Techstrong Gang – March 31, 2025

Hey, everyone. This is going to be a cloud native kind of week. You're watching Textron Gang.

Hi everyone. It's Alan Shimo for Text Drunk and welcome to our Monday Cube Con edition of Text Drunk Gang. Well, you may be saying Shimmy looks like he's in the same background that he always is.

He is not in CubeCon. Well, I'm not technically CubeCon. Tuesday is zero.

Day CubeCon actually opens Wednesday. But by the time you're watching this, I will already be in jolly Old England, London town, getting ready for our coverage on CubeCon. And, and we're gonna kick off our Cube con coverage today.

We're gonna have a lot of cloud, a heavy dose of cloud native, cloudy with a chance of, uh, what's this, what's the TV show? Cloudy or the book Cloudy with a chance of meat. Meat falls.

Meatball. Yeah, we'll try to, well, we got a few meatballs, but anyway, I think it's Containers in our case, cloudy with a chance Of container, chance of containers. Absolutely.

I think more than a chance of containers. It's, they'll definitely be, they'll be containers captain. Um, all right.

But let me introduce you to our gang here today, who's gonna discuss that and more, first of all, in a new camera where we can see just really stunning, stunning. She's the chairman, uh, or CEO of Deploy hub, open source ambassador extraordinaire, Tracy Reagan. Hi, Tracy.

It is good to see you, and I really mean that. It really is a whole new Tracy. Well, thank you for the camera.

I appreciate it. And thank you for having me here on CubeCon weekend. I'm so sorry I won't be in London.

Um, that would be so much fun. I have a new fan of the uk. I I enjoy the UK too.

I actually, I haven't been in London since, uh, COVID, so I'm, I am looking forward. That's why I went out early. Some of our camera crews never been there, so I think we're gonna do the tower tour with the B feeders and stuff.

That's always fun. Anyway, thanks, jc. Um, joining us.

We're going up from New Mexico to Colorado and our mountain West region. The guitar man, uh, FU and VP Analyst, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitchell, how are you?

Great to be here. Great to be here. And, and I will be, uh, in London Town by the time folks are watching this as well.

My second trip in three months, because I was there for blackout eu. Good. Good to be.

Good to be, uh, cloud Native Week on Textron Gang. Absolutely. And Mitchell and IOB as, as I mentioned, will be at CubeCon all week reporting from there.

We'll be doing some Textron games from the show floor, I think for Thursday and Friday show. But staying out west, we're gonna go to our, uh, I in, I in Silicon Valley. He is, he's our tech strong editor, John Swartz.

Hey, John. How are you man? I'm good.

I will not be in London, but I used to live there and my daughter was born in Hammersmith in 1990. Um, we lived in a place called, we lived in a place called Pimlico, which is right near the original Tate Museum. A Tate gallery.

Long, long time ago, long time. Another lifetime ago. I used to write for the Independent.

I lived in London and the Daily telegraphs sometimes for the Times, and I miss it. Um, so I, I hope you have a great time. London is kind of eternal.

It is a, it's a, it is a great, great town. All right then. Look, we've got a new gang memory.

com at least maybe 12 years ago. But as it turned out, I was telling the rest of our gang members. He, he grew up just a few blocks from me where we were young kids.

And, um, it's funny, two people from that same, we're probably the only two people in that town that are working in, in, uh, DevOps, jp. But anyway, he's my good friend, JP Morgenthal and, and jp, why don't, I don't usually do this with our gang members, but you are new here. Tell people a little bit about yourself.

Okay. Uh, so I've, I've been around the block. Um, you know, I've come up through, uh, the engineering ranks and, uh, built, uh, technology.

I've been a serial CTO and, uh, my, you know, proficiency has been really helping people to understand enterprise customers and enterprise users understand emerging technology leading, leading edge technology. So, my big thing has always been to jump on the latest thing that's coming out, you know, get hands on with it, understand it, and then translate it for business value. And I've done that since Java Alpha.

And, you know, I've ridden that through XML. I was Mr. XML at one point.

Um, you know, I had a column of internet week and booking Charles Goldfarb series and, uh, was a analyst and then became CTO of an XML company. So, and I just kept riding that. It took, that, that wave kind of just went all the way to shore, be that XML became soa, became cloud, became DevOps, became, uh, you know, what's here now, which is ai.

So, uh, I am doing that again, uh, around the, you know, artificial intelligence and generative AI world. Um, playing with these technologies as they're emerging and identifying their boundaries and being, and explaining to people, you know, the realities and helping and, you know, enterprises to adopt these technologies. Fantastic, man.

