Speaker 1: All Media.
Speaker 2: Hello on, Welcome to Better Offline. I am, of course
Speaker 2: your host ed zitron. Now we're in hate a season.
Speaker 2: Hate a season is when I bring people on allowed
Speaker 2: to get rude, because you know, this podcast is usually
Speaker 2: so reserved and nice in the way we refer to people,
Speaker 2: especially tech executives, which we've never referred to as funck
Speaker 2: wits or morons or dumbasses or shittheads or shit heels
Speaker 2: or ass wipes or fuck nuts or nob ends. We've
Speaker 2: never done any of that ever. Nevertheless, joining me today
Speaker 2: is chief cloud economist that Doug Bell Corey. Quinn Corey,
Speaker 2: how are you doing?
Speaker 1: I have delighted to be here because normally in all
Speaker 1: the other places I find myself, I have to be
Speaker 1: so reserved.
Speaker 2: You have to pull your punches. Cory, today's Hatter season.
Speaker 2: Tell me about your feelings on Amazon Web services.
Speaker 1: Oh, dear lord, it's it's like it's weird. I don't
Speaker 1: actually hate Amazon. People think I do because of the
Speaker 1: things I say and the things that I do. But
Speaker 1: if I hate it, then this directions, but ten years
Speaker 1: in I write a newsletter about it. If I actually
Speaker 1: hate the company and want nothing but ill things to
Speaker 1: happen to them. First off, that's a pathology and I
Speaker 1: need a restraining order. And secondly, it always bugs me
Speaker 1: when people think that I have an ax to grind
Speaker 1: against the company, because ten years in, are you seriously
Speaker 1: suggesting this is the best I would be able to
Speaker 1: do if I actually wanted to hit them where it hurts?
Speaker 2: Come on?
Speaker 1: But yeah, they've been annoying the piss out of me lately.
Speaker 2: So AWS is weird because maybe you can explain this
Speaker 2: to me. Over my entire tech career, I've heard this
Speaker 2: constant story that your AWS bill just it just goes up.
Speaker 2: It just arbitrarily increases. It's not really clear whether they're
Speaker 2: doing price increases, though I know those exist too.
Speaker 1: Rarely open but occasionally increasingly these days.
Speaker 2: Yes, but why what is it that makes the bill
Speaker 2: go up? Why? And why does this happen so often?
Speaker 1: I used to think it was a conspiracy, and then
Speaker 1: I realized Amazon is in no way, shape or form
Speaker 1: organizationally competent enough to pull something like that off. It
Speaker 1: is the nature of charging per usage and honestly, assholes
Speaker 1: where Okay, we're going to launch a service and we're
Speaker 1: going to charge you for every gigabyte you put in it.
Speaker 1: That's all we're gonna do. Great, straightforward humans can rationalize
Speaker 1: around that, great eazy psy. They did that when they
Speaker 1: first launched S three and beta back in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three. Is storage right, it's a big object store
Speaker 1: picture it as an infinite sized disc and you're pretty close.
Speaker 1: But they would that Originally they only charged for the
Speaker 1: data you stored there. Great, so people stored a bunch
Speaker 1: of objects that were zero byte in size, so they
Speaker 1: just used the names of those objects, and the ability
Speaker 1: to query with that object existed or not in what
Speaker 1: its name was. As a free database, this at the time, also,
Speaker 1: according to legend, didn't just it wasn't just about taking
Speaker 1: free services. It was also just crippling the performance of
Speaker 1: S three at the time. So what they did is
Speaker 1: they started also charging every request you make with jarj
Speaker 1: a small fee. I think it's something like a penny
Speaker 1: per thousand requests of memory served. Don't book me on that.
Speaker 1: I look it up when it matters, and that solves
Speaker 1: that problem. But then you have things like that that
Speaker 1: are patched on and tied to things, and tied to
Speaker 1: things and tied to more things, and in any complex organization.
Speaker 1: What happens is is now suddenly you have this morass
Speaker 1: of one hundred million dollars a year and spent great,
Speaker 1: what's in there that's costing all the money?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: Everything? But if you look at anything individual and you
Speaker 1: don't think it's being used, Okay, am I turn I'm
Speaker 1: going to turn it off. If I'm right, it's going
Speaker 1: to save me a bit of money. If I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: it's going to take down production. And now I have
Speaker 1: a serious problem trying to serve my customers. So the
Speaker 1: safe bias is don't turn things off. Also, you're an engineer. Hypothetically,
Speaker 1: I realize that can be an insult to your part
Speaker 1: of the world. Roll with it for a moment. Exactly,
Speaker 1: you're an engineer. You want something to spin up, and
Speaker 1: no one is letting you spin it up. You will
Speaker 1: take up residents, annoying the hell out of them every
Speaker 1: ten minutes until you get the access that you need.
Speaker 1: You do your job. Things are done. Two things now
Speaker 1: work against you. One, you had to ask and bag
Speaker 1: and plead them to spin that up. You want to
Speaker 1: hang on to it in case you need it again
Speaker 1: because you don't want to go through that. But this
Speaker 1: is an organization exactly exactly. This is not Amazon's fault.
Speaker 1: This is human nature's fault. They haven't patched that yet,
Speaker 1: though they're I think they're trying their best iteration of
Speaker 1: a Laxa plus it. Why not, I'm kidding that thing
Speaker 1: just sells ads. We're good boy way.
Speaker 2: So I'm an engineer and I've advocated for my thing.
Speaker 1: Yes, and now you're done using it. No one is going,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no call to action to get you
Speaker 1: off your ass to go, and no one off or
Speaker 1: no one will come and badger you about it. It
Speaker 1: just it tends to exists. It's why people cynically say
Speaker 1: you're not charged for the things you use in the
Speaker 1: clouds so much as you're charged for the things you
Speaker 1: forget to turn off.
Speaker 2: And Amazon loves this. I'm guessing they love the fact
Speaker 2: that there's just this cloud anchor system.
Speaker 1: I would say that, on some level, contrary to popular belief,
Speaker 1: they don't love it as much as you'd think, because
Speaker 1: all right, I'm trying to run on my blog and
Speaker 1: I've spun up eight attempts at this blog, so it
Speaker 1: now costs eight times what it should. Great and the
Speaker 1: narrative becomes if they're not careful with all that wasted
Speaker 1: usage that's doing nothing is huh, the cloud is pants
Speaker 1: shittingly expensive. We should go back to data centers. There's
Speaker 1: really no one on the other side of this issue.
Speaker 1: So why doesn't Amazon help people turn tune these things
Speaker 1: down and turn it off? They made some a board
Speaker 1: of attempts at part of the organization. But this is
Speaker 1: going to surprise you. Amazon is not the most organizationally
Speaker 1: competent company you're ever going to meet.
