The Cloudcast

It’s that time of the year… Aaron and Brian answer emails and questions for the second half of the year.SHOW: 882SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #882 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwNEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW NOTES:Question 1 - There was a lot of talk about Broadcom’s changes to VMware at the beginning of the year, but not as much since then. What’s going on in the world of virtualization?Question 2 - Both of you have talked about working remotely for quite a while. What’s your take on RTO mandates? Any suggestions for remote workers? Question 3 - Have either of you found any valuable uses of AI in your day-to-day job? Question 4 - Now that the US elections are over, how do you expect the US Gov’t to be involved with the tech industry (anti-trust, CHIPS ACT, AI regulation, etc..)Question 5 - AI models and GPUs  seem to get all the attention in the news. Are there other areas of AI that you think are really important but aren’t getting much attention right now?Question 6 - Are cloud skills still considered valuable? Do certifications matter anymore? Question 7 - What’s going on in the open source communities like the CNCF? Question 8 - What surprised you the most this year?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netBluesky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod

In the late 70s and early 80s, a music revolution started because a bunch of talented musicians played on 100s of albums, behind the scenes. Would the AI startup community benefit from a similar infrastructure of experts?SHOW: 881SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #881 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW NOTES:Yacht Rock Documentary (HBO Max - Trailer)WHY DON’T WE HAVE EXPERTS BEHIND THE SCENES OF EVERY STARTUP?History of the interactions between bands like Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, etc..Why do VCs allow startups to hire their own back-office people? Why aren’t there services that offer startup backend services, not just one off SaaS services?AI could be used to scale those services. FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodBlueSky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod

The 2024 AWS re:Invent happened, with a new CEO, and an appearance by a previous CEO. What were the big announcements, trends and stories coming out of the keynote?SHOW: 880SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #880 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwNEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SHOW SPONSOR:While data may be shaping our world, Data Citizens Dialogues is shaping the conversationFollow Data Citizens Dialogues on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcastsSHOW NOTES:AWS re:Invent 2024 - CEO Keynote with Matt GarmanTop Announcements of 2024 AWS re:InventWhat hath AWS wrought? (Forrest Brazzeal newsletter)Prince guitar solo during George Harrison tributeOverall Takeaways:The new CEOThe overall themesAndy Jassy’s appearanceBrian’s Top 5 Takeaways:The focus is now all ARM and GPUs/AI Accelerators (goodbye Intel)AWS is getting back to basics on Cloud - a focus on primitivesAWS is trying to get ahead of startup and enterprise usage of GenAI with a focus on Inferencing costs (trying to make it a game of compute costs vs. model capabilities)What are the 1000 GenAI apps that Amazon has built? (Rufus, Robot package loading? NFL Blitz predictor?Brandon’s Top 5 Takeaways:Amazon is the “Everything Store,” AWS is the “Every Service Store”Garmon is the legacy AWS CEO, Jassy is the AWS AI CEOAWS wants everyone to build a chatbot and/or call center app using AWS Bedrock The NOVA foundation models are the AWS answer to OpenAI and Anthroptic. AWS is attempting to build both the models and the AI Chips to run them. Tenuous partnerships with Nvidia and Anthropic. Neither was on stage. AWS will never stop telling us about “Working Backwards”AWS marketing still wants talk about the how rather than the benefit. A long lecture on Nitro and Amazon Aurora DSQL with a lot of discussion about synchronizing clocks.FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netBluesky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod

How are the largest VCs viewing the early stages of the AI Era, from the perspective of investment, technology moats, economics, early adoption and future use-cases.  SHOW: 879SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #879 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW NOTES:AI Eats the World (Presentation - Benedict Evans)IS SILICON VALLEY STILL THE CENTER OF TECH INNOVATION?Companies are investing tons of moneyBreakthrough results haven’t emerged yet (business models, profits)It’s not clear that there is a technology moat; but maybe a capital moatModel training costs are expected to rise 5x to 10x - worse economics??Lots of VC investment and vendor 2nd-order investmentsLLM costs are creating marginal cost of software (been since the mainframe)Model quality vs. price is improving, but price of the services (e.g. ChatGPT-Pro) is increasing - how much extra value is being delivered?How will open source impact AI? “If anything in life is certain, semiconductors are cyclical, commodity tech goes to marginal cost, and every new tech produces a bubble.”Today’s GenAI question - is it accurate and useful? How can we tell, and how can it improve (or does it need to)?Start with a simple concept - AI gives us unlimited interns - how can you extrapolate that? How would this have been extrapolated for the original internet (create content, translate language, write code, etc.)Use cases are still not easy to see beyond Chatbots (and variants), Coding AssistantsConsulting revenue from GenAI is bigger than technology - and still most/many projects still in trials. Technology can take a long time to adopt - Cloud still only has 30% of workloads (15yrs old)66% of CEO’s don’t expect their first GenAI app in production until sometime in 2025, 50% at least 2H of 2025.[Shadow AI] SaaS AI will accelerate adoption, if it follows Cloud pattern - external forces are more motivated to attack business “change” than internal teams[Build vs. Ecosystem] Do the LLM vendors become the application vendors? Where does the LLM start and stop (infra, platform, API, apps, etc.)[Learning from the customers] Do the LLM vendors use their knowledge advantage to build the apps? GenAI Apps Categories - Make something better, Replace something, Just do the thing“AI is just whatever is wrong/broken now” - How well does AI understand “broken”Will people be the biggest problem in AI progress? [Decoupling] Looks at global markets for Internet today - ecommerce/retail, food delivery, advertising, media, autonomous driving, [Elevator Example] Automation gets rid of peopleNo real conclusionFEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodBlueSky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod