a lot of people just need they need to understand where's the line between safe AI and bad AI because again, there's a lot of bad AI just as much as good AI. Everything's symmetrical. Whatever is good over here is an opposite effect. That to me is where it is. I tend to look at the other side of the coin and people talk about how bad AI is here I look on the other side and say where's it good and that's going to be interesting to see. I think and the other thing I'll predict is there's going to be a continued regulation a mindset around government trying to take big firms down because I think Amazon Facebook, now Meta Google, Apple they're going to be under scrutiny. In fact, just today New York Times just posted an article that the DOJ might file an antitrust law suit against Apple around as dominance of the iPhone. Soup du jour you were so successful Can you imagine if Steve Jobs was alive iPhone? You're too good. Sounds like Microsoft can go back into the 90s. I just find that incredible. Microsoft is unbelievable how successful they are. Back to your reward though. On our last podcast we talked about the S&P 500. You saw all the analysts at the end of the year. It was a great year for you invested in Facebook, Meta Apple, Amazon, Alphabet Yeah, the big seven and JP Morgan S&P 500 By the way, I think the rich, those rich magnificent seven, I think they keep getting richer despite all the the potential activism against government coming after them. But if you're right and I think you are, I think optimism will be rewarded. And I think one of those rewards is going to come in the form of IPOs I didn't really chime in before, but you mentioned Databricks. I think Databricks Databricks based on the data the survey data is doing incredibly well anecdotally, we know they're doing well. You interviewed so many customers at the Databricks data plus AI summit last year, they're doing kicking ass. We know that but they're not a public company so they don't have these quarterly catalysts for whether it's news or earnings news, earnings prints. Yeah, they can make a product announcement, but it's not as if you compare that to like Snowflake every quarter, you know, you get to dissect it and I know they're on the 90 day shot clock, but there's to me some advantages despite all the compliance concerns of being a public company just from a marketing standpoint and an awareness standpoint and I think that confers advantages to those public companies. I'd love to see Databricks. I'd rather for instance be UiPath than Automation Anywhere even though UiPath got crushed you know in the market initially, I'd rather have a public forum where I can say I can have a say do ratio that people can track. Look this is a great point. I mean we can let's unpack this next week, but I think we should put a pin in this because this is exactly the opportunity that I see the Databricks of the world, the UiPath and the companies that were funded or overfunded in the last cycle. There's two companies in that last cycle that go overfunded and that are doing well. The Databricks of the world and the ones that didn't make it so it's becoming clear to the capital markets right now, very clear which companies have a path forward and which ones don't. The ones that don't have a path forward they didn't get the product market fit they have limited product differentiation they don't have what it takes they got to know. I mean if you're the entrepreneur, you're the founding team or the investor you got to have a soul-searching moment and you got to look inside yourself and say look it. Do we have what it takes? Do we have a path forward and a lot of companies are going to either say I'm going to have to land this plane softly in another company, an AccuHire or target a UiPath or that plane is going to crash, run out of gas and fall out of the sky. This is what's going to happen and this is an opportunity for UiPath so the world. These companies can pick up a bunch of AccuHire so if I'm at UiPath or a company like UiPath that's got great position, I'd be looking at all the white space and saying okay where's my product gaps let's pick up that company because you can pick up teams right now. The start-ups that don't have a path forward have some people and some tech. Grab that tech plug it in. So to me that's what I would be doing and then the ones that have a path forward they're going to go public. Databricks will go public. It's very interesting to look at the HAVs and the HAVNOTs and the AI washing and all that stuff. You mentioned UiPath you think that's a company that started an RPA and has moved into intelligent automation and there is a difference by the way. RPA is a point tool kind of a desktop point tool and intelligent automation is a much broader agenda but you think about generative AI it's going to do a lot of the things that RPA was designed to do and that's a lot of the business of UiPath and automation anywhere and Louprism and guys like that so they're going to potentially be negatively impacted. There's a two-sided coin there. When you look at the spending data and you look at AI accounts with certain RPA accounts some companies hold their own like certainly Power Automate with Microsoft holds its own. UiPath holds its own actually boosts a little bit. Others get depressed. Interestingly when you look at I just recently looked at this data Snowflake really didn't have an AI strategy prior to gen AI so they went out and they kind of poo-pooed it in a way from my distance of observation so they