 Okay, welcome to episode 20 of the Cube Pod. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, we hit 20. That's our episode number we were looking at to get going. We did it in seconded weeks in a row. Great to see you. What a busy week again. Again, interesting. We're so packed up with events in June, and we've got our big SuperCloud event next week. I've had dozens of interviews circulating around the SuperCloud, multi-cloud, cloud-native market, and the tsunami of apps coming from AI. While at the same time, the economy is really not doing well on tech on the startup side. Funding is down to an all-time low. You're seeing all kinds of activity around VCs trying to offload the companies that aren't performing. There's no real-accue hire market, which means no one's acquiring some of these startups, and I think as I predicted this week, you're going to see some startups falling out of the sky next year. As fume dates come close, fume date meaning the data when they run out of gas and capital, and there's no acquisition market for talent or accu-hires, then you're going to see a lot of people in the streets. Lena Kahn is at it again. I can't wait to hear your perspective, but she got pretty much hit over the head by the courts that rule that Microsoft's acquisition is going to go through. Then Broadcom VMware is in the news on the register article today, saying as they need rescuing. I call BS in that article, I think it's just fodder for what everyone knows, and it's just to placate the EU and the UK. All kinds of stuff, the Activision Deal, as I mentioned, the FTC, that was a big deal. I want to get into that, not just on a rant day, but just overall impact to how the lack of understanding of tech is going on. Of course, we got AWS Summit in New York City. I'm going to be down there. You have a big event going on here on storage. We got SuperCloud next week. What's going on? Two events, one on storage, one on data. We got SuperCloud. I was just on with an investor, John, and he was telling me that he's seeing deals that are getting done where they're getting VCs to invest, signing term sheets, and then by the time that the round is about to close, they're already disrupted because somebody else is getting funded that has never seen anything like it. It's like, you got to be careful out there as an investor, as to where you're putting your money. I mean, I know they just sprinkling it around. Yeah, I can't wait to get into Lena Kahn whiffing yet again. I think she's 0 for 4 now. She probably should be dropped down to the miners, but she keeps going. We'll talk about that. But yeah, busy week. Security. I just love the generate AI thing. Again, I didn't mention it at the top, but it's now a week into threads. Five days ahead, 100 million. I did not call that. I'm meeting my words on the app because I said there's no way they're going to be faster growth in chat GPT. And I was wrong. A lot of people are saying that they're throttling back the numbers because they're afraid, as I pointed out on the first day of launch, that there's a monopoly power action happening. The fact that that app can launch so fast. If you're meta right now, you got to be thinking about monopoly. I mean, the fact that they did that has, besides the fact that they did a good, perfect launch is the power of the meta. I mean, that's just unbelievable. And what can they do next? So this comes back down to the narrative you and I have had over the many years on theCUBE, going back to say 2015, when we really started talking about cloud scale as a competitive advantage. And I believe that you're going to start to see the haves and have nots emerge where the notion of scale as a differentiation emote will be huge. And I think meta is a great example with this threads thing. Now, I already seen the engagement drop off on threads, but still they got a hundred million. They probably hide the numbers. They did leverage the interest of the gram, cold start, graphs data for the people to move over and do it. But I think- Well, John, I mean, six months ago, everybody was like, oh, meta is screwed. They're spending all this money on metaverse. I as well. He's kind of missed the metaverse. He missed AI. But look at them now. I mean, they haven't even turned on the advertising machine for threads. And Zuckerberg cut staff. And he probably looked at what Elon did. He says, you know what? I can just cut staff and people are still going to advertise with me. I mean, they're making so much money and they have so many other levers that they can turn. I mean, Facebook all of a sudden is looking really good or meta. As you saw in the Wall Street Journal today and an article on this on how the insider's talking about the OG mark coming back. You know, I pointed that out when they first launched, they got too many knobs to kill Twitter. Twitter has no options, but one, that is to kind of lock in the developers and win back the day. But that might be a sinking ship. I don't know. I mean, Twitter's, I like Twitter. I think Twitter's better now since Elon took it over. I mean, a lot of people don't like it at the check marks and stuff, but it seems like conversations are better and I mean, I still like it. I like threads. I like Twitter. I'm like one of these all above guys, John, right? Why not use them all? Yeah, I mean, I got to post all of them. I've been posting, but I think threads definitely could wear out. Again, I always call it the nightclub factor, Dave. And like the hot new nightclub and then it gets boring. And then it's like, okay, no one wants Twitter. I was talking to some of our younger folks in our team here at theCUBE and I don't really want to Twitter happen. I have Instagram. I really don't want, I don't really need to tweeting. So meanwhile, TikTok's out there and you got real. So Twitter, I mean, really, we need to know the Twitter. We've mentioned that last time. So I don't want to rehash it, but I think generally like it's, I think it's going to come down to if Elon can win the media back, the ones that left, Twitter will never die. There'd be too big to die. I've said that over and over again, but you know, self-inflicted wounds could be a wild card. Elon's unpredictable. But, and I don't know if we need another Twitter, but the affinity with Instagram is just so easy to sign up. I know, you know, my daughter is like this influencer in TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. And of course she's loving threads. Like a lot of these influencers are because it's just so easy to bring your social graph over. I mean, it's just followers on threads. I noticed I bumped her up the other day. Yeah, because she just basically showed up and everybody started following her. And so it's so easy for her to now find another channel that has an adjacency. I think it was much smaller extent. You know, we in enterprise tech can do the same thing. I mean, I've enjoyed my interactions on threads and it has taken away from some of the time I've spent on other platforms. I have to admit it. I mean, I tried tweeting in some of the journalists that are