It's a pleasure to have you on here, jp. And, and I will add, I also lived in London for a very short period of time, but what a time. I, uh, I worked for EMI music worldwide, and my job was to help take the office technology from the, uh, UK and move it to the US from this, they chose a US A CEO.

And so I actually lived in em in Abbey Road Studios. Really? Yeah.

Very cool. Wow. That was fun.

That sounds Fun. Yeah, that There's actually, if you look at EMI, not, not the album cover, 'cause it's not on the album cover, but if you look at pictures, there's a building right next to the studio, and that is a set of apartments that would own by, uh, EMI and Capital Records. And it was used for executives when they're in town.

Um, but, you know, and it was nice. Had a, a full apartment, kitchen, everything. But I still ate all my meals and went to the pub in EMI in Abby Road Studios.

Fantastic. Very cool. Little, little little history right there.

Let it be. Okay. Hey, um, let, let's, let's jump into our eight block today.

So look, it is this cloud native week. We're kicking it off. I guess we should start with a little bit of the state of cloud native in, in, in, you know, with, with CubeCon coming, the, the announcements are coming fast and furious.

Mitch, you wanna you wanna hit some of em and comment, kick us off? Yeah, I'd be happy to. You know, we're, um, in our business, we get flooded with the announcements and a lot of them are under embargo.

So some we can't talk about yet, but they're already going into, into coup con have been a flurry of announcements, which frankly, I think is a good idea. 'cause you don't get lost in the shuffle of the mountain of announcements that happen at those conferences. But I mean, we've had, uh, like, uh, Commodore is added, the ability to remediate vulnerabilities, uh, that they find in, uh, Kubernetes is his experiences drift.

Um, I think we're gonna hear a lot about Wasm, uh, at this particular KubeCon. Um, just recently, hyperlight, uh, announced that they're en engaging us as a Microsoft Open source project. They contributed to the CNCF, they announced their supporting, uh, wasm within their kind of environment.

It's a, it's a micro vm. It's interesting that, uh, that's, that's kind of come up again as a, as a technology, um, Cosmo as control plane for managing Wasm. Another announcement, you know, we're gonna hear about e Biff.

Uh, we're gonna hear a lot about the vulnerabilities of, not just in our software that we create, but the sources of software that we use Chain guard at. No, made an announcement about now being able to look at VMs and provide V VMs that are, uh, vulnerability free. Um, but in addition to images and software, things like that.

So, I, it, it will be last year when we, when I went to, uh, Europe, it was very much Kubernetes everywhere. That was all we talked about, you know, kind of other things on the side. I think this year we're gonna be talking a lot about, some about AI of course, but also Wasm and some of these other technologies that are catching fire too.

Well, I, I'll tell you, in my mind, I think these are gonna be our, the big themes for this year's coupon. You know, Mitch, you're right, it was Kubernetes last year, but Observability was on the scene last year, right? That was, that was big.

But here's where I think we're gonna see this year. I think we're gonna see ai. 'cause we always, everywhere, it's AI all the time.

But we're gonna see AI manage managing Kubernetes. 'cause, 'cause Kubernetes, in spite of its success is too damn hard. It's hard.

It's a hard, it's hard to manage using Kubernetes. It's hard using Kubernetes. And, but yet it's central to this whole cloud native stack.

And I think we're gonna see a lot of AI to manage Kubernetes. You mentioned the Commodore announcement, and that was more to, you know, keep Kubernetes drift from setting in. 'cause that, that happens, right?

And, you know, I don't know if that's using AI to do that, but, um, I think we're gonna see a lot of AI configuring Kubernetes and maintaining Kubernetes with the hope that it makes Kubernetes easier. I think you're spot on, Alan. And we already saw some announcements leading into ku com.

Dynatrace announced they have a Kubernetes component of their observability solution to help understand what's happening from the observability perspective into Kubernetes clusters. So I think we'll see AI coming in, in all areas, to your point, a lot of focus around how do we manage the complexity and how do we manage the sort of tall mountains things like Kubernetes. Yep.

Then clearly wm, as you say, Mitchell, I think is gonna be big. I think the important thing, or the, the nugget from that Ferryman Akamai announcement is, look, WM is tailor made for the edge, right? And, and Akamai, I know they're not just a CDN anymore.

They're security. They're all of these great things, but they're really interested in having that edge, uh, presence, right? Lower latency closest to the, to the user.

