 Good morning AI fans, and welcome back to theCUBE Studio here in Palo Alto. This is special event coverage of our SuperCloud 5, the battle for AI supremacy coverage, both here from the studio and from AWS re-invent in Las Vegas. I am joined by my favorite, Lisa Martin. Good morning, sweetheart. Good morning. I'm great. The SuperCloud 5, the battle for AI supremacy. Is it getting sexier than that? Me too. I don't know if it gets sexier than AI supremacy. I don't think so. At least for us ladies. We hit a pinnacle. We have really hit a pinnacle. We really have. And thank goodness we have a brilliant mind to join us, a CUBE veteran. He's been on the show multiple times over the last decade. Please welcome Balaji from Red Hat, Balaji. Nice to see you. Nice to see you guys. Thank you for inviting us. It's been a whopping, what, 12 days since I saw you in Chicago? Two times in a month, I think that's pretty good. I know, I'm feeling great about it. We had a really exciting conversation there. We actually talked about developer cognitive load and I know that developer productivity is your sweet spot. Since the subject of the day is AI, how will AI impact developer productivity? I think one of the biggest challenges, obviously, we talked about in CUBE Con with Backstage, for example, is the ability to reduce the cognitive load. And the AI will go a long way in reducing that. Today, just like with any other activity anybody, a developer is doing, there's a lot of things that could help. Obviously, you have seen GitHub Copilot as one of the ways to reduce the time to reduce the develop code, but there's also many, many, if you look at the lifecycle of a developer from starting a code to building, to testing, to deploying, monitoring, there's so many ways you can have AI to assist in improving their productivity. What do you think in terms of a projection of productivity improvement that AI can actually deliver to developers? Are we looking at incremental? Are we looking at 10X? What is that projection from your perspective? I think it'll be a multiple X, right? I'm not sure, 10X, but definitely multiple X because the amount of time that, I think, every, you know, I guess I was talking to Savannah before, like, you know, we spend a lot of time doing things that are non-productive in general case. From a developer perspective, there's a, you know, there's many things that could improve. I would say definitely multiple X if not 10X, right, for sure. I like that. Are you using AI to come up with that number? Maybe I should, yeah. That's a valid question. 7.8. Perfect. I want to dig in there a little bit because when I was asking you in the green room earlier, I was saying, you know, there's a lot of hype around certain spaces that AI is going to touch, but the reality is it's going to touch a lot of the less sexy and more repetitive parts of our life that aren't getting as much hype. What are some of those areas, I know you're a man about productivity, how do you think AI is going to make our life at the office easier? Yeah, I think, let me talk about the, today most of the time we are spending doing emails. I mean, most of the time it's emails or chat, trying to find, trying to find tribal knowledge of what everything is. How do I find this information? Well, you can go search for it. You know, it has improved, efficiency is improved in search before it used to be very difficult, right? And now it has improved, but it's nowhere near getting things done. Like if I want to get a new batch, for example, I need to go to service now to open up a ticket and then do multiple back and forth. You know, I think AI has a lot to improve on. I think email is one of the areas where I think we are spending way too much time, even now. Even now, there's a lot of improvements there, but I think there's a lot more things to improve and meetings, multiple meetings, information, so much to improve there. Oh, the meeting front, you have meetings. Yeah. Or the glut of, what are your thoughts, you know, AI has been around for so many years, but last year it got this massive injection from chat GPT and it's been revolutionizing every business, every industry. What have you seen in the last 12 months in terms of really kind of that injection of AI and how do you think that this current acceleration of this wave that we're on is going to really help those multiples of productivity become a reality faster than you can imagine? Yeah, I mean, my undergraduate, it was on neural networks, right? So I used to- You were ahead of the game? Yeah, I know I was, but I kind of left it because it was so complicated to your point because back then the amount of time it takes to build a model and get anything productive was hard. That's why I gave up and doing something else. But now with the foundational models and all the models that people are generating and you have that base that you can build on, now the only thing you have to do is to take your data, which is your differentiation in any organization and then tune the model to your business. That's a lot easier than having to do from scratch and build it from. That's what I think is that platform that is now available in the last few years that allows you to productivity gain. I think before that people are struggling to get to that. Not every company can get to it. Maybe a large company like Google and those people have the energy to build it up but not every other. Now just become sort of a commodity at that layer. Now you get that most of the X factor from there. You know, you're reminding me of an analogy that I heard at the very beginning of the 3D printing revolution about letters and the internet. So when we first got computers and access to the