YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Muglia

lines on the record: 66
first: 2023-09-08
most recent: 2023-09-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“They can learn more about the book by going to the datapreneurs.com and learn a lot up there. There's a bunch of links to other podcasts and things up there as well, some information about the book. And I hope that people enjoy it. And if they do, please leave a review on Amazon.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They didn't act very ready, though. They didn't act that ready. I mean, they got kind of caught flat footed, didn't they? I mean, they really felt to me like they got caught flat-footed and they had all this technology. You know, the idea that Microsoft is leading Google in this is crazy. I mean, Google was so far ahead in AI. Everybody knew Google was going to be the winner. And somehow because of open AI and some really smart moves on Sacha's part, it really changed some things. And I think it's good because it's a shake-up that the industry needs. In general, I think it's useful for large numbers of companies to have access to this technology to build their own solutions. And now we know that's going to happen.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we have these bots in front of us, I think we're going to be trained to go to them. So there may not just be one place you go. There may be many bots you talk to. And those bots will talk to search bots. So it may be that the portal is not, the search browser in the future. It may be that whatever app you're working on. So the whole model has a chance of changing, but we haven't really seen that fully play out yet. I do predict Google will lose share, but I don't believe they'll lose their position as the leader.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went to one vendor, and the cost of running it was so high in different regions around the world that it was almost impossible to replicate that. And the only company that managed to do a decent job of it is Microsoft. And that's because it just hung in there and did an incredible job of turning Bing from a money losing thing to at least being a decent business for Microsoft, not a great business, but a decent business. And then he hung in there for all this time until this new innovation came out, which changes everything. It's a total change. And it's the first time where Google is vulnerable. Now, will they be unseated? No. I mean, I don't predict that. I don't predict that because I predicted Google will respond and build great products that take on this new paradigm. But I do predict they will lose share. I think they will almost certainly lose share. The other thing that's interesting is that with the behavior of people has been trained to go to Google.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biggest and most profitable app on the planet. Let's just start with that. So, in terms of, you know, you give the numbers, in terms of any app, nothing is bigger than that. It's the biggest it gets. And it was impenetrable. Google was impenetrable until now. Was that Microsoft? We competed, we did, and still, we did and they still do compete with Bing. I watched us try and compete. It was one of the most heart-wrenching things to watch because, you know, what I learned from the leaders at the time from Microsoft was how just because of the way the industry is structured, it resulted in one big winner. You know, typically in an industry, you get a big winner, you get a winner that is the leader, but then you have three or four other companies that have material market shares as well, or at least two, like you've got, you know, Android and Apple. You have at least something like that. Search was really different because it just, it was a singularity. I mean, it turns out to be its own type of singularity where everything.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think search will be totally different 10 years from now than it is today. Let me start by saying that. I don't think search will be, you know, the way the Google is today with the 10 blue links and the zillions of ads, all the damn ads in front of it. So I think that it will be disruptive in the sense that these answer bots are already very disruptive. I use an answer bot, which is one I'm an investor in called perplexity that I think does a nice job of giving you good summarized answers to your questions with references to tell you how it got to those answers. And it avoids hallucination by working with current data. And I think they already do a better job than search for a lot of problems. And I'm already from Google to those problems. Interestingly enough, where Google is still most useful is where you need the ads, where you want the ads. That's where Google is really particularly good these days. But other than that, some of these other things can solve a problem. You know, search is the most profitable.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think investment managers are people that work with people and talk to them. So it's just like everything else. There's the software will make the job of an investment manager different for sure and maybe easier in some ways. But I think the human interaction is still going to be important. And I think that we'll continue to see that in most industries. That, in fact, this software won't replace people. It will augment what people are doing. That's the way technology has always worked. I think this is the way it's going to work this time. You know, that said, when we have technological disruptions, while it does create a lot of new jobs, it does impact people in their current roles. So some people will, you know, whatever, how the world changes will change in a way that is difficult for some people to actually make the transition. So it has a human impact. And I don't want to, I don't want to diminish the importance of that human impact. But in general, I think it will advance society and help things for people, including for investment managers, who I think very much play a role.