Speaker 2: But what does that mean in practice? Is it just
Speaker 2: that they don't know they're ass from the air hole.
Speaker 2: They don't really know how things work. All of the above.
Speaker 1: Silos, it's all silos. They're over two hundred services. And
Speaker 1: we long ago across the point where I can speak
Speaker 1: incredibly convincingly about AWS service is that do not exist
Speaker 1: two Amazon employees and not get called out on it
Speaker 1: because who in the world knows everything that Amazon does?
Speaker 1: AND's just th guy, I sound as plausible as AI
Speaker 1: these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's just a labyrinth, the Leviathan of different
Speaker 2: SKUs and product categories that.
Speaker 1: Make million SKUs. If you want to be precise, Yes, Jesus.
Speaker 2: And those are all just different kinds of virtual machines
Speaker 2: and the like.
Speaker 1: Okay, we'll start there. Sure, virtual machines. You want to
Speaker 1: spin up a virtual machine in Virginia, US East one? Okay,
Speaker 1: which one are you going to pick? Because there are
Speaker 1: approximately seven hundred different types you can spin up. Are
Speaker 1: you going to pick the right one? Of course you're
Speaker 1: fucking not.
Speaker 2: Oh so how do you pick the right one? This
Speaker 2: is the thing because it seems that the people making
Speaker 2: these decisions of which virtual machines to get or whatever
Speaker 2: spin up on aws or engineers, right, Usually sulfware engineers
Speaker 2: software engineers aren't necessarily infrastructure experts, are they.
Speaker 1: You've noticed very often companies will standardize on one particular
Speaker 1: size of instance across the board. Why well, because in
Speaker 1: development it's the one that the original founding engineer picked,
Speaker 1: and we'll come back and revisit this later ten years ago.
Speaker 1: No one is revisited.
Speaker 2: M take that.
Speaker 1: They do have a tool that I like, it's even free,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure someone loses sleepover called compute optimizer that
Speaker 1: looks at you're running workloads and says, hey, this one
Speaker 1: should be bigger, this one should be smaller. I was
Speaker 1: extraordinarily skeptical when it came out. It is better at
Speaker 1: figuring that out than I am with a tooling that
Speaker 1: I built internally. So once again I'm thrilled to turn
Speaker 1: it off. It's one of the Amazon at its best things.
Speaker 1: I can only assume that the people responsible for that
Speaker 1: are being eyed for layoffs or.
Speaker 2: Pips, because Andy Jesse and several NBA snipers are outside
Speaker 2: at the location right now.
Speaker 1: It's frust stay, but I like AWS truly. Something changed.
Speaker 1: He got a job that no one in their right
Speaker 1: mind could possibly want but also could not refuse. And
Speaker 1: I feel like I sould a soul. Yes, absolutely, but
Speaker 1: he just he was the CEO of a double us.
Speaker 1: And he was he when he gave keynote talks, when
Speaker 1: he gave presentations, when I was fortunate enough to basically
Speaker 1: sneak my way into them, you could see the irrepressible
Speaker 1: humanity leaking out around the edges. He was a person.
Speaker 1: Now he is a figurehead. He doesn't want to customer,
Speaker 1: just to be clear to Congress.
Speaker 2: This shift was when he became CEO of Amazon or
Speaker 2: CEO of a WS.
Speaker 1: CEO of Amazon. AWS was his own Fifdom, and he
Speaker 1: could do whatever he wanted to my understanding within that company,
Speaker 1: it was the only people that mattered, Brother Garrett who
Speaker 1: had an opinion on this were Andy Jassey and God.
Speaker 1: And God was sort of absence, so great, We're just
Speaker 1: gonna leave it to Andy. Andy went deep and he
Speaker 1: understood every aspect of this stuff. Factly, a year ago
Speaker 1: he went to Reinvent in Las Vegas and gave a
Speaker 1: talk on stage.
Speaker 2: I think because he missed it.
Speaker 1: He missed being able to get up there and talk
Speaker 1: about computers with people because now he has to ship
Speaker 1: underpants all over the world instead.
Speaker 2: Right, But is he technical because he's an MBA? Is
Speaker 2: he not?
Speaker 1: This is one of the dangerous things that I have
Speaker 1: found people underestimate Amazon leadership on is it is never
Speaker 1: the smart bet to assume that they don't understand the
Speaker 1: technical nuances of the things that they are working with.
Speaker 1: They go so sarcastically deep in so many different ways
Speaker 1: that it is never a smart move to say that
Speaker 1: they don't understand it is unlike virtually any other tech
Speaker 1: company I've ever spoken with, other than small scale ones
Speaker 1: with technical founders, he very clearly understands the technology and
Speaker 1: used it to build things himself.
Speaker 2: Right, But here's the reason I question that. Please, he's
Speaker 2: talking about general IVAI. I've just pulled up his notice.
Speaker 1: Oh no, one understands how that works under the hood.
Speaker 1: Let's be very clear on that. And yeah, he lost
Speaker 1: the fucking plot when it came to gen AI.
Speaker 2: That's the thing, because he's like, we're also using GENERATIVEAI
Speaker 2: broadly across our internal operations in our fulfillment network. We're
Speaker 2: using AI to improve in ventur replacement. So not generate IVEAI.
Speaker 2: Demand forecasting definitely not generative AI. And the efficiency of
Speaker 2: our robots not generative AI. I don't know, maybe he
Speaker 2: does know what he's talking about. He's just a fucking
Speaker 2: carnival barker now he's.
Speaker 1: Doing to say that it all seems to be. And
Speaker 1: the trick to disprove everything you just said about that,
Speaker 1: rather everything that he said that you relate to us
Speaker 1: is very simple. Go out with an Amazon employee for
Speaker 1: several drinks and then ask them about their experience of
Speaker 1: using AI within the company. Oh, I have two different companies.
Speaker 1: There is no there is no congruity between some of
Speaker 1: those two perspectives.
Speaker 2: So Corey, maybe you can help me with this because you, certainly,
Speaker 2: without saying exactly what we're talking about, you knew about
Speaker 2: a contract that I knew about way before I knew,
Speaker 2: and I knew about it months early. Yes, with a
Speaker 2: large company we discussed, so you're very well connected. It
Speaker 2: seems up until jeneralf Ai, like AWS was at least
Speaker 2: a somewhat sensible operation, that it was something that we had,
Speaker 2: if not focus, at least a focus on scale and
Speaker 2: useful cloud computing. Yes, what the fuck is it about
Speaker 2: GPUs that's having everyone insane?
Speaker 1: Because I want to point something out that I think
Speaker 1: is being lost in the streetwide because I've talked to
Speaker 1: folks at AWS about this, and folks who have left AWS,
Speaker 1: who have I used to dabble working in data centers,
Speaker 1: which means I know just enough to know what I
Speaker 1: don't know, and I've talked to these folks. When Amazon
Speaker 1: commits to being able to bring certain amounts of capacity online,
Speaker 1: it is real capacity. It is each data center they
Speaker 1: build out, each region they build out, is a multi
Speaker 1: billion dollar investment, and it takes years to go from
Speaker 1: sign contract to its serving customer traffic. They are real
Speaker 1: when it comes to this stuff. There are a number
Speaker 1: of other companies building well, yes, and they agree that
Speaker 1: running it. They have operationalized how to run these things
Speaker 1: better than you or I would ever be able to do.
Speaker 1: That is their superpower. Other companies and they're spinning up
Speaker 1: a data center, do not do this. They are, well,
Speaker 1: we've we've rented a warehouse out, we round up, throwing
Speaker 1: some generators in the back and were check. Call Comcast
Speaker 1: and see what they can do to get it hooked
Speaker 1: up to the internet netney to go. Yeah, you say
Speaker 1: other companies, You don't mean Google and Microsoft here, No,
Speaker 1: I'm taught, well, I am talking Oracle, but yes, Microsoft
Speaker 1: kind of Microsoft. Microsoft is a shitty at building data centers.
Speaker 1: Azure has been a disappointment across the board. Capacity shortballs
Speaker 1: plagued them for a long time during COVID. They generally
Speaker 1: tend to view two racks in a data center somewhere
Speaker 1: as a region, which is weird and messed up. Google
Speaker 1: is real, but Google has made other interesting technical trade
Speaker 1: offs that I can see why they did it. But
Speaker 1: I would say when it comes to infrastructure, in my experience,
Speaker 1: AWS is number one.
Speaker 2: Google is a close second. I have heard some crazy
Speaker 2: shit about Google that they're doing these things called stalks
Speaker 2: where they just like like create these pop up data centers.
Speaker 1: For a long time. Every company does that for a
Speaker 1: point centering stuff.
Speaker 2: Yes, anyway, but back to the major question, which is
Speaker 2: AWS seems like a sensible business that does real things.
Speaker 2: I'm not disputing that.
Speaker 1: Yes, it prints money. Let's be clear on despite all, remember,
Speaker 1: I help companies negotiating money cloud contracts and understand what
Speaker 1: they're spending and where the money is going, which means
Speaker 1: that companies can say a lot. People say a lot
Speaker 1: of things. But one of my prime rules about this
Speaker 1: stuff is that customers lie mostly to themselves. They're not
Speaker 1: intentionally trying to mislead me when they tell me what's
Speaker 1: going on. But I find the bills of the ultimate
Speaker 1: source of truth, because if you're not paying for it
Speaker 1: doesn't really exist. And the AI spend in most of
Speaker 1: these companies hovers, in my experience with a few outliers
Speaker 1: between five and seven percent of their total infrastructure spend. Right,
Speaker 1: it is not three times. Companies that are doing a
Speaker 1: three hundred million dollars a year contract with AWS are
Speaker 1: not turning around saying better make it four hundred because
Speaker 1: of all the GENAI that is not happening.
Speaker 2: That's kind of my point though. It's like Amazon Web
Speaker 2: Services doesn't seem like a business that chases fats, or
Speaker 2: if it does chase them in a more sustainable way.
Speaker 2: They now they's credit.
Speaker 1: They docked they Dutch blockchain almost entirely, and I was
Speaker 1: worried they were going to fall down that rabbit hole.
Speaker 2: But I mean, they doing two hundred billion dollars in
Speaker 2: capex this year. What is it they see in AI?
Speaker 2: Because to your point, just now, what like seven to
Speaker 2: eight percent of a three hundred million contract, that's dog
Speaker 2: shit like that's that's not going to pipe out that
Speaker 2: Capex Sandy.
Speaker 1: I believe this is my belief here. I can't base
Speaker 1: it on anything other than what I've seen Amazon do,
Speaker 1: uh I, and what I've seen from customers. The Amazon
Speaker 1: is selling the capacity that they are spinning up. They
Speaker 1: are spinning up as fast as they can spin it.
Speaker 1: The question that I have is twofold one. Okay, you
Speaker 1: invest in all these AI data centers in the AI
Speaker 1: bubble pops to flates whatever, how repurposable are those facilities,
Speaker 1: and that capital expenditure if it's data centers and networking, Yes,
Speaker 1: very repurposable. Yeah, GPUs, well, we're all going to get
Speaker 1: real in online gaming in a few years. I don't
Speaker 1: except they.
Speaker 2: Don't have video out, they don't have DisplayPort.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, we still call them graphics, which I love.
Speaker 2: I think I like the people are I've also heard
Speaker 2: people say general purpose units, which is the opposite of
Speaker 2: what a GPU is like. It is very much not
Speaker 2: general purpose. It was.
Speaker 1: It became public through a press release that they have
Speaker 1: signed a thirty eight billion dollar contract with open AI
Speaker 1: with insane. There is zero doubt in my mind that,
Speaker 1: because I did some digging on this, is there line
Speaker 1: of sight for AWS to bring all on line thirty
Speaker 1: eight billion dollars of capacity to provide to open AI. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: there is where my doubts come in. Is open AI
Speaker 1: good for the money?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: I have some questions here, mostly from reading your work.
Speaker 2: And that's the thing. It seems like something about GPUs
Speaker 2: and large language models have broken everyone. That's kind of
Speaker 2: the point I'm getting too, because like everything I've read
Speaker 2: about AWS, and I've read because I'm a dickhead, I
Speaker 2: went and I read all of the previous coverage of
Speaker 2: the lead up to AWS becoming profitable. Kevin Rust, by
Speaker 2: the way, literally a month before they did so, wrote
Speaker 2: an article saying it would be a while. What fucking
Speaker 2: three points in that ass wipe? Anyway, everything I read
Speaker 2: was everyone's saying, oh, Amazon's being really spendy. They're spending
Speaker 2: sixty seven billion in kapex a quarter. Oh no, and
Speaker 2: then the total capex of sixty nine billion. But everything
Speaker 2: from Amazon was like, we're building something sustainable, we see
Speaker 2: the revenue potential behind it. It was all very boring. Now
Speaker 2: with AWS, everything they talk about with large language models,
Speaker 2: it sounds like they've all been huffing ayawasco or something.
Speaker 2: They sound insane they.