So I think, you know, we'll see a lot of that wasm or Wasm everywhere. The other thing I think, and it goes to that chain guard announcement about, uh, you know, uh, guarding the weakest link in virtual machines is just like everywhere else we're seeing with cloud. And jp I'm sure you're probably seeing this, right?

We are at a crossroads here where it's like a perfect storm. People, people are concerned about Broadcom, VMware licensing changes primarily cost, right? It's a, it could be up to a three x difference in cost for your VMware.

They're taking that as a, okay, this is a good time. If I wanna reevaluate, do I wanna run VMware on-prem? The way I've been doing it, is this the time I've been waiting for, to move more to a public cloud, still in a virtual hypervisor situation, right?

But maybe not VMware hypervisor, or maybe I'm going hype, right? Or going full cloud native. You know, the, so the really interesting thing, and I'm very, you know, close, uh, as, uh, unfortunately Keith's not here today, but we're both very close to this VMware community.

Um, mine goes back to working at E-M-C-I-I, I hear the biggest concern isn't so much the cost. It's the feeling that it, that the Broadcom acquisition has, uh, created a loss of innovation and support in the community around VMware. Now, where a lot of customers used to get their, uh, support for VMware was from the partners.

Uh, companies like EMC, which is now Dell, um, and other resellers of VMware. VMware was a very partner, uh, centric, channel centric company. Very strong partner.

Cha. That channel has been blown up. And so now the p you know, there was relationships there, there was a, you know, entire ecosystem that people who, customers who are basing a huge infrastructure on VMware now don't have.

It was taken away from those partners. They don't have the ability to provide that support in the way they did before. And to me, that is what is changing people's minds and making them rethink about what they do and where they go.

And, you know, another part of this whole aspect was VMware was heavily chasing the hypervisors, right? They were doing, they had VMware on Azure, VMware on AWS. Those were big initiatives.

And now, uh, you know, the, those customers are questioning, really, do I wanna go this way? I don't think Broadcom is going to continue supporting these hypervisor approaches. So that is really what I think is changing minds more than just cost and licensing alone.

Fair enough. But, you know, and, but the public cloud providers are giving people options. And, and, and again, one of those options is not just to move to the public cloud hypervisor, but to take this as the point where not only am I moving to the cloud, but I'm gonna re-architect and go maybe to a microservices architecture and use Kubernetes and containers and, and go full on cloud native Tracy.

That's kinda right up your alley. I think, I think if you see a theme this year at CubeCon, it's going to be that and the complexity that that adds to, um, your infrastructure. Um, and I believe that you're gonna see a lot more people with the title of platform engineer because what we're do, and, and if you kind of, you notice the pre-releasees, as Mitch says, there's probably more to come, but at least that we, the releases that we've gotten out, uh, up till now, uh, you notice that they're all about, I, I hate to use the word to simplify them, but they're all about cleanup.

In the past, we were, how do, how do we, uh, how do we deploy containers? You know, now it's about securing containers. It's about, you know, uh, making them, uh, it's easier to configure, manage drift.

My goodness. We're finally gonna get to talk about that. And we, and when we talk about Drift in the, in, in just the platform engineering space, we're just talking about maybe a few containers that have different configurations.

We don't even go down to containers that may have drift within the applications that they're running, serving the same people. So we haven't even gotten there yet. So I think that the, uh, the theme is this for this year is how do we start pushing it forward and cleaning up and fixing the issues that have held us back?

And security is gonna be a big one. I'm super happy to see somebody's actually talking about, you know, security in this space. The, the armo, um, article.

I've, I always find anything interesting that's trying to derive security from what's actually deployed as opposed to what might be coming through the software supply chain and re repos, because that becomes relevant. Um, so there's, I think there's, it's gonna be an interesting show, uh, because I think you're gonna see a lot of messages about how do we make this complex environment easier, and what kind of cleanup do we need to do? Absolutely.

I, I, I think there's another thing that we, we really should mention, and that is, you know, CubeCon Cloud Native Con is, it's the same, you know, they're, it's called both. It's the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is now managing 200, 200 projects. And how do you, you know, like the old woman who lived in the shoe, she had so many children, she didn't know what to do.

How do you manage 200 projects and give each one of them and the light of day that they require to grow and, and feed them and be healthy in one event like this? So you're poking the bear here. You really are poking the bear.

This is a, I, you know, this is my complaint. Um, you know, I love the Linux Foundation and the C ncf F has really been a driver, uh, for open source in the realm of software and infrastructure. There's no doubt.

But everybody wants to go where it's the most popular. And there are tools in, in under the con under the management of CNCF that probably should be in the CDF or the open SSF, but they wanna be where the, the everybody else goes. And I feel like it dilutes, uh, it dilutes C uh, CNCF and it dilutes, uh, the messaging around security and, uh, continuous delivery.

So they don't manage 'em well. They don't get as much love and attention as TIUs does from the CD Foundation or even open source, uh, uh, score. Uh, open SSF scorecard gets from the open SS F.

So I think that it's, it's, you know, they can't tell people where they, to put their open source projects, but I believe it's gotten big because people wanna be part of the party. And I don't think it's beneficial to the, the consumer who's trying to sort all of this stuff out. You know, why would a, you know, just because a particular piece of software runs in a Kubernetes environment, it doesn't mean anything except that it runs in a Kubernetes environment.

It's really doing security, or it's really doing cd. So I think there's some problems there, to be quite honest. You know, I've always, Argo Argo should have been in the CDFA long time ago, Alan, we talked about this.

I think it may have been Salt Lake, uh, at the Kon there last year, that Kon has become more of a general cloud computing, uh, conference. It's not really just cloud native heavily focused on that. Yeah, there's a lot of that there.

And that tends to happen with conferences that kind of start to take on a life of their own. But I think that because of the projects that's driving it too, the amount of projects that are being contributed to CNCF expand that focus. So, you know, you can argue whether it's a good thing or bad thing.

I think we'll probably end up in a day where it's the, here's the kind of cloud native track of it, here's a different security track of it or whatever, AI track, whatever that might look like, which tends to be how these things evolve. I don't disagree. I don't, I think there is a general cloud.

I, I, here's another thing I just wanna call out, is that I think they're expecting this to be the biggest cloud native or q con cloud native com. Uh, bigger than Paris even, right? Bigger than Amsterdam before that.

Generally over the last few years, the European, uh, additions of CubeCon have been bigger than their US counterparts, right? Um, next year's cloud native is in Atlanta. It'll be interesting to see, or Cloud native US is in Atlanta.

We'll see how that goes. But they're expecting a, you know, record breaking crowd here. So it'll be, I, I'm interested to see that as well.

Um, you mentioned platform engineering. You know, from what my people at CNCF are telling me that on the zero on Tuesday is zero day, right? All the projects have their own mini conferences.

And, and then there's some conferences like around security, and some of the Sister foundations have conferences, though those are more moved out now that other ones. But anyway, the platform engineering, track conference, mini conference on Tuesday is probably one of the most popular by registration and request tracks at Zero Day for CubeCon this year. And of course, CNCF has rolled out platform engineering training and certification.

So I do think platform engineering is gonna be huge. org. org is supposedly putting on some kind of killer party.

I forget now if it's Monday night or Tuesday night, but it's quite the party. I'll, you could probably look it up there. But, uh, Luca and I, and maybe Mitch and the rest of the Techstrong team, we're gonna be doing a few of our, uh, platform engineering show podcasts live or not live, but recorded at CubeCon.

com. com content Security Boulevard, content cloud native, now, content and platform engineering, as well as I'm sure Tech strong AI and tech strong IT content as coming outta Q Con. I do have a confession to make.

I'm also going, because they announced Jamie Fox is gonna be at the closing session. Really? Yes.

Oh, That'll be fun. Yeah. Yeah.

You'll chase, you had How many, how many people, uh, what are they looking at? Like 12, 15,000 a year? I, I think they're looking closer to 15 now.

Wow. That's, uh, that's amazing. 'cause I think that, you know, probably the largest one before was 12, pushing 10.

Yeah, no, I, I thought Paris was close to 12, And I don't think they're the It's that big in North America though, right? No, like seven or eight. Well, the last couple years, Amsterdam, well before Amsterdam was Valencia, but it certainly Amsterdam, Paris, and now London have been bigger than their US counterparts, which have been, I think, Chicago, salt Lake City.

And now, as I said, Atlanta is coming up. Then I think LA after that, I'm not quite sure. Um, anyway, it's gonna be a heck of a show.

Mitchell will be there. I'll be there. We'll, we're not gonna stream live from there, because what we found is it's really early in North America when we stream live from Q Con.

And, um, so what we'll probably do is record and play later that day. So you'll get sort of same day coverage, but not, not live, just go to Textron tv, text, post tv, and of course, it'll be on our daily Textron TV shows as well, including the gig. So that's it.