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“World. And those models are going to become more and more the software that we build. If you look, it's happening already. The entire software industry is moving now this year to perfect models and to take these language and artificial intelligence models and tune them, fine-tune them for different applications. So instead of writing code specifically to do things, we're going to take these models that are general purpose models and apply them to solutions. And that's the new type of coding. That's the way the coding is going to work in the future. So models are going to eat the old way of doing software.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've always built software directly to do things. Today we write software very, very directly and it's focused on you learn what something does, you write a piece of code that solves that problem. Where we're moving towards a world is where we create essentially a twin, a digital twin of an organization. And that is a model of the organization what it does. Today it's very difficult to do that and software does it in a way, but it's very opaque and it's not structured in a logical sense. I think over time, the way we operate our business and run things will be to have these models that define what our business process is. And as we learn from that, that model will reflect what that business process does. All of these machine learning and artificial intelligence things are models. They are a type of model that emulate and essentially some physical thing and doing it in a virtual.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years ago. I mean, it literally with the technology three years ago, it was not there. Now it's there and it's actually working. So to me, it's about innovative things that break new ground in data. And I'm looking at new ways that you can apply the relational model to both analytics as well as to operational applications. In my investments in small companies fall into these categories.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm not a traditional investor. Let me just start by saying that because my number one concern is actually learning and advancing technology in areas that I care about, not so much return on investment, although I try and make investments that will have rational returns. I try and be rational about investments. So my focus is always on things that are new and cutting edge that are in the data space that are solving problems that couldn't be solved before. Like an example of a company I've been involved in is called Docugami. It's solving the problem of taking business contracts and turning those contracts into data that can be actioned by an organization. I mean, today contracts are programs that are interpreted by lawyers and executed by people. And over time, that program is going to be interpreted by AI and executed by computing systems. And Dakugami is playing a pivotal role in connecting those dots together. It's a classic example of a problem that could not be solved three years.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hopefully, we'll have all kinds of tutor bots. I look forward to tutor bots that help to tutor young children. Lord knows our education system. I don't know that that's the answer to our education system. I'm not claiming that's the answer to our education system. But Lord knows something needs to be done to our education system. And this might help. I can see ways where this could help. I'm not claiming it's a magic bullet, however. You know, we will see, like I say, psychologist bots. We're going to see answer bots. We already see some of those that answer questions. They do a pretty good job of that today, actually, a pretty amazing job in some senses. Soon we're going to see action bots that do things for us, you know, like schedule a reservation at a restaurant for us where we don't have to go through the process of doing it. Just tell it what to do and it'll do it. You know, these things are all going to appear and they're going to be from different companies. And Elon will have his bot. He'll have his X bot and Mark Zuckerberg will have his Facebook bots. And of course, Google will have theirs. And now lots of little companies will be there.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They surely do, and he's investing. He's investing actively in building artificial intelligence. I think it's connected to his new ex-service that he's creating. Whether you like Elon Musk or hate him, he has a right to build his own solution around there, just like Meta has their right and Google has their right, and Microsoft and OpenAI have their right. And we'll see all these companies build things. To me, the great thing is now that we have these open source models. And by the way, I have to give Meta and Mark Zuckerberg incredible credit for releasing the open source Llama 2 model recently, which is really having a dramatic impact in the industry. It does appear to be a really, really good model in open source and is competitive with some of the frontier models from companies like OpenAI even. But what this means is that we're going to have every possible solution. You're going to have counselors that help counsel people that are AI counselors.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was an issue before AI though, wasn't it? I mean, I got plenty of it before AI, it seemed like. But it'll get worse. It'll get worse.