Speaker 1: Do, which tells me one of two things is true
Speaker 1: or honestly, this is the real world. Unlike on Twitter,
Speaker 1: two complex competing things can in fact be true at
Speaker 1: the same interest time. One of them is they're still
Speaker 1: doing a lot of that boring stuff, but the publicity
Speaker 1: all accrues to the things that are far flung. This
Speaker 1: is also two hundred billion dollars across the entirety of
Speaker 1: Amazon that includes distribution centers, that includes Low Earth Orbits
Speaker 1: and basically Amazon Basic Starlink. I think they're calling it
Speaker 1: Leo now. It includes yes, their AI nonsense, their factory boondoggles,
Speaker 1: their robotic stuff, office buildouts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: They don't give clear breakdowns on how much of that
Speaker 1: is AI services, and frankly, I wouldn't trust them if
Speaker 1: they did not, since I saw a job ad a
Speaker 1: few years back on Amazon dot Jobs saying experience with
Speaker 1: other AI services like S three storage service, that's not AI.
Speaker 2: You can use it to feed AI. But my hairanthropic
Speaker 2: anthropics one of the largest S three customers I've heard.
Speaker 1: I've heard that. I've heard from seven different companies so
Speaker 1: far that they are the largest customer really three. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is funny how that tends to work out.
Speaker 2: God, I miss I miss working in cloud software so much,
Speaker 2: where everyone is the everyone's the exclusive partner, everyone's the
Speaker 2: number one partner, and everyone's the larger.
Speaker 4: It's so but the qualifiers get They're like, we're the
Speaker 4: largest S three customers in Australia, great in the Northeast,
Speaker 4: in the Northeast region between the hours of six am
Speaker 4: and twelve am.
Speaker 2: Okay, So here's the thing with the capex. I'm sure
Speaker 2: a lot of it is for is for AI, just
Speaker 2: because if you look at their previously as of Capex,
Speaker 2: it's like four A fifty sixty Yeah, four A sixty
Speaker 2: one sixty three fifty two eighty three one hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty one two hundred billion.
Speaker 1: Gerald Over at Platform and Nomics has been tracking capec
Speaker 1: span to the hyperscalers for a long time now, and
Speaker 1: he was one of the first people to call out
Speaker 1: the cloud pretenders IBM and Oracle specifically, because they're making
Speaker 1: all the cloud noises, but they're not spending anything on
Speaker 1: Capex and you kind of have to build the data
Speaker 1: centers for this to work. Not to worry, Oracle's taking
Speaker 1: care of that. What I want to know, my question is,
Speaker 1: when you start, okay, we're going to spend even assume
Speaker 1: it's all AI whatever, fine, two hundred billion dollars on
Speaker 1: AI spent, how much of that is just in the
Speaker 1: form of a check written to Nvidio.
Speaker 2: And that's the question because from my understanding, my understanding
Speaker 2: the I should bring up the chart. I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: do some live on air. I just bringing up an
Speaker 2: image and of course can't find it. Nevertheless, there is
Speaker 2: an image I have the Amazon doesn't. Well, Amazon builds
Speaker 2: its own the trainium GPUs. And do they still use
Speaker 2: inferentia or.
Speaker 1: They That sounds like that that my grandpa got diagnosed with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but do they liked inferentia? I thought was there?
Speaker 1: Oh, they talk about it a fair bit. They talk
Speaker 1: about trainium. And the thing is is what you don't
Speaker 1: see is people using it in the wild. I looked
Speaker 1: at a bunch of stuff with OLAMA. That's the run
Speaker 1: your own stuff there. I searched about a year ago
Speaker 1: for the term inferentia. It showed up once in a
Speaker 1: pull request that had been closed after sixty days because
Speaker 1: no one responded to it. No one is using this
Speaker 1: in the real world. A year ago year in the
Speaker 1: month now they had with tranium two I think it was,
Speaker 1: they had speakers from Anthropic on keynote stage talking about it, which, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: they invested how many tens of billions into Anthropic? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's a contract requirement around to sending it
Speaker 1: executive talk on stage. And the other one was Apple.
Speaker 1: Apple doesn't admit what they're doing to their own employees,
Speaker 1: to each other, let alone publicly. So yeah, that looked
Speaker 1: about as natural as an oral bowel movement.
Speaker 2: Nice, but those are.
Speaker 1: The only two companies I've seen doing anything with it.
Speaker 2: So based on this chart I've got, which involves various
Speaker 2: stars and company names, it looks like Amazon gets their
Speaker 2: GPUs through fox Con also known as On High Precision
Speaker 2: Corporation Limited. I love Chutneyese and Taiwanese names. By theme
Speaker 2: is almost certainly in there. No, TSMC isn't because builds
Speaker 2: the chips.
Speaker 1: These are the training ships themselves, because they have they
Speaker 1: bought and do the design, but they don't do the fab.
Speaker 2: So they ship the I assume that Anna Perna, which
Speaker 2: is the internal place that Amazon makes its chips, ships them.
Speaker 2: It looks like the fox Con, Quantum Computing and Jabil,
Speaker 2: and then they put them in the service. So really
Speaker 2: it's them cutting the checks to them. I'm going to
Speaker 2: be watching the monthly earnings of those companies in Taiwan
Speaker 2: quite viciously, because here's the thing. If it's all two
Speaker 2: hundred billion dollars of capex, if they really think they're
Speaker 2: going to get paid that much, but what happens. Has
Speaker 2: Amazon ever faced the situation where they did and overbuild
Speaker 2: Has that ever happened to them? What did they do.
Speaker 1: Yes, they made a bunch of noises about it. During
Speaker 1: the pandemic. They overbuilt their distribution centers.
Speaker 2: Ah, but that's people buy stuff exactly.
Speaker 1: That was my position on it. It feels like, Okay, they
Speaker 1: slowed it down and they didn't shut them down, but
Speaker 1: they waited for people to grow into it. The thing
Speaker 1: is is a warehouse that you use to ship out underpants. Great,
Speaker 1: that has the same utility more or less five years
Speaker 1: from now as it does. Yes, exactly. A lot of
Speaker 1: these chips are depreciating assets. M like, oh man, I
Speaker 1: can't wait to get that seven year old computer in
Speaker 1: here so I can do some real work, says no
Speaker 1: one ever.
Speaker 2: Well, also training them especially they've got well they are
Speaker 2: on generation two three.
Speaker 1: Now they're now shipping three, right, it's time to pre
Speaker 1: announce four. And then a desperate attempt to Osbourne Computer themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, explain that reference.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 1: Osbourne Computer was a company back in the eighties.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 1: They launched the Osbourne one and their CEO went out
Speaker 1: and did a whole press joke and he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is great, but Osbourne two is gonna blow the
Speaker 1: crap out of it. Oh, luck in video, and everyone's like, great,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna buy the Osbourne one. Then the company
Speaker 1: went under and never shipped the Osbourne two.
Speaker 2: Well okay, not like in video. Then this is the
Speaker 2: thing surely that sets Amazon up for a big problem
Speaker 2: with those tradium chips success. Like even if in some
Speaker 2: wid well the Trainium four or five was amazing, I
Speaker 2: don't think it will be. But just saying doesn't that
Speaker 2: mean they're gonna be sitting on a bunch of obsolete
Speaker 2: Trainium It just feels very questionable. You know.