Uh, that's a cloud native, uh, recap or promo, or preview, whatever you want to call it here on the gang. We're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about symbolic AI coming to DevOps.

Stay tuned. Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT, leaders and practitioners worldwide.

Our secret impactful content that sparks awareness, engagement, and top quality leads with us. You'll access editorial websites, streaming videos, virtual events, custom content analyst research, and more. Join our satisfied clients.

Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey, everyone, back here on Textron Gang.

So, as I teased, uh, before the break, uh, Aman extend symbolic AI model to validate source code, you know, it, it's happening more and more. Tracy, uh, you're, you're up on this. Why don't you kick it off?

So, isn't it something that after all these discussions about ag agentic ai, and you know, everything that we're doing with LLMs, that we get to talk finally about the OG of ai, The OG of ai, Right? The OG of ai. I mean, this is original stuff.

Um, I smiled when I read this article article because, you know, back in 1995, Steve Taylor and I built a rules-based system to generate, make files that turned into supporting 200 different build, uh, control file types like ant. Um, so I think, you know, this speaks to the fact that we don't have to do agen ai. We don't have to be pushing the envelope to take advantage of what AI can offer.

Now, there's, you know, there's some questions I would have for them on, on this topic. Um, when you have a, a, a rule-based system, uh, you, you're, you know, it's a bit more rigid, um, and it struggles with what I would call kind of unstructured data. Uh, and it doesn't really learn, but in some cases you don't.

You really just don't need that. And, um, these logic, something that's logic based is logic based reasoning is actually perfect for what they're, uh, what they're doing. So I was excited to see it, and I'm glad to see that these, you know, that the OG of AI is still being considered.

And just like we never talk about, you know, machine learning or ML workflows anymore, it's all about pretty much everybody wants to wor worry about AgTech anymore. So we pass through these phases of the, of new technology so quickly that sometimes we don't just look at what we have and what can be applied. And I, I, I applaud them for doing this.

I, I, I agree wholeheartedly with what you're saying, Tracy. It's like the, the, first of all, I, I think that there's a, it's a lot of whitewashing going on. Agen is whitewashing even, you know, more traditional forms of, uh, use of GE generative ai, uh, which is con, which only makes the field more difficult to understand, especially when it's so confusing and all new right now, right?

We, we saw this with the cloud. We've seen this with so many technologies, right? Everybody wants to be, everybody wants to be part of the party.

Everybody wants to go to the party, right? So, oh, I'm an agent, but, you know, a agent technology and, and, and, um, it's unfortunate that businesses are gonna learn this the hard way. In fact, I just, right before this, I posted, um, on LinkedIn a whole, uh, you know, post about, uh, companies are getting it wrong.

They're selecting the wrong skillset to decide their AI strategy and why. And, and it gets to the, the root of what you said, which is, you, you what you, you know, AI is just, and I wish Keith was here because I'm stealing his, uh, nail gun analogy from one of his LinkedIn posts, but right, it's the newest nail gun, right? And now everybody wants the nail gun operator to run their company.

I'm like, you know, my analogy in the LinkedIn post is, if you bought a beautiful plot of land and you were considering building a house on this plot of land, is your next call to the person who works the nail gun to cons, run your project, construct your product? No, it's to a general contractor, right? But people don't realize this AI stuff, it's just the latest nail gun.

What you really need is a general contractor still, because the general contractor has the knowledge on how to get the project done, right? And what is strategy? What is governance?

What does it mean to operationalize this? What does it mean to go into production? All that's being lost in, in the race, right?

And, you know, some prompt engineer's gonna decide for a Fortune 500 company, what its AI strategy is. Are you kidding me? Right?

So, you know, it, it, there's great stuff. Symbolic, uh, neuros symbolic AI is phenomenal. It's, it, it's great because if you think about everything we've learned about generative ai, right?

It, it, all these words in sequence, in a vector space is the happy dog, right? All that goes away. We take a lump of these and we just represent them by a symbol.

Now I've reduced my entire vector space by a hundred x into these symbols, and now I can compare symbols so much faster with so much less overhead. And it, it just, it holds such promise, uh, as a way to move forward and away from the brute force attack of, you know, GPUs and, and multi gigabyte vector spaces. Sorry, I, you got No, no, you are all good.

Hey, can I actually, something that JP were saying that I, I, it's really interesting to me is that there's this land rush, right? There's this land rush for the AI mind share. I mean, you're gonna see it in every conceivable conference, and sometimes I think we're getting ahead of ourselves.