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People. You can also almost certainly use it to block spam. So we'll see all of these things happening. And some of the laws like anti-spamming laws will apply directly because they're just”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While it's possible today, it's probably going to be trivial within a year or two. And there'll be apps for the phone that'll the kids will be able to do it with. This is a potentially very dangerous thing, and we do need to make sure that laws prevent people from impersonating others without their consent or acknowledgement. You know, I don't have any problems with people kidding other people, you know, comedians have been mocking people for decades. As long as you say it was created by AI and you don't misrepresent it, whatever. But when you misrepresent it, I think it should be illegal. And that's an area where regulation is required. Some of these other concerns like of how these things get super intelligent and things like that, it's too far out to regulate. There's no way to regulate those things. It's just too soon to understand what the issues are. But as we begin to build as real products emerge from AI and capabilities appear, AI will be an incredible spamming device. You can use it to spam.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When January was, and I was finishing the book, it was unclear how people were going to react to this. And I was worried that I didn't know how strongly people would react. I'm no longer worried about that. The volume has been set to 11 since then, and every possible concern has been written. I mean, there's a new article every day. You know, it's all over the business press. It's in the New York Times. It's in, you know, Vogue magazine. It's everywhere. And so the concerns are very present. And there are valid concerns. And there are needs for some government regulation. To me, a very good example of that is these deepfakes. You know, it was never possible to build a video of a person saying something that they don't believe. I mean, you could never really get away with that. You can now. I mean, these systems, it is possible to create a deep fake, which is pretty indistinctable from an original.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And every tool that people have built has been used for every possible purpose good, bad, and evil. And that's going to be true for these large language models as well. But because they're open, we'll also see lots of good things come from it. And I think the fact that there is a lot of innovation will allow us to stomp down the bad uses and focus on the good uses. That's the thing that's amazing about this. It's such a multi-purpose tool.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To do. And so it's very much based on values in, values out. And so I think the industry is recognized how important it is that these models operate with a high set of ethics and standards. And they will be built based on the values of people creating it. Now, since I wrote the book and finished the book, the thing that has changed in the industry that is incredibly positive change is that in addition to having GPT-4 from open AI and BARD from Google and, you know, whatever, the big, big companies, we now are seeing open source models being introduced, which have very powerful capabilities, but can be used by anyone to do effectively anything. Now, some of those things will be not so good. People will do bad things with them. These models are tools, just like anything else humans have built.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We follow, we do what we do. And most of Asimov's stories about robots are actually all the stories are parables of how you live and work with robots where robots are following these laws and people are not. And, you know, so this idea, like what does it mean to not injure a human being or to have a harm come to a human being? That's very vague, right? It's not obvious. Well, Asimov spent many of the stories talking about that in different types of harm and how that happened and how the robot would react following the laws. And so it's a chance to think through these issues because these are values essentially. And as we create these large language models and these intelligent machines, unlike Asimov's robots, which follow these laws because they were hard-coded in their positronic brain, these are models that are very malleable created by people. And what they do will be dependent on what we tell them.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That came before him, the writers that came before him, he saw these devices as machines that were created by people to serve people. And he recognized if you're going to have machines interacting with people helping us with tasks, there needed to be some rules that they operated by. And so in the early 1940s, he came up with three laws of robotics. The first law, a robot may not injure a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. That's the first law and it dominates everything. The second law, a robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law, so it has to follow orders. And the third law is a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. So this idea that these creatures would live amongst us, but following very directly these laws, and of course, you know, humans do not.