Speaker 1: You can say a lot about open Ai, and you do.
Speaker 1: But that dress release where they announced that thirty eight
Speaker 1: billion dollar contract, they didn't mention Trainium.
Speaker 2: They didn't, did they?
Speaker 1: Which tells me that if it were half as good
Speaker 1: at this at the model training as they say it is,
Speaker 1: open Ai would be all about it. Yeah, I am
Speaker 1: not seeing that to be true.
Speaker 2: Well, Clammy, Sam Moltman, he's he signed a thing with
Speaker 2: Sarah Brusber, Sarah Brush.
Speaker 1: Is there any one that Sam Mortman has not signed
Speaker 1: deals with?
Speaker 2: Ah, let's think Grock. I haven't signed one with Grok yet?
Speaker 1: Okay, good?
Speaker 2: Good? I mean actually sorry, just to be clear, hasn't
Speaker 2: signed with either, well, I guess it would. He wouldn't
Speaker 2: sign one with GROC as technically Grok is a competitor,
Speaker 2: I mean g r o Q. The annoying fast inference
Speaker 2: At this point, my hated dom and people are going
Speaker 2: to say this episode was two technical and the answer
Speaker 2: is calm down, this is my podcast. I'm just I'm
Speaker 2: wondering at what point they they say uncle, because okay,
Speaker 2: two hundred billion dollars and let's say one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty five billion of that is AI, right, AI chips
Speaker 2: takes four or five years probably to install all of
Speaker 2: that to what's end? What happens in forfit? Are they
Speaker 2: gonna make? Well?
Speaker 1: I mean it would be That's what no one is
Speaker 1: able to explain to me. What use cases today do
Speaker 1: are we looking at? Where? Wow, if we had ten
Speaker 1: times as much inference as we do today, then X
Speaker 1: would be possible solve for X. I'm not hearing it.
Speaker 2: No, I'm not either. I'm not even being my usual
Speaker 2: hate you self, even though this is hate a season.
Speaker 2: It's I genuinely can't get the answer of anyone, even
Speaker 2: the boosters. It's like there's this insatiable demand for compute.
Speaker 1: We're gonna summon God through Jason is step one, and
Speaker 1: step two is we're gonna ask God what to do.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the thing I do think that they
Speaker 2: I think that have you seen the revenue projections for
Speaker 2: these companies? Have you ever seen like Oracle's cash flow?
Speaker 2: So if you see this that they.
Speaker 1: Put out, also known as there's a reason that every
Speaker 1: time Larry Ellison, co founder of Oracle, goes and gives
Speaker 1: a keynote or talk somewhere, they preface it with a
Speaker 1: disclosure that is the lawyer version of everything you are
Speaker 1: about to hear is a fanciful imagining of reality.
Speaker 2: Don't listen to him. He's he's at a long day.
Speaker 2: He hasn't taken his nap. Fucking if hr Guy Gooz,
Speaker 2: Jerry Stiller. He The thing is, you look at these
Speaker 2: cash flow positive these cash flow diagrams for Oranthropic, open AI,
Speaker 2: and Oracle, they all follow the same thing, which is
Speaker 2: terrible cash flow negative cash flow for years and years
Speaker 2: and years, and then in twenty twenty nine everything changes,
Speaker 2: number go up, and I at this point genuinely think
Speaker 2: that they think they're going to invent Agi in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty nine, that that's the only plan they have.
Speaker 1: Because they're not doing the things that they're not if
Speaker 1: they've genuinely believed that they would not be doing these things.
Speaker 1: We think that we are three years away from launching
Speaker 1: AGI that will change everything. So what are we gonna do.
Speaker 1: We're gonna find a way to put ads into chat jibbity.
Speaker 1: But that's not the play when you are when you
Speaker 1: think you're on the verge of the singularity.
Speaker 2: I mean, nobody was demes habit. I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't like him to say should extent I refused learn
Speaker 2: his name. The deep mind bloke. I try not to.
Speaker 1: I try not to anthropomorphize either AI or its creators.
Speaker 2: Yeah, deepest mean beepus. He's the one that every few
Speaker 2: weeks does an interview and he's like, and then God
Speaker 2: is going to come out. I'm really scared of what
Speaker 2: the computer will do. He doesn't sound like that he
Speaker 2: wishes And it's just you make it sound exciting, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: It sounds fun and interesting and comical when these people
Speaker 2: are just boring, boring people, boring motherfuckers. Bom. It's just
Speaker 2: these massive overpromises and these weird fucking like these weird
Speaker 2: things where I like, look in let's look at this.
Speaker 2: There are six hundred and fifty billion dollars in CAPEX
Speaker 2: being spent this year just by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft.
Speaker 2: Where is it going? Genuinely? Actually simple question. I actually
Speaker 2: don't know where it's going anymore. It's into a giant
Speaker 2: hole in their balance sheet. At some point.
Speaker 1: You'll notice that all of the hyperscalers, all of them
Speaker 1: that have succeeded, even the pretenders, have other businesses that
Speaker 1: financed this. There has never been a successful hyperscaler that
Speaker 1: launched as a hyperscaler. The closest story you've got to that,
Speaker 1: and I question whether you call them a hyperscaler is
Speaker 1: cloud flair because they start as a CDN and then
Speaker 1: just added the rest of the cloud stuff.
Speaker 2: And let's see, I picked this stock. Is I got
Speaker 2: fifty nine billion dollar market cap? Well, they're a real company. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't w I won't want to invest in a
Speaker 2: company that wasn't making egregious promises. But it's just Jesus,
Speaker 2: it's just so strange because even if they think AI
Speaker 2: is going to be big, surely all the money they're
Speaker 2: spending today is not going to do that, Like all
Speaker 2: of these chips aren't going to do it. The models
Speaker 2: they train today aren't going to do it.
Speaker 1: It's like they're trying to bootstrap from thing to thing.
Speaker 1: To think, the story that concerns me is I, okay.
Speaker 1: You take a look at these companies and their subscription plans.
Speaker 1: Top end of it is two hundred bucks. Great. I
Speaker 1: pay it myself just so I can dispatch a winged
Speaker 1: monkey to build me a shit post website, which is awesome,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it works and sometimes I have to prompt
Speaker 1: it to do different things. Great, it's better at shitty
Speaker 1: front end than I am at shitty front end. Terrific.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to spend five grand on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the model of for zooms not. And we're not
Speaker 1: just talking me here, we are talking effectively everyone. It's
Speaker 1: like the unspoken message of a lot of these folks
Speaker 1: is that your boss is going to fire you and
Speaker 1: then take your salary and split it with the AI company.