giving, you know, phoning results, phrase over threads, mainly because they hate Twitter. Taylor Lorenz is very transparent about her feelings about Twitter and the toxic nature over there and the goofs and the misfires. But, you know, I asked a question and I'd like to have one. Some of the reports are on that beat. Answer the question. What are the active uniques on Instagram? Because I think Instagram is gonna get penalized. People go on threads. I mean, I've already noticed personally, my Instagram uses its way down. Not that I was an active user, but threads, you know. Me too. It's like, okay, so if that's the case, Zuckerberg is cross subsidizing threads from Instagram. Okay? And when you cross subsidize, that's a competitive strategy just to kill Twitter. So think about that bet. He wants to get 50% of the town square market so bad that he's willing to subsidize and cannibalize Instagram to subsidize threads. And you know how that is, Dave, you cannibalize something, you take from here, Instagram leverage the social graph, the onboarding ease of use, click, click, click, your in was phenomenal. Again, perfect launch for these guys. And then there you go. They're subsidizing threads and cannibalizing or herding Instagram. That's smart, but also kind of evil genius at the same time. So, you know, I think- Falsy. It's really palsy. The meta-policy people gotta be saying to Zuckerberg, slow down, we gotta camouflage our land grab. We can't let the government see us use this power that we have over the marketplace. And meanwhile, they get the whole press corps, you know, begging for followers. So, you know, they're controlling. It's power. And, you know, I've been asking questions and I've been pretty overt on the app saying, hey, you know, is this another nightclub? Is it the power? Okay, the cold start problem. Is that a feature or a bug or an advantage with monopoly? And so these are questions. And again, if the case is Instagram is losing daily active uniques, then there it is. They're using Instagram as a lever to propel threads. Is that bundling, John? It's kind of clever. Well, the meta-people are like, no, no, no. You have to download the app. Okay, true. But the onboarding is literally Instagram backend. So, yeah, you're technically downloading software, but all the backend work, graph data, username, and that's why you can't delete your username on threads without deleting Instagram. Right. So, there it is. Instant mode. Instant lock-in is evil genius. And meanwhile, Lena Kahn's distracted with Microsoft Activision and OpenAI. We'll get to that, I know. And Lena Kahn, by the way, what we just were talking about, I think it's a little bit above Lena Kahn's pay grade intellectually. So, I don't think she can actually grok that. Her focus is on other things that are just so pedestrian and not even relevant. I don't think it's a matter of her intellect because she's super smart. I think it's a matter of her dog- I didn't say being smart is one thing, but putting things together is another. But you say, yeah, above her intellect, but whatever. But I think it's her dogma that is blinding her. I mean, she's certainly smart enough to figure this out. She's like a dog on a bone going after these attempts to take down big tech. We'll get to it. Unless you want to get to it now, I'm like ready to go. Go, let's go. Okay, so let's look at the Activision Microsoft. So she loses that. This is like, oh, for four now, after Meta tried to acquire, did acquire and successfully, the last thing she took to court. She said in public here, she said, if you never bring the hard cases, there's a severe cost to that. It can lead to stagnation. Okay, is stagnation, is that a word that describes tech? No, impacts of consolidation. She says, I'm worried about lower wages for workers, diminished innovation, and lower levels of service quality. Again, does tech have lower wages? I mean, the average wage in the US is probably 55,000, 60,000. Do you have tech much higher than that? Diminished innovation in tech, no. Lower levels of service and quality? Look at the NPS scores of Apple. And then this woman, Jennifer Rye, who's a senior litigation analyst for Bloomberg, said FTC needs to pick better battles. And so what did she do? Right after she lost the Activision ruling, she sends to open AI, ChatGPT is a target of pro by the FTC. One question asked the company to describe in detail the extent to which you have taken steps to address or mitigate risks that your large language model products could generate statements about real individuals that are false, misleading or disparaging. So here's another phishing expedition, John. They sent a 20 page letter to open AI with 49 queries with 17 document demands. Well, open AI was not designed or ChatGPT was not designed not to hallucinate. If you're using that to get the truth, you're using it the wrong way. You should be using it for ideation, summarization. I mean, it's just another, to me, misguided attempt by the FTC to inject its dogma into the industry. It's, and there's zealots. It's just, you've heard my rant on this before. I just, I don't know, what do you think about this? Is it just more of the same nonsense? When is it gonna end? I think it actually exposes the hypocrisy of the FTC and Lena Kohn. I think she's just her ideology and her worldview is warped from reality. And I don't think she understands how technology works. She might be super academically smart. I think she went to Yale or something like that. She wrote some papers. She was anti-Amazon. And I see that, I mean, I can understand that point of view, but I just don't agree with it at all. I think she's on a crusade and will steamroll whatever she can to change distribution of wealth and how our economy works. And capitalism. So, you know, I just think, you know, sometimes you got to let the free market do its thing. Now, I'm not saying don't have oversight. If anything, I think tech needs to have more oversight or not oversight, more understanding holistically as it hits all aspects of our lives. I mean, the digital transformation and or the digitization of our world is happening. And that means data is everything. Security is everything. Privacy is everything. These are features of a fabric, not a, you know, some canned siloed thing. So, you know, I think technology was once an industry where a bunch of nerds in California and certain parts of the United States were working on cool stuff and they'd roll it out to the world and people would be happy, people would make money and get rich. Now you're seeing in the past three years more unicorns. Remember when unicorns was like three of them? Now there's like 300 of them. Unicorns being companies worth over a billion dollars. The surge in the market has been good. And so, you know, zombie, zombie corns is the new term though, right? Well, I mean, the world's changing. We got a, we got a headwind and you know, the macroeconomist will get to in a second. But I think, you know, the FTC has an obligation to understand how economics work and how we trade and how things work. And