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to put this in perspective of this guy. I mean, Ezmoff was a brilliant man. I think he was actually a prophet in the sense that he saw things ahead of where of the rest of humanity was. In the early 1940s, before digital computers were invented, Asmoff was toying with this idea of intelligent robots living amongst people. And as he began, and he was a science fiction writer, that's what he was. He was a very good one, but he wrote stories. They're all stories, right? Fictional stories. And he had this idea that unlike previous generations of people that thought of intelligent beings as Frankenstinian monsters, you know, that were created by man that proved that man should not create these things. I mean, that's essentially what thousands of years of history associated with humans creating super intelligent things or robotic sorts of things came from. Asmoff, unlike all the pre-”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the title, it's the singularity is near. He wrote this book, he wrote this book about 20 years ago, but it just released a newer version, a new book that updates this.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happening. It may not happen. We don't know for sure. But to me, the real key is let's make sure that as we build these machines that may do be able to do things beyond us, that we instill within them the values that we think are important. I mentioned values earlier on. I can't stress the importance of this enough in building companies, in leading your life, but for goodness sakes, when you're building technology, the values of the people are imbued inside the service and the technologies that are created. And I can see these things. I know the values of Microsoft. Of meta inside Instagram and Facebook. You can see the values as much as they exist in Google inside the Google products. And so as we create these new things, the values that we imbue in them will be very, very important and will direct what they do.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where they're really smarter than all of us. That's the idea of superintelligence. And what's happening through this process, and when we feel it and see it almost every day in our lives, is an increase in pace and innovation. Things are happening faster and faster. And that potentially will continue to increase. And if, in fact, we do build these machines that are very intelligent, that will continue to increase the pace of innovation. What a technological singularity is, is effectively a situation where machines begin to advance science and technology at a pace that is beyond human capacity to really understand. And that's this idea that things go very, very quickly. Ray Kurzweld was the one who first brought this up many years ago with his book about the singularities near. I've had chance to meet Ray once in my life and I think he's probably right about what he mostly wrote. He would tell you, I think it's a lot sooner than even he thought now. And so that direction seems to be.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, again, I sort of have always viewed. I mean, I start by saying that when I was a young man, I spent a lot of time reading Isaac Asmoff in the early days and went through, he wrote over 400 books, which is ridiculous. And I can't say I read all of them, but I read a lot of them. I've covered a lot of Isaac Asmoff. And so I'd always had in my head this idea that people would have developed intelligent robots that are machines that work and live amongst us because that's what many of Asmoff's stories talked about. And I always believed that people would develop these systems that go beyond us. And in some senses, that's our purpose, is to build something that can take the next step. And again, I never thought I would see this. I thought this was all post my lifetime. And, you know, now I see it coming closer. The idea of, first of all, you've got artificial intelligence intelligence, which is essentially a machine that's as smart as a person. Superintelligence is when these machines continue to get smarter and smarter.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Care for elderly people or cut the lawn. I mean, all of those things are going to happen. Some of that is a bit further away, though.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so every industry is going to be impacted to some degree. What industries are the least impacted? Well, it looks like in the short run, the industries that are the least impacted are the ones that involve human labor in some ways. I mean, it's been said that the last, you know, we thought that the jobs that were going to be impacted in the short run would be drivers and things like that. Well, that may happen. But in the short run, the impact is probably on information workers and how they work in their jobs. And the people that are cutting lawns and doing all of the tasks that are required in life are probably the least impacted in the short run. Now, that may change. I believe that will change in the 2030s because the 2030s, I think, is the era of robotics. And that's where we will really begin to have robots live and work with us as a part of our daily lives, whether it's autonomous vehicles or robots that help us to clean the house or”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is because if you look at what is behind every industry, intelligence is a big part of every industry. I mean, if you sort of see what's behind an industry, well, you've got labor for sure. So there's that. There's intelligence and there's knowledge. Those are all elements of every industry. Well, we have computers have done an amazing job of storing knowledge and that is really, you know, what is knowledge? Knowledge is data that has been analyzed. And a conclusion has been reached. That's thought of as knowledge. And sometimes those conclusions are correct. Sometimes they're wrong. Society over time reaches what are generally believed to be correct knowledge conclusions. Often that gets encoded in things like Wikipedia. Sometimes it's right, you know, mostly it's right occasionally it's wrong, but that's knowledge. So we've had knowledge. Now we have intelligence for the first time that we can combine with that knowledge to solve problems.