internet, we did something we knew how to do. We wrote letters and we called it email and we did it faster. I think right now we're at a really interesting juncture where we're getting access to AI, where we're getting access to these LLMs and now getting to build on top of that. And I'm just thinking about it now in the context of a chat DPT. You know, we got this AI model that we can all play with now and we're using it to do better search. That's kind of like a letter to email, better search to X. So I'm really curious, just diving into that a little bit. Now that this developer productivity easy button is at least being pulled together. Not quite sure it's 100% built yet but you are a key player in that. What do you think we're gonna see more and more creation in verticals or in apps or where are we gonna go now that people don't have to waste time building that first wheel? Yeah, I think the innovation will be happening much more rapidly, right? I think you are, you know, we talked about earlier is that the ability to generate auto-generated common tasks in a coding language, you know, in your programming, then you can then focus only on the value added or the interesting or the intelligent portions of it. And that will basically means that the features that I have, I'm a product manager, so I have a huge backlog of features I have to do in engineering, obviously saying, well, I'm gonna take X amount of time to build it, but now if they can fast forward those kind of mundane tasks into writing, not only in coding, but the end to end process, now they can get more features. The thing that I wanna build in a vision, et cetera, can be much quicker. And if you fast forward across every industry, you're gonna see, I think, a tremendous boost across the productivity for the world, right? And basically, I think that will happen. Oh, that's a mic chop moment. Yeah, I was gonna say casual claim. For the world, I like that. I'd love to kind of dig into, there's obviously barriers to AI adoption. Where is Red Hat in helping customers go, okay, they're there, this is how we help you overcome those, so you can really become, not just AI ready, but AI in production to drive those productivity improvements that we know are just right here. Yeah, so Red Hat is obviously an open source-based company and we are a platform company. So one of the key things we are trying to do is to have a platform to build your new applications. So basically, how do you get the data, get it ingested, training, building the model, deploying the model and monitoring the model and lifecycle of the model? Because models are not just one and done, it's always changing. And then that's on the model side of the house, right? And then you have the application that take advantage of the models and you have to do the lifecycle of that. So essentially, our job is to be as a platform player is to bring in, you can bring in an open source model from wherever you wanna bring in. We help you with the sort of the logistics of getting that into production and getting to that benefit you're looking for. We had an interesting discourse and I love that you said this also as we were leaning up to this. So 10, 20, 30 years ago, languages, programming languages were the differentiators for a developer getting a job. When we were chatting earlier, you said that natural language is now the most powerful language. What does that mean? Yeah, basically now, you know, for example, if I'm a Python developer, perhaps a writer in C++, whatever language it is, I can just ask chat GPT or co-pilot to convert it. Like, for example, IBM, for example, is converting from cobalt to Java or some other thing. It's like, you know, you don't have to know the new language, you can just ask natural language. Can you convert it to Java, please? Boom, you're done, right? That is, so natural language is now becoming sort of a powerful language. By the way, I have to compare it to Satya Nadella, you know, Microsoft, you know, he was talking about it. So I totally get it, right? You know, now you can use the natural language to write better programming. I think I still don't all hype it. You know, you still have to do the hard work, but I think you're going 80% there, right? You're getting 70, 80% there. You mentioned Satya Nadella, Microsoft, got to mention open AI and a lot of news and controversy. You may have heard just a little bit last week, a little, that and Tom Turkey. But I'd love to get your thoughts on the two most important things from last week, at least in the United States. Governance, compliance, AI regulation, what are your thoughts there on what's really going to be necessary to improve things like security to help reduce hallucination so that we can really depend on it? Yeah, a couple of things. One is having choice is very important. I think that's first thing that you don't want to be dependent on one provider or one model and then have any of these kind of issues, which nobody saw it coming, I guess, but you should have probably seen it coming. I mean, that's sort of the first order of business is to have that multiple choices for the enterprises as well. You're all about that multiple choice at Red Hat, aren't you? That's right. So we definitely allow you to bring in whatever models you want to bring in to develop that. And then it creates a competition that you need to make sure that there is less of that factor, right? If you have one winner, it's going to be difficult for them to change anything. But if you have multiple players competing for that thing, you can see, I think, the session before that, they were talking about different kinds of companies that are doing AI investments and new and new new companies besides whatever we know already is common knowledge that's helping to further tweak it. So I think, in a way, that's really useful to have competition and has to have choices. And then the government also stepping in as well, right? Because this is a very, like I said, it's a productivity for the humans, right? And to the world. So it is not a trivial, it is impacting humankind. And so everybody has to be playing their part. What do you think is the biggest barrier as we move faster and faster than we ever have before towards that future? What do you think is going to hold that back? Do you think it'll be the players, the governments? Or do you think we're just going to be able to move? I feel like the momentum has shifted. I think what I'm saying is that the dam has broken a little bit, right? I think people are converging. People are converging. People are going the right direction. I think there's a sense of two-point security. Governments are already aware of it. Like if you think of crypto and all that, the whole drama we went through on that is, again, maturity, it will come. I think this one is so fundamentally affecting everybody. I think the convergence is happening much faster. I think if you look at the AWS keynote today, they talked about producing different choices for customers. So everybody is talking that same language, and I think it's the right thing. Because if you look at previous other technology waves that happened, at the end of the day, that's what happened. It's the choices, it's the self-governance. Well, it's this push for standardization. It was a big conversation that we were having at Supercomputing, as well as we were having at KubeCon. We all got to speak the same language if we're going to make natural language the most powerful language on top of all this very complicated AI. So we also had a really fun conversation that I want to bring up. And I'm really thrilled to ask you this question. So when we think about, I mean, we were just at Supercomputing. When we think about high-performance computing, when we think about the machines and the models that AI is being built on, whether that be traditional or generative, one of the first things that always comes to mind for me is weather forecasting, it's climate mapping, it's looking at traditional data on our planet, as well as satellite imagery around us. But that got me to thinking beyond space and about aliens. Bellagie, do you believe in aliens? I do. I mean, well, first of all, I don't know which form of aliens are existing in the world. I'm sure it may be something similar to us. Maybe not, I have no idea. I always build it in Star Trek and how that came about. One episode where Jim Kirk goes to an alien planet and he sees a non-human form, it's like a simple wave or something. I'm like, wow. That was like, obviously way early in my life. But I could see that life would be in any form. So aliens, absolutely. You know it's just too big to have nobody in there. I think you're saying it. I agree. It's just random things happening and it's just too, you don't know, even Earth, I guess, properly, so absolutely. I love that. I think, I would like to believe why not. I mean, I believe in Santa, so I definitely believe in him. Me too! He's almost here. I know. I can't wait. Counting the days. AI Santa, yeah. Yeah, AI Santa. Well, I wonder if artificial intelligence will allow us to sophisticate our lexicon in a way that lets us communicate across light years or across galaxies or in some very new and exciting ways. Last question for you, and I know you can't give us the super details. There's some exciting news coming up this holiday season, this winter from Red Hat. What can you tell us? Yeah, I think, particularly for speaking for my own space of product, I mean, obviously we talked about a backstage, you know, obviously coming into the commercial offering around backstage internal developer platforms, right? Called the Developer Hub. And, you know, we are closer to, you know, at some point releasing the very, very soon. And we have a lot of, you know, great enterprises, you know, excited and interested and, you know, want to use it. They're already giving us great feedback. And I think we're looking forward to, you know, getting it out there and getting more options. So that's sort of my big thing in the next, you know, few weeks, few months. Yeah. Oh, that's exciting. Last, okay, one more just because we've now been on set together twice in the last two weeks. Next time we sit down, what do you hope you can say that you can't say today? Well, we'll probably. It doesn't have to be the secrets. Could be anything about AI. Yeah, on AI, I mean, I think, you know, we hope that we would have released whatever we were talking about and also be able to have some, also be able to have some AI in there, right? Because at the end of the day, Dollar Product, we talked about how, how it can definitely improve everybody obviously, dollars are very important. We focus on dollar productivity. Oh, yeah. Having AI in that product or within that space, partnership or otherwise would make a huge difference for dollars. And that's what I'm like, hopefully we can share more of that in the next talk. Well, I hope so too, Balaji. Thank you so much for all the work you do to reduce the cognitive burden that 76% of developers feel. Absolutely incredible work from Red Hat. Lisa Martin always an absolute treat to share your presence. Likewise. And to talk a super cloud five with you. And thank you for tuning in to our four days of wall-to-wall coverage from theCUBE Studio here in Palo Alto, as well as from AWS re-invent in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for cloud and generative AI coverage.