when you're in a digital economy where you have concepts like digital twins, something that you're talking a lot about and you're breaking analysis around the Uberization. What Uber is, all companies are gonna look like Uber with some sort of complex new digital infrastructure and software, AI, generative AI applications are surging. I heard almost 50% of all code being committed in GitHub now is built by generative AI machines. And so more and more information overloads coming. You're gonna have fatigue, you're gonna have misinformation. There's so many bigger battles to fight to win the overall war to create an economy that everyone has access to and where people can be entrepreneurial, whether you're an individual living in the corner of some area or in a corporation and innovating inside a company and disrupting. So they got to do that differently. And I just don't like what they're doing. I mean, okay, you know, even in the Broadcom, VMware conversations that are happening, we saw that piece out today and it was just, it was just all fun. It was just a story that was ridiculous. I mean, yeah, Broadcom is going to cut sales and marketing. But, you know, VMware had no cloud, Dave. There was no threat to anybody. Of course they hadn't, I mean, it had a product. So it was all ridiculous. So again, the world's changing. And I think, you know, these bigger mergers are going to be good, but you know, I'm more worried about the metas of the world than Broadcom, to be honest with you and Microsoft and gaming, come on. Well, but so Microsoft, the Activision thing, I just want to say one more thing about that. The EU basically was the one who initially blocked this and they worked it out with Microsoft and Microsoft said, look at the concern you have over Call of Duty and us restricting access to Call of Duty. We'll agree to make Call of Duty available to anybody who wants it, doesn't have to come to our platform to get it. You said, all right, cool, boom. That's the consent decree. You abide by that, you violate that, we're going to come after you, but if you play by the rules, no problem, check. So we figure, okay, hey, good enough for the EU, it's got to be good enough for the US. No, not for Lena Khan. So because she's so focused on changing the policies and agenda, and my opinion, she's going outside her swim lane. I mean, this is really, I don't even know if she has congressional authority to do some of this stuff, but she just, no, she rejects that outright. I'm taking it to court. And now that she's even appealing the ruling, just to bust balls. It's just like, it's not right. And then, you know, the other thing, you're talking about 50% of the code now in GitHub is AI generated. I was just talking to Jeff Jonas on this week's breaking analysis. You know what he said to me? He had a great line. He goes, Dave, entropy is winning. And my entropy, he's talking about, you know, the entropy, second law of thermodynamics, you took it in college, right? And it's like the degree of randomness or disorder. And he's referring to in data. And basically saying, you know, there's so much AI going on and so much now randomness created by machines. It's probably the, there's more, probably more machine created data now than there is, you know, human data. Entropy is winning. I love that. I just had a conversation too with the CTO this morning of CrowdStrike, okay? Ilya Zetserv, he super smart guy. We're talking about the human plus AI is better than AI. And we were talking about chess, you know, grandmasters in the old days were dominant and people who couldn't get there are gonna get there with AI. And we've had one in cybersecurity. It's not just skills gap. You're gonna see new people come in that weren't, that couldn't crack the code to get the big jobs because in security you have to be a top notch coder or computer science or math person are just super smart. And now with AI, you can get people who come in who don't have to know those disciplines and can be up and running and perform at that grand master level, defending adversary. So you're gonna start to see this, and I said it before in the pod, multiplayer gaming like vibe where technology and humans work together. I mean, I play video games with my kids, used to, but they're good, I'm terrible. So it's not helping me, but they're good. And so they're playing the game. The game's available, but certain people are gonna be really, really good at working with machines and some aren't, but they can get in the game. AI will help people do things they've never done before and it's gonna help areas that we're once hard to get into. Starting companies, being a security guru, whatever elite positions, grand master chess player, you're gonna start to see a second tier of excellence come in quickly from people who have that unique skill, but not maybe the total package to do it standalone. But with AI, that person could propel to excellence. And I think that's gonna change the game. You're gonna start to see new shit happening, new startups, new people rolling into positions that are gonna be, wow. That person's like operating at the tier one level of performance. And of course, the people who are actually in those performance positions are gonna be more productive, right? So this is what Elia and CrowdStrike and I were talking about and it went from a security conversation to data. So data is everywhere. It's data native now. Everything's about data and AI is just gonna eat that up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and it's gonna be incredible, power dynamic and I think entropy, opportunity, wealth creation and people like Lena Kahn get in the way of that in my opinion. So that's why, you know, kind of tie her back in. These kind of protectionists kind of like, that's equalized the playing field. The playing field is already equalized with democracy. So to me, give people opportunity. Now with the technology shift that's happening this is democratizing and creating opportunities. All we gotta do is give people access to it. So, you know, I'm pro access, anti-protectionism in terms of letting innovation flourish. And I think at the end of the day, that KPI, that benchmarks about entrepreneurship. Who's starting companies? Who's building stuff? Who's creating value? And can they get paid for it? Does it create value for the, for people in the world? So John, couple of things, a while back, I don't think you did this show with me. No, it was like John Walls or something on theCUBE. Gary Kasparov came on. We were down in New York City. And you remember he got beat by the IBM, I think it was Blue Gene, the Blue Gene supercomputer when it beat him. This is years ago, way before Jeopardy. So people might not remember Gary Kasparov. He was like the greatest chess player in the world, Grand Grand Master, like number one guy was amazing. So when he lost to the computer, he's such a baller. He said, I'm gonna beat the computer. So what he did was he created this tournament. And I think it still runs today where he beat the computer with a combination to exactly to your point with humans and machines. So the human plus the machine beats the machine. So he created this whole tournament where you get to use a machine in humans. So the greatest chess player in the world is not a machine, it's machines plus humans. So that's kind of cool. The other thing is, you're talking about, we're talking about Lena Kahn and innovation. I think there's similar things going on with the SEC and Gary Gensler who's trying to kill crypto in the US. Now I'm not saying that he shouldn't go after, you get frauds like FTX and you got finance breaking all the rules. But then you got Coinbase trying to figure out what to do. And I granted they're trying to do a little bit of a reach around but they're pushing crypto out of the country. You know, if you look at what happened in Japan and Japan is not, you don't think of Japan as the place to go for innovation and crypto but they were the only country in the world where the FTX investors were able to get their money back because Japan put down the proper controls. Now again, I'm not saying that that's the place for innovation but that's the right model for crypto is to actually partner up with the organizations that are providing these services and create rules that can be followed so that you do protect the investor. Not that you just kick them out. These big Genslers trying to basically, to my mind just push them out of the country. And I don't think that's the right thing for innovation especially in the US. Well, this is why the FTC, by the way, I love your rants too. I kind of agree with most of them if not all of them but the FTC plays a critical role in our economy on their one little lane that they should be staying in. On the other side, you have our government with the fiscal and monetary policies. They do a good job. You can see Wall Street's got a good barometer and as a good interaction and a balancing force between policymakers in the Fed. So inflation numbers just came out. I had some talking points on this. You know, it's down, right? So their target inflation is 2% is getting closer. It looks like a soft landing might be there. So it's gonna keep rates high for now but they think if it continues to go on a downward trend that could be that soft landing. Again, we hope companies don't fall out of the sky in 2024 but I think they will based upon some of the data I'm hearing on fume dates, you know, in the capital markets here in the Valley relative to the tech startup scene. So macro inflation down soft landing possible but the big red flags to me is the backlog of lack of IPOs. This is a drought now 18 months and counting from an IPO tech IPOs enterprise or, you know, SaaS or software IPO and significantly down and prolong that absence is gonna be longer if it continues to get suckier. And then the second thing companies aren't going public. So then the next thing is what do you gotta do to go public? We already know that the valuations are dropping in the capital markets for real estate startups almost by half. The series A hurdle to get a series A financing is higher than it was when money was for almost free. So you're gonna have this whole who goes public when it is gonna be a tsunami everyone going at once, you know, just flooding the equity markets and then how, what metrics do you need to be ready to go public? So, you know, you got soft landing possible still inflation backlog of IPOs, no liquidity and headwinds there and then the readiness what is good mean if the markets are changing so fast with AI and other things. So you're gonna see a shift of power in my opinion on these pre-public companies. If you're not data bricks with billions on the bank or some of these AI companies that have raised a billion dollars which is like going public, you're gonna be screwed. I mean, it's gonna be a tough market. It's gonna be interesting. And the insiders of Silicon Valley are all saying that the seed investors, those early stage investors the series A's are trying to get the series B trying to get the series C that are struggling. There's no M&A market for AccuHires right now and it's not cause cash is a premium. So if you have cash right now you are in a great position as an innovator. And so when the government starts meddling like the FTC especially with the big whales it's gonna have an impact to a trickle effect to start up. So, you know, that's my view on it. I look at the in the trenches. What's the perimeter for the startups? And then what's happening with the big whales like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple who have all that power, Meta, Google those guys can't move fast enough so they're pretty much easy to predict. But the startup scene that's the proxy in my opinion with the economy is. Let me ask you a question. Sure. NASDAQ through June 30th was up 32% year to date. Did data bricks miss a window in which it could have done an IPO? In other words, instead of waiting for the perfect time, could it have gone out and taken advantage of some of the froth in the market and this little slingshot rebound in the first half of this year? That's a great question. Well, I mean, I don't know how I feel about that because as all the people know in the Valley here there's been liquidity going on inside data bricks for a long time. Their last valuation was $38 billion. That was their last round of funding. I think they raised over a billion dollars. So they have enough capital. I mean, the point of going public is to quote, raise money and then get liquidity. So if you can raise the kind of money that they have like a billion dollars and you have kind of a secondary market developing and I know the valuation is much lower than that. I've heard ranges significantly lower than 38 billion. Low 20s, let's say, right? Let's just say 25 billion just to use the number or 20 billion. That would be an 18 billion dollar discount. But there's liquidity happening for data bricks stock. We know that because we've heard and confirmed rumblings of that in the rumor mill. So when we heard from people in the street saying, yeah, I sold some data brick stuff. So that means the VCs are taking their percentage out, putting it into their returns, locking in their position and playing with house money on the forward basis and hoping for upsides. I think there's going to be a hell of a lot of upside on data bricks given this comparable snowflake. So I think the answer would be, I think they're fine. I mean, either way they'd still be in my opinion, I think knowing the data bricks team, it's almost a pleasure not to be public, no more filing. You can get a 30 day shot clock, right? So you got the cash, you got the liquidity, why do you go public? I hear you, but it reminds me of not that, not that the company is the same, but it reminds me of cloud area. Remember cloud area took all that money from Intel? Mike Olson would say, well, we don't need to go public. Well, it's like sometimes you take it when you don't need it. And so to me, and I hear you, they don't need the cash necessarily, but to me, data bricks being a public company would expand its presence