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that you hit on the real big thing, actually, which is the shrinking of timelines. And that's what's happening. And you talk about the trend in the arc of data innovation. It's actually been a constant speeding up of how things move over time. If you look back in the 1970s and 1980s, this was before email even. And information moved between people at a much, much slower pace than it moves today. So technology has sped up. and the ability for people to work with and exchange data has constantly been increasing the pace of innovation. AI is exactly the same way. It will be a significant increase in the pace that innovation happens. And ultimately, it may continue to go faster than really we can even really understand. We'll see over time. You ask about what industries are impacted. I think a bigger question is what industries are not impacted. And I can't think of any. I mean, every industry is impacted with”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now beginning to enter this trough of disillusionment as people are saying, okay, fine, how does this affect me? How does this affect my job and what I do? And we're waiting for products right now. And there's a chance that those first products might be a bit disappointing, which is what often happens, that when first generation products come out. And so that's all part of that trough. And now that, you know, the”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and we're in that period, we're in a waiting period right now. I actually feel like Gartner has this thing called a hype curve. I don't know if your viewers, if your readers or your listeners are familiar with this, but it is when a new technology is introduced, it goes on a hype cycle. And the curve goes up at a fast pace of high pi, pi pi pipe, and then the hype hits the peak of hype. And then it goes into what they call the trough of disillusionment where reality strikes. And in that period, people become disillusioned about things. And then eventually it goes into a cycle of usefulness. And it has a lifetime afterwards where people understand what really is possible. Well, the first six months of this year were the hype. You know, I've never seen hype like AI hype. It was the most fast hype, biggest hype I've ever seen in my career. And I think we actually hit the peak of that hype cycle sometime in early July. And I think we're”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Processes. It's not as advanced yet as human intelligence, and there's definitely missing elements, but the technology is able to solve problems that literally were unsolvable two years ago. And all of a sudden, there's this vast set of problems that I've wanted to solve and I have companies that want to solve that. Now, all of a sudden you can solve them. And essentially this idea that you can take any task, any process that people do and knowledge that is in people's heads on how to do that. And you can effectively bottle it. and put it inside a piece of software and take that knowledge that domain knowledge that you have and actually make it so that a computer can replicate that. It's a remarkable advance and it affects effectively everything. So it's an incredibly exciting time.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty breathtaking. And then I watched with the stuff that was happening with stable diffusion and the dolly and the drawing apps. And then like the rest of the industry, I was just caught sort of breathless by how fast and how far ChatGPT has come. And so that made me realize the world is totally changing and changing at a pace that's much faster than I anticipated. And the remarkable thing about this is that for the first time we have what you can think of as intelligence. the ability for machine to make independent decisions that are not driven by logic that was created by a person. You know, programs are written by people and they're very logical in the way they do things. And that's the way a lot of artificial intelligence used to work, rules-based things. Now with these neural networks that have grown in very large scale, all of a sudden these networks have a type of intelligence that is very similar to human intelligence in the ability to think through.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first, I mean, I work with Microsoft, and sometimes I get a preview on things that are coming at Microsoft. And I had seen in early 2022 the co-pilot work that the GitHub team was doing. And I found that breathtaking. I mean, I found that sort of breathtaking, that this technology was writing a material part of the code for a programmer. And Microsoft believed that that number would be around 40%. And that seems to be holding true, that when developers use copilot, that 40% of the code that they check in is actually written by copilot, which is a stunning number. I mean, you know, you're talking about a massive increase in productivity of developers, which is one of the biggest gating factors to technology advancement, is how fast can developers write code. All of a sudden, we have a very significant 30, 40% increase in capacity from this technology.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To build such devices. I've always believed that. But I thought it would be more like 2100 or 2050 when that happened. And I figured I wouldn't be around to see it. And now I think it's going to happen by like 2030. I sure hope to be around in that time frame. And so I recognize the horizon for progress had moved in considerably. And so the arc now changes and talks about things like artificial general intelligence and even superintelligence and beyond.