And I, I look at ag agentic AI in particular, and almost a form of inflation with this product. So this concept, right? So PWC makes an announcement last week, Alibaba Badu, Zendesk fill in the blanks.

Every conceivable company is doing something. And I also, I I begin to wonder, although it's impressive what all of these AI agents can do when conceivably where they'll take us and doing bigger and better things, I wonder if it's a bit overwhelming or even con confusing to the, uh, it decision makers. Like there's so much candy to choose from.

It's, um, it's, it's in a sense, it's they're flooding the market with this miasma of, of, of AI agents. And I, i, I, it's, to me, I think it's kind of reached oversaturation point. It's gonna have to filter its Way out.

It's like walking into Las Vegas casino with all the lights going on on those slot machines. Exactly. And it's like sensory overload.

Well, Well, the, you know, the first thing You, oh, can I just one, one more thing you mentioned Las Vegas, Alan, that is so interesting because literally every week in Las Vegas, there is an AI conference dedicated to a company. And, uh, ServiceNow is gonna do one, Zscaler, Informatica, Zendesk, what have you. It's ev Adobe, it's every week.

And it's just, it's just, it's ridiculous. It's overkill. So the interesting thing about the Agen AI problem space is it is a super complex distributed computing problem domain.

I'd like to know where in the world all these people who weren't distributed computing experts three months ago are all of a sudden distributed computing experts able to build complex ecosystems of agents in an intelligent way when they haven't been able to do it for the last 30 years. I mean, I started with corba, I started with DCE, I have 30 years of experience building complex distributed computing networks, and it's always a problem. So what somebody who started last week is gonna have all that experience.

Come on, JP corba. So I'm having like, I dunno, flashbacks, Deja Vu again, back to the nail gun, right? It's that knowledge, that experience that you need to drive this stuff at the LLM stuff.

That's the new nail gun. If you let the person who understands how to work the nail gun build your complex network, you're gonna crash and burn you. There, there was, Yeah, There would be about this announcement is, you know, when you talk about programming languages and all the technologies that, that we work with, whether it's LLMs or, or Cowell, uh, it's all symbolic.

It's all math, right? That's what, that's what programming languages are. They're symbolic languages.

If you took, and, and I suffered through a predicate logic class in, uh, in college, that's what SQL's based on. That's what, what prologue is based on. And, and so these lang, these programming languages have structures.

You break 'em down to its primitives, here's the syntax, and you what you can do with it. So it makes it a lot easier to take a, take a model that understands each of the programming languages, their primitives and the variations of what you can do with it, and then apply the, okay, where are the bugs? Where are the things that we can fix?

I'd like to see a, uh, so a Guinness Book of World record, or a contest at C**n or something. What's the, uh, the most good bugs found versus false positive bugs found? Were there security or just general bugs?

Let, let's kind of put 'em to the test and see what does what, let let the winner be the winner, You know? But crazy's point, I I, I, what's getting lost is what these things do fundamentally well, and, and that is pattern recognition. They are essentially pattern recognition against NLP.

I mean, that's, that's what we have right now. That's what this generative ai, this attention based, uh, AI engine really is. It's, it's NLP for the most part in communication with it.

But it's, um, it's really deciphering patterns, right? And pattern, It's a heavily weighted model. I mean, that's, that's the transformer difference.

Yeah. Right? You, but it's what, but they can pick up on things that humans totally missed, right?

And that is the fun of it, right? If you put in like all the data for pharmaceuticals, right? And, and, and how they interact.

This thing has found chemicals that no human that's ever tried in the lab before because it costs it nothing to try it. But also the fact that it has the ability to see cross the, the space in a way that, you know, humans can't fathom the permutation. So I, I think that we are racing past the good juju for the hype.

So, but let me just get this straight guys. You're acting surprise that the technology industry is not like a Pavlovian dog attracted to the shiny new trinket. Is that a new, is that something new?

No, this is the first time You That's pattern and that's why I exist, or, you know. Yeah, that's what I've done my whole career At the, at, at our core, we're all gadget boys, right? Let's not forget it.

And, and so we are, there's something, I don't know if it's DNA, you know, we could do the, uh, the uh, uh, trading places, I don't know if it's in our DNA or it's the environment. But we've been trained to, to act like, you know, Pavlovian dogs. When someone has a shiny new trinket here, we all, you know, get all happy.

It's an impact. We like to tinker. We like to tinker, right?

We're tinkerers. It's a, the tech industry is a, an industry of tinkerers, Tinkerers, tinkerers. But I think we have to remember that this, you know, using a symbolic AI is, is, is more reliable.

I mean, that's what we're all saying. And remember that LLMs are just code two. So symbolic AI can be then, now the generators of LLMs, Well that, that, that's like the whole universe is in my thumbnail here, right?

Yeah, exactly. Remember everything? So Tracy talked about building essentially a rule engine, right?

Which goes back to the whole idea of, you know, prologue and knowledge basis, right? Under the hood of all this is, it's just trained by a knowledge base. And if there's garbage, it's a knowledge base.

Knowledge base. Yeah. Alright.

Yeah. There's a lot Garbage. Guys, we gotta take a break.

We're running a little behind, but we're gonna come back with our C block. And John has a, uh, a, uh, a preview of of some intel news coming up. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more. com has the largest selection of security content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more. com to learn more.

com. Home of security bloggers network. Welcome back to Techron Gang.

Hey, Monday, today is gonna be a big day, another big day for Intel. Their new CEO lip Boutin is gonna make his first public comments, since he was appointed a couple of weeks ago, had replaced Pat Gelsinger. And in a sense, I think what Mr.

Tan is going to be facing is like an Indiana Jones moments. So he could swoop in and save this great American icon institution, which has tremendous assets, tremendous brand name, but has heavy baggage or, um, things could fall apart and we could end up with yet another Intel. CEOI think we've had, not counting the interim CEOs, I think they've been four in about seven years.

So he's gonna probably talk Monday afternoon later today about what he plans to do with the foundry business, which has been losing money, but has a lot of potential. He might talk about even more job cuts, maybe cutting out, uh, the bloated workforce. There's, there's been a lot of criticism and Mr.

Tan was one of the critics of Gelsinger and to left the board last year over disagreements over the company's bureaucratic slow ways. It's risk averts culture and its lagging AI strategy. So he is going to be outlining what we can expect.

I think one of the things that might be interesting and a touch point that I talked with the great, uh, Steven Foskett about was Steven might made a good point. He's gonna be looking at, uh, what they do with the Foundry business and any hint of maybe a potential partnership where Intel would join in funding a spinoff, maybe with, with the likes of TSMC, who'd been named repeatedly as potential partners, a MD who spun off their own global foundries business in, I believe in 2009 Nvidia, who would love to be a US manufacturing partner, perhaps Apple, even Broadcom, uh, in, in any sense, something dramatic has to happen. Uh, the stock has been down significantly.

There are so many questions about this company. It's been around 57 years. It's like any big tech company has had its challenges.

Apple went through a really bad patch. We'll see what happens. The stock has been up since 10 took over.

He has very well respected from his days at Cadence and as a member of the Intel board. And, um, I'm just looking forward to seeing what he has to say in about 45 minutes, I think will be this length of speech. Do you think that, uh, he's gonna break the company up or is he gonna keep it together?

No, I don't think he will. No. He, um, he's made it clear that he doesn't want to sell off the, uh, the product side of things.

Um, but maybe they do something with the Foundry business. I don't, I I do not think they wanna do that. But you know what, if things don't turn around, they may not have, they may not have a choice.

Yeah. And the truth of the matter is, the US really needs intel. They ha they, they, they have to survive for us.

They really do. We need intel. We, uh, and I, I don't, I worry about them because I know they took some money during the CHIPS Act.

I don't think they've received it all. No, that's helped them. They, no.

Yeah, They, They, Is there gonna be money from the CHIPS Act? Because when you have an administration that wants to cut it just because it wasn't made by them, but by their predecessor and cutting off your nose, spite your face, but it begs the bigger issue. I think an important thing of his speech here is to declare Intel's independence.

They are not going to be dictated to by the us, by the US government. Donald Trump doesn't get to pay Gordon play Gordon Gecko and sell this thing off by its parts. It's still Intel.

This guy's still the CEO and he's gonna call the shot. Now, do you wanna spin off the Foundry group as a, there is a company called Foundry Groups, my friend Brad Felds company. But do you wanna spin off the foundry into a separate thing?

The best partners for that are companies who are looking to develop their own silicon and will be its best customers. Right. You know, so Tracy, Tracy mentioned as a good really imp ing um, important point is that Intel is the only American leading edge ship manufacturer.

And, and Alan, to your point, they received Intel received nearly $8 billion through the CHIPS Act, which was, I believe passed in 2022 by Congress. By Congress. So how, I mean, we've talked about this before, but the administration cannot just willy nilly come in and decide, oh, that, that law that was passed, we're gonna executive order it out, John, if the courts don't enforce it, they could do whatever they want.