Speaker 2: Right, and also you will be able to code everything
Speaker 2: with AI versus what people love that I quote the
Speaker 2: same thing Carl Brown's saying, makes the easy things easier
Speaker 2: and the hard things horder.
Speaker 1: Like we are building software at duck Billet, We are
Speaker 1: hiring engineers. Is this because we're stupid?
Speaker 3: I don't believe that to be true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's kind of the thing. It's like, I
Speaker 2: don't know, people still seem to be hiring software engineers.
Speaker 2: The engineers are getting fired and replaced. AI story doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to work. And also, every time I go and
Speaker 2: read someone who claims that clawed code changed their entire life,
Speaker 2: it mostly comes down to, yeah, it took something from
Speaker 2: a few hours to an hour, and it's like, cool, great, okay,
Speaker 2: but in.
Speaker 1: My life, what did it do? It taught me to
Speaker 1: clearly explain what I wanted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but also I still had to fix things. It's
Speaker 2: like if all of this money just went into creating
Speaker 2: slightly more efficient software engineers, and even then the data
Speaker 2: suggests they're less efficient. I don't know was this worth it?
Speaker 2: And Amazon certainly isn't. Amazon certainly isn't. I guess they're
Speaker 2: getting the chunk out of anthropic from this, like they
Speaker 2: can claim anthropic success. They can have them pay for
Speaker 2: trainium in project.
Speaker 1: Platform company, where when people build interesting things on top
Speaker 1: of you, how do you how do you take credit
Speaker 1: for that without being obnoxious.
Speaker 2: I mean, has that ever been a problem for Amazon?
Speaker 1: Well, not that that's nothing their word about being obnoxiou,
Speaker 1: it's just they're bad at messaging.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean they'll mention Emlierate panos Panee m is
Speaker 2: panas Penee came over from Microsoft from the Surface team
Speaker 2: to lead Amazon's Alexa Plus. I mean, now there's something obnoxious.
Speaker 2: Now there's some real generative AI bullshit. They've lost like
Speaker 2: billions on Alexa now as well? God, what does strange
Speaker 2: company Amazon's become?
Speaker 1: They've always been peculiar. The problem is is at some
Speaker 1: point of scale, like we're a little weird, no longer
Speaker 1: carries water. It's great, you're now one of the lynch
Speaker 1: pins of the global economy. You have to explain what
Speaker 1: you're doing a bit more effectively.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I I what do you think You've known Amazon
Speaker 2: for one hundred years? Now, what do you think happens
Speaker 2: if the AI bubble busts? What do you actually think
Speaker 2: they do? Like, what do you think are they the
Speaker 2: types to actually mothball this stuff? Would they just pretend
Speaker 2: like this never happened aspects of it?
Speaker 1: But there are again, they are making money hand over
Speaker 1: fist on the actual nuts and bolts of cloud computing.
Speaker 1: That's not going away. They will their Stockell tumbled because
Speaker 1: they're not posting massive growth numbers, but they have a
Speaker 1: banging business of providing computers to the world. The question is,
Speaker 1: is what happens when there's a giant hole in their
Speaker 1: balance sheet because well, it turns out that hundreds of
Speaker 1: billions of dollars in contracts everyone's die and they suddenly
Speaker 1: they don't got the money. What do we do? That's
Speaker 1: going to be a systemic problem. It's not going to
Speaker 1: just hit Amazon. It's going to hit a lot of folks.
Speaker 1: And I think that the answer everyone's sort of hoping
Speaker 1: for in that space is government bailout. No but of Amazon,
Speaker 1: though I would be so irritated.
Speaker 2: Well, also what they bailing out? Amazon's not gonna go
Speaker 2: bank or even if Amazon had to take a massive
Speaker 2: impairment on elder Tradeum chips and it was like thirty
Speaker 2: billion dollars the shareholders had the shareholders, they'll be mad,
Speaker 2: don't get me wrong, But it's not gonna destroy Amazon,
Speaker 2: like it's not. I mean, it might destroy Anti Jesse's asshole,
Speaker 2: like it might be might send Andy Jesse and a
Speaker 2: Nye and bail into the sun. But it doesn't feel
Speaker 2: like it will kill them. I just don't know what
Speaker 2: a bailout would be.
Speaker 1: I am so annoyed that I had great hopes when
Speaker 1: Andy took over, but it seems like the company has
Speaker 1: just continued down the in sertification curve. They're not doing
Speaker 1: surprising things. The reason I started the Last Week in
Speaker 1: Aws newsletter in twenty seventeen was that every week they
Speaker 1: were fixing massive customer facing problems and it was hard
Speaker 1: to keep track because they were just as bad that
Speaker 1: as they are now twenty seventeen. Right now, they don't
Speaker 1: do that anymore. It's basically inertia. I would not be
Speaker 1: able to start the newsletter and build in our readership
Speaker 1: today the way that I did back then, just because
Speaker 1: it people do not care nearly so much about the
Speaker 1: platform as they once did.
Speaker 2: So when did you notice the shift happen?
Speaker 1: It was first graduate than all at once, I think
Speaker 1: is probably the way to frame it. When I realized
Speaker 1: that I went from every week having the problem of
Speaker 1: there's so much stuff here, which ones make the cut,
Speaker 1: to there's so much filler here, where's anything actually worth
Speaker 1: writing about.
Speaker 2: And when you say philo, what do you mean they
Speaker 2: used to say?
Speaker 1: They used to talk about things like as lambda, a
Speaker 1: transformative shift in how a compute could be run. They
Speaker 1: put that out with the same enthusiasm corporate voice as
Speaker 1: there's now a third cloud front edge location in Dallas,
Speaker 1: which even people in Dallas do not give.
Speaker 2: It to us about, right, what does LAMB that do?
Speaker 2: In effectively? You give it its code.
Speaker 1: It runs the code when certain trigger events happen, be
Speaker 1: a web request, be it a time being hit, be
Speaker 1: it's something that it's some other event hitting. And it
Speaker 1: only charges you for while it runs. Huh and massively
Speaker 1: scales up and you don't have to worry about any
Speaker 1: of the care and feeding of the infrastructure around it,
Speaker 1: which that's really cool. It is it was cool. There's
Speaker 1: beta in twenty fifteen. But now for the last truly
Speaker 1: great things Amazon put out that change the way I
Speaker 1: thought about how this could work.
Speaker 2: Except now Amazon doesn't really put out fun new updates.
Speaker 1: It's just incremental updates. We have a new thing. We've launched,
Speaker 1: our own large language model called Nova. It's not as
Speaker 1: good as the ones you currently use, but it's less money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's start poc stage. They don't care.