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scale. I'd always seen an arc of data innovation in the book always had in it an arc of data innovation. But where I my head was was that it was all about driving better decision making, the digital data economy, where the world is today being driven by data. And that was the world I sort of saw when I started writing the book. And then in the 20 months or so that I spent writing the book, I watched how the industry was advancing in the areas of AI, these foundation and large language models. And I was sort of caught like many of us caught breathless by how fast things were going. And I realized that the arc had changed in that this idea of artificial general intelligence, you know, a machine that is as smart as a human being. I have for my entire career believed that's where we were headed, that people were building and we're going.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been in the industry for so long and I've been working with a number of the players for so long I've had a really unique viewpoint on how the industry has evolved. And what the ARC really does is it talks about the key data innovations that have happened over really the last 50 years. And it describes key things that have happened. 1960, it's more than 50 years. 1960s, the advent of static data or structured data and some of the early database products relational coming out in the 1970s and then really taking off in the 1980s. We have text and internet and search appearing in the 1990s with semi-structured data coming from that. All the log files being thrown off by these business systems, these applications, web servers that now you have the ability to analyze behavior. And then in the 2010s, the modern data stack making it possible for people to analyze that data at real time.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't expect it by any means, and it wasn't something I was directly driving. I did know that was happening. I think it was great for the stock. I mean, it helped to really drive the stock up. I mean, I do think I feel a little bit bad. No, I feel a lot bad. Not a little bit bad. I feel a lot bad for public investors of Snowflake because very few, if any people have made money on Snowflake in the public market because, you know, it opened at a very high price and then it went up from there and it subsequently down below its initial, it's below what its initial offering price was when this market But I wasn't shocked by what happened. The board very much wanted a big bang IPO. They got it. They got it. Problem is it's hard to maintain that afterwards.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pricing. They lose their discount. So the customer and the company are incented to do another deal and purchase more capacity. And that model has worked very, very effectively.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Physical service that you're paying for the rental of these hardware because it isn't that. It very much is an application service, a platform service for customers. And so by moving to credits and this t-shirt sizing, it moved to a much more logical approach to describing things, which allowed us to apply a discount. The biggest thing about a credit is it's a vehicle, it's something to discount that customers can, you know, based on how much they're purchasing, et cetera, you could give a customer an appropriate price. And so that's what put the whole thing together. It is now pretty widely accepted in the industry as a model as a variation of the usage-based pricing model. There are a lot of details in there too, by the way. Like, for example, a customer buys $100,000 in capacity. They can use that capacity any way they want. They can use it for compute. They can use it for storage. They can use it in any region in the world they want. And when they run out of capacity, they go back to essentially book pricing.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In place was move away from a very physical base model to a logical model. So instead of saying a customer gets a warehouse that has four nodes in it, we said that was a medium warehouse, I think is what that is. And so I went to t-shirt sizing on it where each warehouse size doubles the previous size, just like small, medium, large, extra large. I think they go up to six XL now. So it's, you know, gets to very large clusters of servers that can work together. And we created this idea of a credit, which is a effectively, you know, a credit is an hour of usage of one of these nodes. But by calling it and creating it as an object, a virtualized object, it allowed us, it made it easier for us to discount it, easier for customers to consume it. And I very much wanted customers to think about Snowflake as a value-based service, not a”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the only route at some level because when you move to a cloud platform like Snowflake is, you're paying, you have real cogs underneath you. So you have to have a model that is somewhat driven by usage. And the more directly correlated those two are, the better off you are. So usage-based pricing had been in place previously. And in fact, Amazon probably should be given credit for driving that with AWS, which is almost entirely a usage-based pricing model. Now, Amazon is an infrastructure as a service provider. And so their pricing model is very physical in its nature. You are literally paying per computer you buy or the amount of storage you're using or the amount of data you're flowing across the network. All of those are measured and you're charged for your usage associated with it. The biggest thing that I did at Snowflake when I put the pricing model”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What they now call fabric, which is an integrated set of data products. So they all have products that compete with Snowflake. I still think Snowflake's the best product in the market, but Snowflake's ahead in a variety of ways, but it's a highly competitive space, which I think is great for the industry. I think that's a super good thing.