went out and bought Mosaic ML and have begun to integrate that. The latest data actually shows they're getting an uplift from their AI announcements and their marketing around that whereas of course Databricks has always been steeped in ML in AI so that's going to be really interesting to my point being we want to see how companies can respond and it will separate the wheat from the chaff in other words hey I didn't really necessarily have a killer AI strategy. I made some acquisitions, I brought in some talent to your point, some AcuHires and that's actually become a tailwind. Look at what Salesforce is doing on TV with the Matthew McConaughey ads. They're like more ads than IBM Watson ever had. It's interesting Dave if your snowflake clearly we know we talked to them. I personally had conversation with sales snowflake people that they were like AI we're on it but really we're not there yet. I'm sure they had people working on it but it wasn't top of mind. Now the wave hits a year ago it's an easy pivot for snowflake they're in the data cloud already it's not a hard bridge to build for them quickly. Okay if you're a startup and you're say series B funded C or beyond you're either have to be in the Databricks category or you're either walking dead or there's a path out of the turmoil you have to find that path. So are my the questions that they're going to ask themselves are on my walking dead startup or do we have a path can we find a path and that's going to be hard and the VC investors or the investors might want to have a call option for instance how long do they take before they either shut it down or make a play. So this is going to be a very interesting first two quarters of the year you're going to see every conversation that starts go down that way am I walking dead or is there a path through and then the board do they have the balls they have the guts to have the fortitude to say let's make a call now or they want to keep the call option on valuation on a soft landing or roll the dice or go big or go home crash and burn or clear the runway that's going to be that's going to that's there's no there's no market it's decimated on the startups if you're not an AI startup up until the right you're out and any other factor is what's the denominator in terms of the cost to actually launch a company you certainly saw with the web you know it created opportunities to do things that you couldn't have done previously of clearly the cloud created this spate of SaaS companies that didn't have to go out and buy you know Oracle licenses and the premises that AI is going to allow you to instead of having to hire you know 15 engineers you can do the same amount of work with two or three engineers in you know one-tenth the time and I expect that that is actually a real thing you know we're seeing it with our own development how fast we were able to get you know to actually a working product MVP and then beyond and then actually launch you know a public product so I suspect this is going to have a huge effect on speed to build a company, valuations time to value, time to return and it's going to be competitive as hell well it's going to be fun Dave I want to just close out the podcast by just making a reference to an article by Anil Dash who's the he's a web original I call him a big proponent of the open web guy always got a great perspective he wrote a great article for Rolling Stone magazine and it's called the internet is about to get weird again okay it was written on December 30th shout out to Anil Dash again I'm a fan of Anil so people take shots at him but you guys totally pro open web I think he's cool I like his views some of them are a little bit out there but there's nothing wrong with that it's called the internet is about to get weird again and it says the new year offers many premises of the online moment we haven't seen in a quarter century his basic premises is that we become so siloed with the lengthens of the world and X going the way they're going and everyone every tribe having their own little network that he's seeing a renness a swing back I should say to the idea of the internet the open web the worldwide web 1995 so it's interesting because we've been talking a lot about this on the pod around how we think the internet web movement is a lot of parallels to the AI side where you have telecom powered the web which became information superhighway internet and then the worldwide web sat on top of it this article is worth reading because a lot of the cool stuff that happened in the early days of the web were because it was open so the question is why go that same route or are we going to have more of an apple iphone android model pick your closed world garden is it completely closed or it's going to be open so a lot of the debate in AI right now is about open source versus proprietary it's kind of weird this is a double post here I'm reading it now it's like it's pretty well done and that by the way that was one of the premises for crypto right was to build and to build a distributed you know new internet the show silicon valley we're going to build a new internet with my compression algorithm and then there was another article by brendan mccord from the cosmo institute it's called pessimism versus accelerationism it's just interesting long read but it's really about the cultural change I was talking about earlier and I think you know I think we're going to have a revolution this generation of the internet and AI specifically and that the younger generation coming online now who are building and setting the agenda and the standards and the de facto standards are going to have a little bit different view I think it's going to be an interesting thing so it's going to be interesting to see as we have the diversity of participation from us old guys you know multiple cycles of innovation and then the spectrum of ideation am I a pessimist am I an acceleration person a d-cell an a-cell e-cell we don't call it it doesn't matter the startups will define it so it's going to be very interesting to see how the next wave of optimism or pessimism drives it so I thought both those articles were interesting and they both have different cultural impacts and Neil's point is more like ours let it be open let it flourish new weird stuff good weird stuff will happen in a way the Cosmo Institute articles are really around this whole dogma around kind of your approach and the political article that that went out well that went up real quick for everyone here but the political well and but to your point on the ladders like there are a lot of Luddites who aren't going to agree with that you know this it's like you know AI is going to ruin humanity and I'm not saying there aren't risks there obviously there are it's called we say it it's called the AI debate culture clash DC Silicon Valley the title of the political article was when Silicon Valley's AI warriors came to Washington special report it just love the title total link bait when Silicon Valley's AI warriors came to Washington like we're social justice warriors it's just a so it's just so good effective altruism is increasingly described as a cult but the movements but as the movements billionaire adherence poor money into DC its obsession with the AI apocalypse is remaking remaking the capitals tech policy landscape I'll put it in our notes here Dave so you can look at it too so it's just it speaks it speaks to the the culture Dave okay and so if this is if they're calling this the AI warriors from Silicon Valley that's not Silicon Valley it's just FYI guys it's not not what Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley isn't a bunch of a couple of people they're not looking into the world it's just a small fringe this is not the social justice wars with Silicon Valley it's actually the opposite so again I took issue with this one but it was a really great article and so I thought it was worth reading is provocative it's a movement again we talked about this in the pod before around around the open AI board and leadership debacle but I think it's important to note Dave the cultural significance of our time right now well I guess we run out of time here we're ending but it's an election year we haven't we haven't talked about it and so that probably supports your optimism thesis in the markets anyway but it also creates you know this huge divisiveness I saw Joe Lieberman somewhere the other day might have been with CNBC talking about what do they call it the no labels it's a terrible name but the no labels party which it's a they're looking trying to figure out a bipartisan ticket both the Republican and the Democrat on the same ticket go for it I applaud that good luck I hope that happens we need to change big time totally all right well Dave great pod I guess we kind of had quasi rance we're over time now great to see you happy new year so yeah happy new year not a ton of news but next week CES John there'll be a lot of news coming out of that won't there well I mean this news happening right now they got at the New York Times bringing that story about Apple that's pretty huge again CES we're going to have coverage here at Silicon Valley at our studio Savannah is going to be there Rob Streche will be there we're going to have a preview again CES is easy to cover because there's so much coverage there there's not much other than coming out of mainstream news the Cube will not be live at CES we'll have our team coverage on the ground getting some data we'll also have in studio action Dave you and I will be doing some commentary as well and of course we'll have all the analysis on siliconangle.com again another great year ahead for Silicon angle in the Cube shout out to our community 13 years again we've looked at she's going to be the year of community participation you can see a lot more people on the camera this year at the Cube you can see a diverse set of voices okay John and Dave us will be on the pod will be out headlining a lot of the Cube but you'll see a lot more hosts you see a lot more experts the Cube collective I'm super excited by that Dave your your data gang you're starting to see a thirst for truth influence real influence real analysis I think this is going to be the year where AI on the on the media side as media starts to implode I mentioned cheddar going out of business we're having that furlough you're going to see a year where with AI coming on this on the scene a lot of that content being synthetic content you're going to see new algorithms for truth you see more quality rise to the top and you're going to start to see you know the pretenders start to be identified as as they're recycling other people's ideas so you're going to start to see a lot more kind of collective behavior in communities and we're going to see a lot of that on the Cube this year so go to silicon angle dot com of course the cube net will constantly be putting up more stuff there with the cube AI dot com check that out and Dave will see you next time great to see you thanks John