Speaker 2: What's great is if you look when Nova is Wow,
Speaker 2: it's in the UH top twenty five below Kat's code
Speaker 2: of pro Kimmy two point five four point one memo
Speaker 2: me and the Max Quinn thinking Kimmy K two basically
Speaker 2: every other model.
Speaker 1: Right, like exactly, it's like they're racing neck and neck
Speaker 1: with the taxidermy in Frontier AI lab that it really is.
Speaker 2: That though, it's like it's something called yeah Ernie from Baidu,
Speaker 2: like every Chinese model appears to cry, that's so funny.
Speaker 2: What a what a horrible situation we found ourselves in.
Speaker 1: Well, Amazon prides itself on being frugal, and it turns
Speaker 1: out that when I have to assume the reason the
Speaker 1: Titan models that were so bad they never really saw
Speaker 1: broad release in light a day was that it's okay,
Speaker 1: it's gonna cost some billion dollars to train this model.
Speaker 1: What can you do for twenty million? Like that? That
Speaker 1: is the Amazon ethos. Fail is the answer.
Speaker 2: Unless it comes to Capex though, Like that's the thing.
Speaker 2: It feels like what you say there goes directly against
Speaker 2: how they're dealing with AI. It feels like AI is
Speaker 2: just poisoning their brains.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Yes, I wound up doing a so
Speaker 1: I back when these stuff all started coming out, I
Speaker 1: had fun with it. I ran a bunch of custom
Speaker 1: questions against these things, like rank the US presidents by
Speaker 1: absorbency and then see how long long is it? We
Speaker 1: would bully them into doing it or give me some
Speaker 1: criticisms of core Quinn and one of the early chat
Speaker 1: GPT things made me question like aspects of my life
Speaker 1: and go home and drink heavily, Whereas I asked one
Speaker 1: of the early Amazon models that question, and it would
Speaker 1: have been like Exhibit A and the defamation case, except
Speaker 1: I'd have to prove that anyone took anything Amazon said
Speaker 1: even slightly seriously.
Speaker 2: Right. It's it's just weird. There's something that I think
Speaker 2: the I don't know if AI side coast this is it,
Speaker 2: but I mentioned this with David Gerard. It's like people
Speaker 2: getting one shot at by this. It must one show executives.
Speaker 2: I think, oh, it absolutely does.
Speaker 1: I use it myself in the curation of my newsletter
Speaker 1: for example something because this is this is a terrific
Speaker 1: use case, and I think it encapsulates my philosophy on
Speaker 1: this uh where Amazon. I consume all the RSS feeds
Speaker 1: every week and there are roughly one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: items that come out. So what I do is I
Speaker 1: have a scoring thing that pops up two columns. Here's
Speaker 1: here's the good ones, here's the crap ones. And I
Speaker 1: have a whole rubric that I have put into this.
Speaker 1: It saves me a tremendous amount of time. I go
Speaker 1: through and I put some from, I move some back
Speaker 1: and forth as I read down the list and increasing
Speaker 1: it learns from my decisions. It's getting it mostly right.
Speaker 1: It speeds up my workflow. It is convenient. Is this
Speaker 1: worth changing the entire world?
Speaker 2: For? No?
Speaker 1: No, it is not. But I'll make Hey, will the
Speaker 1: sun shines? Besides, if I'm going to make fun of something,
Speaker 1: I should be using it so I can understand it
Speaker 1: to make fun of it more effectively.
Speaker 2: Right, But would you pay the real rates for it?
Speaker 2: Because that's what I think is going to break this
Speaker 2: as well. It's when these companies start having to charge
Speaker 2: the real costs, when they have to start getting paying
Speaker 2: the margins.
Speaker 1: Right now, this is costing me seven cents a month.
Speaker 1: I am glad to pay that I would probably pay
Speaker 1: as high for that as I don't know, twenty bucks
Speaker 1: a month, which, again that's a significant increase there, sure,
Speaker 1: but too much beyond that.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: I spent seven years going and doing this by hand.
Speaker 1: I don't feel the need to stop. I did use
Speaker 1: claud code for several weeks to rebuild the entire interface
Speaker 1: because I was I had this janky, horrible newsletter publication
Speaker 1: thing that I kept meaning to. I looked into what
Speaker 1: it would take to have an engineer do it between
Speaker 1: twenty to fifty thousand dollars. This was just three weeks
Speaker 1: over the holiday break of prompting the thing, and it
Speaker 1: finally got it dialed in and correct. Now, in practice,
Speaker 1: if neither one of those two things is a viable option,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of stuff off the shelf these days.
Speaker 1: It didn't exist back then that I could have worked
Speaker 1: with and had a much better base. But this was fun.
Speaker 1: This was I could use some software in this small place.
Speaker 1: The cost of generating this software now from my time perspective,
Speaker 1: is minimal, and it fills in a gap. And these
Speaker 1: things are good at solving a building tools to solve
Speaker 1: one very specific problem. Where these things fall down. Software
Speaker 1: has always fallen down on this is as soon as
Speaker 1: the requirements change, I said on a link list every Monday.
Speaker 1: I built software myself to handle this. When I started
Speaker 1: sending out blog posts with it as well, I had
Speaker 1: to go back to the drawing board and redo an
Speaker 1: awful lot because oh, it's a different model. The entire
Speaker 1: flow changes when I introduced the requirement downstream. When software
Speaker 1: becomes free, is longer the bottleneck more or less. You
Speaker 1: can build custom tools for any given situation far more effectively.
Speaker 1: I started writing a Bash script to give someone access
Speaker 1: to just run run this one command in your term,
Speaker 1: It'll give you access to this thing. And I started
Speaker 1: writing it myself, threw it into one of these things.
Speaker 1: It came out with a much better script as a
Speaker 1: one off that I don't need again. I could I
Speaker 1: have done it myself. Yeah, about four hours, But would
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 2: No It's soldings. It's also those.
Speaker 1: Small problems or point solutions. But I'm not firing people
Speaker 1: for this. I'm not replacing segments of the economy with
Speaker 1: this I have. My brother is one of the few
Speaker 1: people I have heard about being definitely impacted by the
Speaker 1: rise of AI. Until last year he was a freelance translator.
Speaker 1: I believe that that feels like it's something that is
Speaker 1: easily prone to disruption. I buy less stock photography when
Speaker 1: I can have shit post images of giraffes on fire
Speaker 1: and data centers.
Speaker 2: Now that they're not They're not gonna love that. The
Speaker 2: list is not gonna love that. Oh no, I don't
Speaker 2: even I think Ai is just genuinely ugly, you know,
Speaker 2: even that it would suck the life out of the
Speaker 2: out of the ship post.
Speaker 1: And I paid for artists to do things correctly.
Speaker 2: Okay, good by have stickers.