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very competitive right now. There are five, I always say this, five major data providers, data platform providers. This is often called the modern data stack. It's really this idea that you can consume data from any source. It goes into a cloud service. The cloud provides you with the scalability and the flexibility that's there. And SQL is used to help work with data. So the modern data stack has become very pervasive. In addition to Snowflake as a platform provider, Databricks is another independent provider that is done quite well. They focus more on the machine learning side, less on the data warehousing side, but they're building data warehousing and Snowflake's building machine learning. So they're competing very fiercely with each other. And then there's the three cloud providers, all of which have viable products these days. Amazon has Redshift in their data product line. Google has BigQuery, and Microsoft has built...”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not so sure about that. They always competed at the same time. I mean, you know, it was always, and it varied. I mean, I had a horrible relationship with Amazon while I was running Snowflake, largely because of my past history with Andy. Andy and I had our first tangle when I was at Microsoft. Andy Jassy, who now runs Amazon. So Andy never forgave me for the years ago when he was building AWS and he wanted to license Windows server. And I was happy to license him Windows Server. I just wanted to license it the way I license it to all my other customers and he wasn't happy about that. So I think that was there for a long time. And I was able to build a reasonable relationship with the Microsoft team when I was running Snowflake. And then as soon as I left, it totally reversed. And Frank built a good relationship with the Amazon team and Microsoft, the Microsoft Things soured. But the cloud guys were always a little bit of a co-opetition. And a lot of it was competition, to be honest.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had an opportunity to contribute to that. When we had these values, we really embraced them and drove the company that way. The other thing I'll say is that Snowflake didn't try and solve every problem ourselves. There was so many, the space is so large. So we put in place a company that was very partner centric, that works with partners across the industry and does so very openly. And I'm pleased that that culture is still in place today. I think that came from Microsoft, myself and the head of product at Snowflake now, Christian Kleinerman's X Microsoft, a bunch of ex-Microsoft DNA now and there. And Microsoft, in my opinion, is the most partner-centric company that the world has ever seen. So we learned there.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in that value, the first line of that value is we only succeed when our customers succeed. Which turns out to be true from actual revenue generation perspective because Snowflake is a usage-based pricing model. And so essentially we didn't get paid unless the customers used our product. And so we had a lot of reason to want them to be successful in using it. We were motivated to do that. They were motivated to do that because they had a problem they wanted to solve. And we were in a good place to solve that. So in addition to an incredible product, we built a very customer-focused company and a very value-based company. And that was important. Values were something I discussed in every team meeting I ever had. We put the values together about 12, 18 months after I got there. It was a bottoms-up process. It started in the engineering team with some leaders in engineering, included a process that touched on every group in the company.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some credit in building a phenomenal company. And I feel very good about the values we put in place and the approach that we took. I always felt that in order for companies to adopt a product, they really want to like the company and want to want like working with the company. I've dealt with so many difficult companies in my days that I realized it's such a breath of fresh air when you're working with companies that want to solve your problems. And we built into our values this realization that helping the customer succeed. Our first value, which we put in place was we put our customers first. And I learned that value from honestly Jeff Bezos, who I was fortunate enough to spend a small amount of time with when I was at Microsoft. And I realized how customer-centric Jeff made Amazon. And I wanted to make sure Snowflake was as customer-centric as Amazon. So, you know, we put our customers first. And, you know,”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scale, it was built using a more traditional database technology that was built in an on premises environment, and it didn't have the cloud scalability characteristics that Snowflake had. And so what happened is that Amazon in doing incredible work establishing the cloud and frankly building a very good product in Redshift, what they did is they seeded the market for us. And customers who adopted Redshift, if they scaled and grew in size, they would need an alternative solution because Redshift's ability to handle large amounts of users or data was much more limited. And Snowflake turned out to be the answer. So we were able to move a lot of customers over. The product was a lot better than anything else. It could solve problems that nothing else could solve. And I think the way we built it was in a way that was very friendly to customers. I mean, I give Ben Juan Terry almost all the credit for building a phenomenal product. But I do take...”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT