 Okay, welcome back everyone to SuperCloud 2 event live here in Palo Alto. The Cube Studio's live stage performance virtually syndicating it all over the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Here is Cube alumni and special influencer guest Howie Xu, VP of Machine Learning and Zscaler. Also part-time as a Cube Analyst because he's that good, comes on all the time. You're basically a Cube Analyst as well. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for inviting me. You're not really a Cube Analyst, but you're kind of like a Cube Analyst. Happy New Year to everyone. Great to see you. Great to see you, Dave and the drum. We've been talking about ChatGPT online. You wrote a great post about it being more like Amazon, not like Google. More than just Google search. More than Google search. Oh, it's going to compete with Google search, which it kind of does a little bit. But more, it's infrastructure. So, a clever point. Could segue into this conversation because this is kind of the beginning of these kinds of next-gen things we're going to see. Things where it's like an obvious next-gen is getting real. Kind of like seeing the browser for the first time, mosaic browser. Well, this internet thing's real. I think this is that moment. And super cloud-like enablement is coming. So, this has been a big part of the super cloud kind of theme. Yeah, you talk about super cloud. You talk about AI, ChatGPT. I really think the ChatGPT is really another Netscape moment, the browser moment. Because if you think about internet technology, it was brewing for 20 years before the early 90s. Not until you had a browser, people realized, wow, this is how wonderful this technology could do. All the wonderful things. Then you have Yahoo and Amazon. I think we have brewing the AI technology for quite some time, even then, neural networks, deep learning. But not until ChatGPT came along, people realized, wow, the user interface, user experience could be that great. So I really think if you look at the last 30 years, there is a browser moment, there is an iPhone moment. I think ChatGPT moment is as big as it is now. What do you see as the intersection of things like ChatGPT and the super cloud? Of course, the media is going to focus, the journal is going to focus on all the negatives and the privacy. Okay, you know we're going to get by that, right? Always do. Where do you see the super cloud and sort of the distributed data fitting in with ChatGPT? Does it use that as a data source? Does it have to be, what's the length? I think there are a number of use cases. One of the use cases, we talked about why we even had super cloud because of the complexity because of the heterogeneous nature of different clouds. In order for me as a developer, in order for me to create applications, I have so many things to worry about, right? It's a complexity. But with ChatGPT, with the AI, I don't have to worry about it, right? Those kind of details will be taken care of by the underlying layer. So we have been talking about on this show over the last year or so about the super cloud, hey, defining that API layer, spanning across multiple clouds. I think that will be happening. However, for a lot of these things, that will be more hidden, right? A lot of that will be automated by the bots. We were just talking about it right before the show. One of the profoundest statements I heard from Adrian Cockroft about 10 years ago was, hey, how we add to Netflix, right? IT is just one API call away. That's a profound statement I heard about a decade ago. I think the next decade, right? The IT is just the one English language away, right? So when it's one English language away, it's no longer as important API, this API, that you still need API, just like hardware, right? You still need all of those things. That's what that's going to be more hidden. The high level thing will be more English language or the language, right? Any language for that matter. So through language, you'll tap services that live across the soup? You just tell what you want, what you desire, right? The bots will help you to figure out what the complexity is, right? Like you said, a lot of criticism about, hey, chatGPD doesn't do this, doesn't do that. But if you think about how to break things down, right? For instance, chatGPD doesn't have Microsoft's stock price today, obviously, right? However, you can ask a chatGPD to write a program for you, retrieve the Microsoft stock price, and then just run it, right? So the thing to think about... It's only going to get better. It's only going to get better. The thing people unfairly criticize chatGPD is it doesn't do this, but can you not break down humans' tasks into smaller things and get complex things to be done by the chatGPD? I think we are there already. That to me is the real game-changers. That's the assembly of atomic elements at the top of the stack, whether the interface's voice or some programmatic gesture-based thing, you know, wave your hand or... One of the analogy I used in my blog was, you know, each person, each professional now is a quarterback. And we suddenly have, you know, a lot more linebacks or, you know, anybacks to work for you, right? For free even, right, you know? And then that's sort of what you should think about it. You are the quarterback of your day-to-day job, right? Your job is not to do everything manually yourself. You call the play. Yes. Do your job. Yes, exactly. All the players are there, all the elves are in the North Pole making the toys, Dave, as we say. But this is the thing I want to get your point. This change is going to require a new kind of infrastructure, software relationship, a new kind of operating runtime, a new kind of assembler, new kind of loader, link things. Very operating systems kind of concepts. Data intensive, right? How to process the data? How to, you know, process so gigantic data in parallel, right? That's actually a tough job, right? So if you think about Chai GBD, why open AI is ahead of the game, right? You know, Google may not want to acknowledge it, right? It's not necessarily do they have, you know, not have enough data scientists, but the software engineering pieces behind it, right? To train a model, to actually do all those things in parallel, to do all those things in a cost-effective way. So I think a lot of those are still... Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question, because we've had this conversation privately, but I want to do it while we're on stage here. Where are all the alpha geeks and developers and creators and entrepreneurs going to gravitate to? You know, in every way you see them, crypto, all the elves went into the crypto. Now I think with ChatGPT, you're going to start to see, like, wow, it's that moment. A lot of people are going to, you know, scrum and do startups, CTOs will invent stuff. There's a lot of invention, a lot of computer science and customer requirements to figure out that's new. Where are the alpha entrepreneurs going to go to? What do you think they're going to gravitate to? If you could point to the next layer to enable this super environment, super app environment, super cloud, because there's a lot to do to enable what you just said. Right, you know, if you think about using internet as the analogy, right, you know, in the early 90s, internet came along, browser came along, you had two kind of companies, right? One is Amazon. The other one is Walmart.com. And then there were companies like maybe GE or whatnot, right? It really didn't take advantage of internet that much. I think, you know, for entrepreneurs, suddenly created the Yahoo! Amazon of the ChatGPT native era. That's what we should be all excited about. But for most of the Fortune 500 companies, your job is to surviving this sort of the big revolution. So you at least need to do your Walmart.com sooner than later, right? So not be like a GE, right? You know, hand waving, hey, I do a lot of the internet, but you know, when you look back, last the 20, 30 years, what did they do much with the leveraging? Do you think they're going to jump in and they're going to build service companies or SaaS tech companies or super companies? Okay, so there are two type of opportunities from that perspective. One is, you know, the open AI-ish kind of the companies. I think at the open AI that the game is still open, right? You know, it's really close AI today. And then there are competition, you mean? There's room for competition, right? You know, you can still spend, you know, 50, $100 million to build something interesting. You know, there are companies like Cohere and then so on and so on. There are a bunch of companies. I think there is that. And then there are companies who is going to leverage those sort of the new AI primitives. I think, you know, we have been talking about AI forever, but finally, finally, it's no longer just cute, but also super useful. I think, you know, that's the time. And if you have the cloud behind you, what do you make the Amazon do differently? Like, because Amazon Web Services is only going to grow with this. It's not going to get smaller. They're going to get, there's more horsepower to handle. There's more needs. Well, Microsoft already showed what's the future, right? You know, yes, there is a kind of the container, you know, the serverless that will continue to grow. But the future is really not about. Microsoft's showing the future? Well, showing that, you know, working with OpenAI, right? They actually, they already said that, you know, we are going to have chat GPT service. 10 billion dollars, I think. 10 billion dollars putting in and also open up the OpenAPI services, right? You know, that's actually, you know, I actually made a prediction that Microsoft the future hinges on OpenAI. I think, you know. They believe that 10 billion dollar bet. Yeah, 10 billion dollar bet. So I want to ask you a question is somewhat academic, but it's relevant is for a number of years, it looked like having first mover advantage wasn't an advantage. PCs, spreadsheets, the browser, right? Social media, friends, right? I had the monopoly power on that one. Right? Mobile, yeah, Apple wasn't first and mobile. But then, but that's somewhat changed. Cloud, AWS was first, you could debate, but AWS, okay, they have first mover advantage. Crypto, Bitcoin, first mover advantage. Do you think OpenAI will have first mover advantage? It certainly has open, it has, certainly has its advantage today. I think the, I think it's year two. I mean, I think the game is still out there, right? You know, we're still in the first inning, early inning of the game. So I don't think that the game is over for the rest of the players, whether the big players or the open AI kind of the sort of competitors. So one of the VCs actually asked me the other day, right? Hey, how much money do I need to spend, invest to get another shop to the open AI sort of the level? You know, I get a sum, you know. Line up, that's a classic VC. How much money do I need to replicate OpenAI? I'm pretty sure he asked a question to a bunch of guys, right? He didn't look at that. So we kind of did some nappy. Tell me where the VC is, I'll avoid them. Where'd you come up with? Oh, sure. 100 million dollars is the auto magnitude I came up with, right? Not a billion, not 10 million, right? So 100 million. Hundreds of millions. A hundred million auto magnitude is what I came up with. You know, we can get into details, you know, in other sort of the time. That's actually not that much. It's not, exactly. So when he heard of me articulating why is that? You know, he's thinking, right? You know, he actually asked me, hey, you know, there's this company. Do you happen to know this company? Can I reach out? You know, all those things. So I truly believe it's not a billion or 10 billion dollar issue. It's more like 100 million. And also, your other point about the referencing the internet revolution is a good comparable. The other thing there is, online user population was a big driver of the growth of that. So what's the equivalent here for online user population for AI? Is it more apps, more users? What's your, is it still, I mean, we're still early on, it's first inning. Yeah, we're kind of this, you know. What's the key metric for success of this sector? Could you, do you have a read on that? I think the, you know, the users is, the number of users is a good metrics, but I think it's going to be a lot more. A lot of people are going to use AI services without even knowing they're using it, right? You know, I think a lot of the applications are being already built on top of open AI. And then they are kind of, you know, get people, help people to do marketing legal documents. You know, so they are already inherently open AI kind of the users already. So I think, yeah. Well, we've got to wrap, but I really appreciate you coming in. I want to give you the last minute to wrap up here. In your experience, and you've seen many waves of innovation, you even have your hands in, a lot of the big waves past three inflection points, and obviously machine learning you're doing now, you're deep in. Why is this super cloud movement, this wave of super cloud in the discussion of this next inflection point, why is it so important for the folks watching, why should they be paying attention to this particular moment in time? Could you share your super clip on super cloud? Right. If you think about, so this is simple from my point of view. So why do you even have cloud to begin with, right? IT is too complex, too complex to operate, too expensive. So there's a newer model, there's a better model, right? Let's someone else operate it, there is elasticity out of it, right? That's great. Until you have multiple vendors, right? Many vendors even, you know, we're talking about kind of how to make a multiple vendors look like the same, frankly speaking, even one vendor has, you know, thousand services, now it's kind of getting what Kate was talking about, what cloud chaos, right? So every time you have, you know, it's the evolution that the history repeats itself, right? You know, you have, you know, next great things and then too many great things and then people need to sort of abstract this out. So it's almost that you must do this. But I think how to abstract this out is something that at this time, AI is going to help a lot, right? You know, like I mentioned, right? A lot of the abstraction, you don't have to think about API anymore. I bet 10 years from now, you know, IT is one language away, not an API away. So think about that world, right? So super cloud, in my opinion, sure, you kind of abstract things out, you have, you know, consistent layers, but who's going to do that? Is that like we all agreed upon the model, agreed upon those APIs? Not necessary, there are certain, you know, truth in that, but there are other truths that just let bots take care of, right? Whether the, you know, I want some X happens, whether it's going to be done by Azure, by AWS, by GCP, bots will figure out at a given time with certain contacts, with your security requirement, posture requirement, I'll figure that out. That's awesome. And then, you know, Dave, you and I have been talking about this. We think scale is the new ratification. If you have first mover advantage, you'll see that benefit, but scale is a huge thing. Open AI, AWS. Yeah, every day we are using open AI today, we are labeling data for them. So there, you know, that's a little bit of the first mover advantage that other people don't have, right? So it's kind of scary. So I'm very sure that Google is a little bit. When we do our super AI event, you're definitely going to be keynoting. I think, you know, we're talking about super cloud, before long, we are going to talk about super intelligent cloud. I'm super excited, Howie, about this. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you, Howie Chu. Always a great analyst for us, contributing to the Community VP of Machine Learning and Zscaler, Industry Legend and Friend of the Cube. Thanks for coming on and sharing. Really, really great advice and insight into what this next wave means. This super cloud is the next wave. If you're not on it, your driftwood says Pat Gelsinger. So you're going to see a lot more discussion. We'll be back more here live in Palo Alto after the short break. Thank you.