Speaker 1: And I gave out a reinvent for ship posting dot
Speaker 1: Ai and it was bad Ai art in a nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty style, like a dog with an extra leg, people
Speaker 1: with extra hands and whatnot. That we hired an illustrator
Speaker 1: as a human to draw in the style of bad Ai.
Speaker 1: I thought that was a lot of fun for something
Speaker 1: like this. Yeah, I am paying artists and I'm making
Speaker 1: it work. I'm building a ship post meme to throw
Speaker 1: on Twitter and never think about it against the thing.
Speaker 2: Though posting is an art, posting is an art. It
Speaker 2: is bringing this. There is no bushido in in generating images,
Speaker 2: but let's move on from this subject because I have
Speaker 2: one final question, Please hit me with it. So you've
Speaker 2: seen this thing about how everyone's freaking out about, and
Speaker 2: I know you're going to love this. Everyone's like, oh, hey,
Speaker 2: clawed code is replacing software everybody. How funny is it?
Speaker 2: How ridiculous is it to you? I'm leading question. I
Speaker 2: realized the idea that instead of buying on a percy basis,
Speaker 2: people are going to just replace SaaS with their own
Speaker 2: internal share. I think it's one of the funniest and
Speaker 2: stupidest things I've ever heard.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 1: I think it's a terrific thing that is totally happening
Speaker 1: because obviously, again I am building software for enterprises. Well,
Speaker 1: they can just write this code overnight to do it. Yes,
Speaker 1: they can easily generate a website that purports to do something.
Speaker 1: But what if they need that thing to be correct?
Speaker 1: What if they're, oh, I don't know, signing a billion
Speaker 1: dollar contract on the result of what that software spits
Speaker 1: out exactly? Maybe Yolo slamming it isn't the right answer.
Speaker 1: We're going to just replace all the software with custom
Speaker 1: bespoke stuff.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 1: A terrific example I saw is that for payroll anthropic.
Speaker 1: The company uses ADP, Well why would they do that?
Speaker 1: They can clearly build their own eternally because you're not
Speaker 1: buying the software, you're buying the compliance, the keeping up
Speaker 1: with all the different jurisdictions in which you operate. You're
Speaker 1: someone who is going to certify with their reputation that
Speaker 1: this is going to solve a problem. There are a
Speaker 1: bunch of things out there, like there's some software that
Speaker 1: will be disrupted by this picture, a bunch of the
Speaker 1: obnoxious stuff like I just want to convert this from
Speaker 1: one from one video type to a different video type,
Speaker 1: and you'll find some like random thing for ten bucks. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: now cloud code or whatnot is going to fix that
Speaker 1: because I don't know how FFmpeg command line flags are
Speaker 1: supposed to work. It does great better, it's easier than
Speaker 1: looking it up. Am I going to go and replace
Speaker 1: actual business? Line of business? So line is a software
Speaker 1: I wish?
Speaker 2: But no, Well that's the thing as well. People think
Speaker 2: the people pay for like Salesforce what have you, because
Speaker 2: they're like, oh, because I have to pay for it,
Speaker 2: and also just because it's a simple piece of software. No,
Speaker 2: they're these Intrica API ratking things that roll around in
Speaker 2: their own filth, and then you they get they maintain
Speaker 2: them on the back end. Even if even the shittiest
Speaker 2: cloud software you use is has some weird back end stuff.
Speaker 2: They have to constantly maintain because things break, and the
Speaker 2: bigger the company, the more things that break.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's just the gen one of all of
Speaker 1: Salesforce is just an Excel spreadsheet. It is who am
Speaker 1: I contacting? What is the last thing I did in
Speaker 1: the rest? And it gets complex quickly, and where the
Speaker 1: leap happens is Okay, Now it's not just you. Now
Speaker 1: it's an entire sales team. Now you're going to like
Speaker 1: you have some turnover in that sales team over the
Speaker 1: course of doing business. How do you wind up having
Speaker 1: a provable chain of issue on this? Someone pops up
Speaker 1: for app for three years from now they said they
Speaker 1: talked to someone here. We have no record of that
Speaker 1: because Claude rebuilt it five times this week. Where does
Speaker 1: that going to live? How is that going to exist?
Speaker 2: And even then it's like audibility, auditability, even Jesus Christ,
Speaker 2: but this is.
Speaker 1: Not an AI phenomenon. When Dropbox launched, the number one
Speaker 1: comment on hacker News was this just is just our
Speaker 1: sync with some extra bells and whistles.
Speaker 2: This isn't a product. Yeah, yeah, well that's about yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean even then drop Boxes like, it's not just storage,
Speaker 2: is the support services around it.
Speaker 1: I don't know believe a dropbox doesn't want to do
Speaker 1: what Dropbox does anymore every time I use it. A
Speaker 1: folder that sinks everywhere is what I loved about drops
Speaker 1: Now it's trying to basically compete with zoom in Google
Speaker 1: Docs and all the other stuff.
Speaker 2: Stiles, well, gory. Let's wrap it up there. We've done
Speaker 2: some good hating we can find. I'll have some good links.
Speaker 2: View will link to duc Bill, link to last week
Speaker 2: and Amazon was it.
Speaker 1: Last week at aws dot com with an obnoxious, sarcastic platypus.
Speaker 1: That's one my use of AI before we go that
Speaker 1: I think you'll appreciate. If people email me Corey dot
Speaker 1: Quinn at DUCKBILLHQ dot com and I don't like what
Speaker 1: you're doing and you're trying to sell me something. I
Speaker 1: now have an AI powered executive assistant in the form
Speaker 1: of Billy the platypus, who will tell you in corporate
Speaker 1: appropriate ways to go fuck yourself, which is just chef's kiss,
Speaker 1: because I can't say that to people. I have a reputation.
Speaker 1: The obnoxious platypus responding to so salespeople does not have
Speaker 1: this constraint. This is the one liability shift I have
Speaker 1: found that actually works. And you can blame AI for
Speaker 1: things you personally approved.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't endorse the AI platypus. You should get
Speaker 2: a real one. You should get a real one.
Speaker 1: Danger that customs officials had many questions I can not
Speaker 1: wish to answer.
Speaker 2: Train the platypus Cory. All right, you've been listening to
Speaker 2: Better Offline. I'm at Zidra and you have a monologue
Speaker 2: this week. I guess. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 5: Everyone, thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor
Speaker 5: and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski.
Speaker 5: You can check out more of his music and audio
Speaker 5: projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O
Speaker 5: S O W s ki dot com. You can email
Speaker 5: me at easy at Better offline dot com, or visit
Speaker 5: Better Offline dot com to find more podcast links and
Speaker 5: of course, my newsletter.
Speaker 2: I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's
Speaker 2: youreaed dot to visit the discord and go to our
Speaker 2: slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank you
Speaker 2: so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
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