in the market. And they've got the momentum. I actually think had they been able to go public in like late May, early June, I think they would have had a kick ass IPO, they could have got, I bet you they could have got back above and I'm sure they had advisors, so I'm probably full of shit here, but they probably could have got back to their earlier, their last valuation and maybe had the market run it up. Now, of course, it doesn't do them any good. If they go out and let's say have $35, $38 billion valuation, they take that money and then the market runs up like snowflake did. Remember snowflake, everybody was saying, left a lot of money in the table, but I would say that was actually good. I don't think they did. Well, I mean, technically they did because the stock ran up to like 300, and it was 120 was the IPO price. So they could have the theory gotten a lot more, but I say that's good because it lets investors have a little bit of room to run. So the guys who got in at 120, they were in the money throughout this whole downturn. And so I actually liked that when a company gives the investors a little opportunity to make some cash instead of just all the insiders. But, you know, like this is a good example of the Cloud Air. If the market's got hot market, yeah, if Cloud Air went public, I think they would have done much better because they would have tailwind on value and they would have been transparent so they would have to do better. And the market was hot and the stock market, if you go back and look at when they would have gone public, it was a much different market. They would have rode that growth. Instead they waited and it was kind of a meh IPO, right? I mean, that's hard to tell. I think Cloud Air didn't have the traction that Databricks has. I mean Databricks, it was, I would say it would be called the Cloud Air if before Spark took off. But yeah, and that's why I didn't want to compare the two companies and their business model. Databricks is a much better business model. But it just in terms of the timing of the IPO and the narrative of, we don't have to go public. And I get, like Michael Dell, we don't want to be in the quarterly shot clock. But I think there are other benefits to go public. Databricks has to go public at some point in time. Well, I mean, this is the thing. IPO drought is interesting dynamic. So we got to watch that. So I think the Fed rate is going to impact that. And then, what does it take to go public? I mean, long-term revenue numbers, what's your growth rate going to be? What's your ARR? Those benchmarks, which was once maybe lower hurdle, are going to be much higher or you have to have a seriously hyped and or a winning AI strategy. So I just think it's going to be very interesting. And I think one thing that's not talked a lot about is the market of private companies with no M&A market. And I hate to be gloom and doom and I hope I'm wrong, but if you're looking at your runway and you have a fume date, that's the date you run out of money when your company is dead or has to give up and shut down. That's when you have to kind of let the company die. And if there's no buyers, that's the end of the company. So that's the series A, series Bs, companies that aren't getting the traction in the new normal. So pivoting is happening. Big time people are working hard to pivot, but if they can't make it, you're going to see teams of people on the streets and it's going to be an opportunity for this next wave of AI developers. So I think it's the, you know, you know what they say in Silicon Valley that the the startups that don't make it become fertilizer for the next batch. So that's interesting dynamic and I think it's playing out right now. Yeah, just I can close this out on this. I just wonder, you know, what is it that we don't know? I mean, snowflakes got a nearly $60 billion valuation. We've talked about if you take out the AWS revenue out of the snowflake revenue, it's very possible that snowflake and Databricks have a similar sort of revenue model and maybe Databricks just isn't ready to go public. Maybe they don't have the profitability profile. You know, they trickle out. They're pretty transparent for a private company, but they trickle out like any private company, little bits and pieces of information. But, you know, one wonders, maybe they're just not ready. I mean, I'm dying to see their S1 sort of unpack that thing. Well, anyway, I'm excited to talk about the anti-trust bus, which we just did, but the security stuff, we got the super cloud event coming on. And I think the AI story just continues to surge. And again, the title of our super cloud event on Tuesday, the 18th and 19th is security plus AI. And I think the interesting that on the security landscape, Dave, I know you've fallen this closely, the market's changing, right? And security never goes away. It's one of those things that will be a standard thing. And I just interviewed Merritt Bayer, who's now at Lacework as a CISO. She's saying that, you know, data as a cost center, when companies say that, means it's not a good move. In other words, if you don't have security in everything you do with digital, then you're going to be compromised and you're going to be breached. So I give you a little preview. I get some fresh ETR data. So during the pandemic, John, machine learning containers, cloud and RPA were the big four. They were the big four where spending velocity was the highest. And then when Ukraine and inflation and the Fed started to tighten, people just started to not be as enthused about AI. So if you look at where AI went on the spending momentum, it dropped significantly. It went from like over 60%, what's called net score, which is an indicator of spending. 60% of the customers were net customers were spending more than less. And it dropped down to below 40%. And then after ChatGPT, the thing rocketed back up. It's now the number one sector. So if you look at a month before ChatGPT was announced, the sector was bottomed and it's been rocketing since. And it's percentage of the market in terms of if you look at the percentage of customers that say you were spending on AI versus the divided by the total, it's like doing this, okay? Now, if you look at AWS, Microsoft, Google and open AI, AWS sort of bottomed out and was declining during that same sort of period. And then after it announced bedrock started to go. So AWS went from number one because it had all the SageMaker action. And in Microsoft, in terms of net spending momentum, Microsoft was number two, Google was number three. Open AI wasn't even in the survey. Nobody even heard of them, right? If you don't now post ChatGPT, open AI has by far the highest spending momentum and by far the most mentions, like 87% net score versus Microsoft now number two because they cut the line, 68%. AWS actually went up, but it's now number three that 60% and Google went up, but 52%. So the rising tide lifted all ships and the percent or the number in the survey of folks saying they're doing AI, leaning into AI, spending on AI all went up. So you got the big, big