I think they will, though I hope I do have faith in that, but that's another matter. I think we might be able to use. Um, Steve Jobs as an analogy here when he came.

Yes, exactly. Essentially what jobs did was we're doing too many things. We're too defocused, we're too, everybody was kind of doing their own pet projects.

You know, kill the new and kill that. Let's get back to our core. Let's up, let's really get back to what we do well, which is design great products, but also we have to, we have to upgrade our technology in bringing in, in, uh, uh, Linux or Unix, sorry, uh, for the operating system for the Mac Os.

If you look at what TA has said previously, he's telegraphed where he's going. He's saying, focus on manufacturing. Let's get back to our roots.

Let's focus the culture back on that. Get rid of the overhead. Um, you know, that was part of his cri criticism of Zel er.

Um, and really they've gotta start innovating again. And not saying they haven't in Innovat, but they haven't led innovation like they used to. And they've got to go back to their roots.

So they need to, they'll be reductions and there be, may be things sold off, but it's not gonna be things that need to be core, uh, that, that differentiate and provide their future going forward. I think that's what he's gonna do. Yeah, that's, that's a really, really good comparison to jobs.

'cause I remember so way, way, way back in the day of the, the San Francisco Chronicle when this was all happening and with jobs, it's like, let's just go back. So at one point Apple almost bought B from John Louis gae. And then they ended up with Next, and Jo remember next, and Jobs looked at this product line that Gil Emilio had effed up.

I wish I could use a profanity because Gil Lio was a horrendous CEO. He and I, he was an enemy of my, he ripped me in his book, by the way. So he, it it was, it jobs like we we're doing way too many things.

Let's go back to what we do well, but let's also innovate and let's come up with some new ideas and simplify the product line. And I think in a sense, I don't cover Intel as closely as I used to cover Apple, but it's like when you're trying to do too many things and you kind of lose your sight and lose your way, you need somebody who knows the DNA of the company and he seems to, to come in and simplify things, clean things up, do your blocking and tackling at the most fundamental level, but then innovate as well, which is what, they haven't done it successfully for years. It, it's in many regards.

Um, I I've over the, over the years I've been shocked at like the positions that Intel's hiring for and it them, 'cause it demonstrates like Not their core business. Now I get they're trying to work on technologies that leverage their platform and in addition to, 'cause it helps them to better understand what they need to do, but they invested so much additional monies into these peripheral things that sit on top of the chip instead of focusing on the chip. Right.

And you can find those projects, as you said, throughout the, throughout the company. And they, they ultimately ended up, I think, bleeding the company dry so many positions, so many heads focused on technologies that are not of core strain through Intel. Like, Like their drones.

They went down the path of drones like crazy. And I was like, what are they doing with drones? I mean, I realize drones need their chips, but it's, do they really have to drive the chip market by enforcing it around particular technologies?

I remember the high-end day, A IGP was a Falcon Shores that, that they, they ditched that there was the, uh, they hired the, uh, AMD's graphics chip engineer to develop A GPU, which failed. They, they scrapped a multi-year project. Larrabee developed a standalone GPU like NVIDIA's back in 2009.

I mean, the list goes on and on. That's it. All right guys.

Well look, I think all of us agree though. We all wanna see Intel succeed, right? Intel's success is, I think all of our success.

And that's a great, great way to end our first day of coup con cloud Native week here on Textron gang. Jp, I hope you are gonna have a regular seat at the gang table here. I'd love it.

I I enjoyed being part of it today and talking with all of you. Well, When Mike ARDS here, it's different. 'cause He runs a, mike runs a tight ship.

Jp. Yeah, he's, he's no shimmy. He's no shimmy.

Um, but anyway, we, we took a little liberty. Um, if Alan moved to Vegas, he'd be the next Oscar Goldman. Exactly.

Um, but we will be, uh, well tomorrow, we, uh, Tuesday. Yeah, no, I think we'll be recording that one from London, Mitch and I and Mike and whoever else is, I guess on board with the gang that day. But have a great week, everyone.

Stay tuned. It's gonna be cloud native everywhere. Tracy, looking good in this new camera.

I love it. John, as always, keep up the great work jp. Great to have you here, Mitch.

Thank you. Fishing travel trips for dinner my friend. There You go.

Have fun. You guys enjoy the week. Have fun.

Alright, great time. Bye-Bye everyone. We're out.