three clouds plus open AI. And then as well, you got all these other companies, Anthropic, DataRobot, Anaconda, all rising. And then to Jeff Jonas's point today, then there's all this AI you don't even see, it's just all embedded, which brings me back John to security because all these security companies all have AI embedded into their platforms and that's what we're going to be talking about next week at SuperCloud three. Yeah, great, great, great data teaser there. And I'm looking forward to seeing that data. It does point to what we've been saying about, even our early conversations can open AI, I have a competitive advantage. Remember I said the scale's going to help them and it looks like it has, but what's ironic about open AI is less open than everything else. It's closed AI, it's a large language model. And what's happening is there's a trend of smaller language models emerging. So you have a concept that is going to come out in our SuperCloud event called Data Fusion. So a company called Decinity we interviewed are going to be speaking in our ecosystem section of our event. Decinity is a company that has essentially has came out of the DOD in the Department of Defense and government contracts where they've mastered the art of understanding how data works and how they confuse it together in real time. And that's going to be the interaction of data models. Kind of like our data development environment that we've been talking about for 13 years. It's happening. Data is now a formulaic element, like almost like chemistry, almost like a periodic tables kind of reaction. We're going to be blending things together and data is going to connect and it's going to fuse and interact with other data. And this phenomenon called Data Fusion is legit. And I think you're going to start to see highly availability, high availability of data being thrust into applications that have never been there before other than a query, turn, get a call back. It's like, you know, like maybe the old database days can access the database, get a response. You're going to see Data Fusion become a massive thing and companies like Hammerspace, Vast Data, these storage companies are going to be, have to be enablers for this new Data Fusion trend because the data developers are out there now and it's going to be more and more of that. So, you know, all that's radical change. And I think this is why people are freaking out. I mean, if you go look at again, the news we can talk about here that kind of hits this point of, you know, old versus new, the unions representing all the Hollywood actors and performers have decided to go on strike. First it was the writers, now it's the actors supporting the brethren, right? So, okay, the writers and the actors on Hollywood are striking against the studios. You know why? They're pissed off about the streaming rights. They're worried about their asset being deep faked or their rights to the content being misused or not being compensated for. And so, you know, if you can't innovate, sue. This is a huge topic, John, let's talk about it. Yeah, I mean, cause I mean, what's the choice? They have to be part of the equation. The human creatives, I mean, I tweeted, actually I tweeted, I threaded this. What do you call it? When you thread, you tweet, you know. You threaded it, yeah. Creatives are valuable, right? And this is why the machines, humans plus machines is key. So what's interesting is that they're striking but they're striking for the wrong reasons, I think. So, I don't know how I feel about it. Do you think they should have striked? I think the actors should have supported the writers personally, I think that's solidarity. But I think the bigger picture is, what are they fighting for? Well, so I heard Iger, well, first of all, I think the union workers feel like, hey, during COVID, we stepped up and these streaming services made a boatload of money. And they've stuffed it in their pockets of their CEOs and you've heard the narrative. Bob Iger is on TV this week saying, this is absolutely the worst time to strike. These guys just don't get it. So they're miles apart. And I think the workers are saying, screw that. It's our time, we got to get paid. And so my understanding is they're obviously concerned about AI and locking in an agreement now. Because if you're, let's say you're an extra on a site, I was talking to Ken Schiffman about this today. And if you're an extra on a site and you're getting paid for showing up every day and walking around the set. And I know friends who are extras in that movie, Little Women, because it was filmed in my hometown. And they'd walk around all day and they'd be there for eight, nine hours, just for a one minute or 30 seconds shoot regardless. They'd have to be there that day, the next day, every time they shot that scene. And they're worried that they're saying, okay, they can just take that facial image, pay them once and then replicate it whenever else they need it. And to dramatically cut the pay of the extra of the actors. And so they're saying, wait a minute. No, no, we have to renegotiate this and lock in our rights, our IP rights. It's a moving train though. I mean, first of all, I think that's fine. I mean, hey, if you can replicate, automate that, then that's, I wouldn't, if you're automating save redundancy, I mean, to be an extra, I mean, really, okay. Now the bigger issue is the talent, right? So, Brendan's texting us, a producer. Bob Iger, by the way, saying that while he's on a billionaire retreat in Sun Valley. Exactly, Brendan's right. But wait a minute for a second, wait a second. So, I mean, if you're getting paid for your to be there and they're taking your face and then replicating it, why shouldn't you get rights to that? I mean, I know it's not as big as the creatives, I agree. But let's start at the bottom and work up. I mean, why shouldn't you get rights on that? Just like you would if you wrote a song. I think you should. I mean, I'm not against them, just saying automating physical presence is gonna happen, right? So, I mean, look at this, you know we always say, do you wanna fight fashion, right? So, the trend here is, is the trend their friend? Obviously not, because that's why they're distance apart between, you know, the tone deaf executives and the talent. But the talent also have to know what they're fighting for too. And I think, you know, I just don't understand the frame. I understand the premise of the following thing. Talent is better than, creative is better than mechanism, right? Meaning the industry itself. So, I would say that, I would say AI will help and should benefit talent more. Now, the problem is, is the power of the studios to get the money and they got the control. So, what ultimately breaks this in my opinion is a new vendor, a new way. So, you know, it's like the clash of the Titans. And ultimately, I think what will solve this is, new talent will say screw the middleman, go direct. And look at, I mean, I was just talking about this about the YouTubers, like, you know, the Mr. Beast. You know, he makes most of his money, not so much from YouTube. He makes it from the brand deals he does and his own, like, he did a thing, some takeoffs, he does his own productions now. So, he's got billions of views on his stuff, but YouTube's paying him jack shit for that. Talking about Mr. Beast. He's the big time guy on YouTube. We actually saw him at Palo Alto Gym, actually. Yeah, the big time producer, right? Yeah, he's a big time producer. He's an influencer. Yeah, but didn't he get a start as a producer in writing songs and confusing him? Yeah, confusing him, he's a YouTuber. My point is YouTube monetization in Twitter just started trying to pay their monetization with mostly right wing people. But this idea of paying talent in these new platforms like YouTube and Twitter and these bottoms up organic growth, not the big studios, they're all struggling. There's always been a controversy with paying them and the monetization I've always claimed has been ridiculously low. I mean, YouTube pays people on a CPM-like basis, which is old school banner advertising. So, I think the entire monetization industry from the people that have the power of the audience, like the YouTube, like the Twitches, have to rethink how people get paid for the value that they bring as a talent. And YouTube gets away with it because it's the only game in town. They have massive scale and they can get away with it because the talent basically cuts side deals. That's how they get paid. And so, you know, Hollywood is its own little racket. So, but the studios are there. So, you know, it's interesting how, you know, this creator culture is emerging today. Cause, you know, remember, talk about democratization. If you told me 25 years ago that, you know, people can go on YouTube and get billions of views being no name, I'd be like, what, YouTube just upload videos for my kids little league game. Now it's like it is new TV. But I think the guys like Eiger, by the way, I'm a fan, completely underestimated the power of user generated content. And that people are spending more time on TikTok, more time on social media, Instagram, now threads, wherever, than they are watching, you know, and they're cutting cords. So, and these studios went out and spent billions to create this content. And they made out in this little short timeframe. But look, if you're spending your money on TV ads and print ads at the expense of social platforms, it totally missing the boat. It's where all the action is. It's always amazing to me to see how much money is still spent on places where it's against the fashion. I mean, I would be doubling down on, I'd be spending money on Instagram, threads when it becomes available, Twitter, why not, Facebook, you know, obviously, and YouTube for sure. I mean, that's where you're gonna get better return and you can measure it. By the way, just as a side note on the whole Hollywood rights, Sarah Silverman sued open AI for copyright infringement for- Right, yes. So again, this is gonna not go away. This came up in our podcast early on when we started talking about open and general AI license rights on software. So not just software license rights, now you got content license rights. So, you know, it's gonna be very interesting to see, again, this points to a new generation. I've been saying this for years, you know, me and my rant. This cultural shift is here. A revolution is coming, how people get paid, how technology is deployed, and the skirmish encapsulates, this Hollywood strike encapsulates the difference between, you know, the people who are building the content value, the creative and the middleman, the studios. Now they have the money and the power. So, I think there's gonna be that tension and ultimately it's blocking things, but the power of the society will push that blocker out of the way and I think you'll see new solutions. How fast, I don't know, but all I can tell you is that I've seen this movie before. When you have an incumbent who's not gonna give up the reins to the power and this growth and there's a market there, new stuff will emerge. I think YouTube's got a great opportunity with this. I think Amazon's got a great opportunity with this. These bigger platforms that are kind of the new school could come in and mop up the talent. So, it's gonna be very interesting to watch because, you know, we're in the content business. We watch this very carefully, but we don't have unions, but we're digital. But, you know, we're not producing Hollywood hits either. So, but yeah, talent should get paid, period. But your point about can't fight fashion is right on. And I think that you're gonna have this debate, this fight, this strike is gonna go on and it's just gonna further hurt the old guard, if you will. User-generated content, the talent is there. The cost structure is superb. The attention span is shifting in that direction. And it doesn't, this whole thing doesn't spell, I mean, I think the both sides are basically gonna create their own demise at the, and they're gonna lose to user-generated content. And I wanna just say one other thing. We were talking about earlier about OpenAI, the FTC probe. Back in January, after SuperCloud 2, you, Sarbjita and I did a breaking analysis on, you know, will OpenAI be able to capitalize on its first mover advantage? So I just asked the cube AI what it thought. And it said, it has potential to sustain its first mover advantage, blah, blah, blah. But it, however, AI is rapidly changing and evolving in order for OpenAI to capitalize on first movement invention. Must remain neutral. It's going to depend on the open source community. And then it gives me clips. First clip, will OpenAI go the way of Friendster in MySpace. What a great clip that is. I got it right here. In the next one, what are the odds that chat GPT will sustain first mover advantage by the end of the decade? I just, I love this. We're using, I think GPT-4 now. I think we're using two-shot prompts. It's getting better. What's the story with the cube AI? I don't, I think the cube AI has nothing to do with OpenAI. That's the genitive clips are using chat GPT-4. This is using, this is using our transcripts. Totally, but absolutely. I'm just talking about the content, not the architecture, which was, you know, we made that debate. And now you've got, you got governments going after them. You got, you know, other competitors. You got open source. They're closed AI. I wanted to bring this up only because I want to ask you, like, what's the status of the cube AI? I think you're in private beta. You're kind of letting people try it out. I mean, people are asking me, Dave, how can I get access to the cube AI? Okay, so the cube AI is open for waitlist beta. And I'm letting people in, we've got a waitlist, but it's simple. You go to thecubeai.com and you'll hit a site there and you just hit enter the waitlist. And then I get a dashboard screen that says, here's the list of the waitlist. I just say invite pops an email to you, check your spam folder or just check your email. And then you sign in, you have access to the entire corpus. And what it is, is it's a, essentially it looks like a chat GPT interface, but it's from our 35,000 transcripts of interviews we've done over 13 years and all the clips that go with it and all the metadata, because we have text, audio and videos, it's what they call multimodal. So we now can have, you can type in text and get videos, put in videos to get text and other merchandising assets. We have a video cloud that does that. So, but chat GPT is an inspiration for us to do QBI on our language of which we then can go and interface and fuse to data fusion into chat GPT if we want to help format. So we've solved the problem of hallucinations to the extent of being completely wrong to like maybe a little bit wrong, but good, excellent. So it's in alpha beta right now. So it's getting better every day. Training and inference is going on. So it's all good. It's gonna, and then we hope it to be an interface for people to find what they're looking for. So, well, in the future, if someone could say, hey, what does Dave Vellante think about open AI? And then there it is. What does Andy Jassy think about AWS's new AI plan? Or what is the best thing that happened at the Databricks summit? But what I love about it, John, is, you know, people talk about explainability, not only does it give you an answer. And yeah, sometimes it hallucinates, but it gives you an answer, brings in some other, sort of mashes up some other opinions in the cube, but then it gives you clips and you can watch and actually listen to exactly what was said, who said it. I love it. I mean. Where it's going to go, Dave, is going to be more compelling than that. It's going to be, you put text in, you get clips and data, you put video in, you get data and clips. So it works both ways. And then what's going to really get exciting, and this is something I think is going to be a big trend, we can pick it up on another pod or even talk about it at SuperCloud three next week. The personalization aspect is going to be off the chart. So our vision is to have an open corpus of data so that any user can personalize the content. For example, I got a, I do the treadmill for one hour and 15 minutes when I go to the gym for my cardio. I want to roll up a podcast, audio only of what Dave Vellante thinks of breaking analysis this week or what's the open AI? I want to learn about open AI. So give me an hour and 15 minutes of audio from experts. I got a commute. I want to train. I want some videos. I want to do a mashup. I want to edit videos. I want to include that video in my production or I just want to lean back and learn or connect with people. Who's the best person to talk to that can talk about GPT three powered with Jasper AI, for instance. So we're, where's LLM's going? You know. The other thing I want, I mean, not to pimple all our shit but this is, I'm so excited about this. So I did a breaking analysis last week and it was really hard one to curate. I used chat GPT a little bit to actually quite a bit to curate, I had three guests on and they were all, they were all over the place. So I needed some help because I was really late for another thing I had to go to in the weekend. I actually do, you know, have weekends. You too, you know this, right? So, but so I went to our video data lake and there was a button there that said auto clip. So I pushed it to see what would happen. I got 52 clips, all less than two minutes. Of it was, this was a long one. This was like an hour long, 52 minute breaking analysis. All I did was push the button and the machine put in all the metadata, all the hashtags. I mean, amazing. I mean, the big three themes of Databricks conference, emphasis on owning analytics and moving up the stack less focus on specific technologies but like data warehousing. I mean, and it's all hashtagged and it's amazing. It's it's, you know, we get the linguistics and the modeling down it's been, you know, hoarding all that data for 13 years kind of came in handy when this big language balls. We were already doing entity extraction, which is, you know, trivial form of kind of machine learning and data management. But when the massive models came out and all the new technology really put us in a great position. In fact, I'm looking at the query here that you just ran will open AI to be able to capitalize its first mover advantage. And then here's a clip. Let's see if it plays in here. Can you hear this? No, can't hear it. Can you hear that coming across? It's a 30 second clip on inflation. So we just talked about that. So I think remixing content will be huge. And right now you're seeing that on these platforms. And this is why I think the Hollywood people are scared because of remixing AI generative content. I was talking with our guys in the studio the other day in the office that, you know, why are we, why not just have, why not have mid-journey graphics on our screens while we're talking. Let's do some meme overlays. Why can't we get AI to go to a database at runtime and inject better special effects on the fly as we're talking, right? So, and if you start getting user-generated interaction, say in a live feed, you can make things pop on the screen differently. So I think there's going to be a huge interactivity boom in media. And it's going to come from these evolutions of the AI. First, get your language models, your foundation models, right? And again, we're lucky we're sitting on a treasure trove here, Dave. So I'm pumped, too. I got to say, we'll see where it goes. But if you're out there, know thecubeai.com, check it out, play with it. If you want to get on the wait list, just sign up. I'll let you in. If you listen to this podcast, drop us a note and we'll hook you up. So, cool. Next week, super cloud, Dave. Yeah, I'm stoked, John. The lineup is amazing. We got a bunch of CEOs and CISOs coming into the studio. We got a bunch of technologists. We're dropping in all the prerecords that we did with guys like Matthew Prince of Cloudflare and George Kurtz of CrowdStrike and so many others. I mean, CISOs and practitioners. And it's just, I learned a lot. It's all in my head and I can't wait to actually do the live program, John. And then summarize and synthesize two days of content, supercloud.world is the website. Go, definitely go sign up. You don't have to register to listen, but we appreciate if you do, because then you can go in and do some other things on the platform. But it's going to be good. All right, Dave, great to check in with you if weekly pod 20. We hit our milestone. We're going to take a look back and look at our reps, look at what we want to double down on. If you listen to this podcast, have feedback for us, set us a note on all DMs are open, all channels open. And of course, go to silkenangle.com. That's where all the content's posted. That's where all the traffic is. The cube.net's a great catalog for community. We're going to make that site much better. You start to see more communities that site. Of course, thecubeai.com is the beta product that's going to be innovating pretty quickly. And we'll see you next time for pod 21. Have a great weekend. See you next week, John.