GCN ’24 Show Wrap | Google Cloud Next ’24
[Savannah Peterson]
Welcome and Introduction
Good afternoon, Cloud and AI fans, and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We are here for our last segment at Google Cloud Next. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my familiar faces and friends, and apparently my ability articulates kind of waning here at the end of day three. We’ve got Dustin, Rebecca, and John. Such a lovely week with the three of you. My gosh.
[John]
This is our wrap-up.
[Savannah Peterson]
Yeah. Yes.
[John]
End of the show right now, after this segment. I know. We get to relax. I’m kind of burnt out. I don’t know why.
[Savannah Peterson]
We’re only in Las Vegas. I’m super hydrated all the time.
Show Highlights
It’s fabulous. We had 35 segments this week. Over the course of the three days, we had 42 different guests. So many compelling insights.
[John]
A lot of stories. Over 30 stories on SiliconANGLE posted, shipped. A ton of content. Yeah. A lot of flowing content.
[Rebecca]
Booth and Hallway Conversations
And a lot of great conversations just in the booths, in the hallway, at lunch. It’s a lot of energy at this show.
[Dustin]
Can we get the AI to summarize all of that, John?
[Rebecca]
Yeah.
[Dustin]
Into like a one-pager, maybe?
[John]
I don’t have the chip implant yet, so I can’t.
[00:01:01]
I know Gemini is all over it.
[Dustin]
Yeah.
[John]
I’d hope so. Google’s listening.
[Savannah Peterson]
Favorite Announcements
I’m curious. So, we’ll go through a bunch of highlights, but I’m curious what your favorite announcements were. Dustin, I’m going to start with you.
[Dustin]
Well, I mean, the generative AI for code and developers just continues progressing. It’s not a big surprise, but the steps that we’re taking toward high-level articulation of what you want some code to do for you, and code being generated from that, it’s incredible. And there’s a lot of players out there working on that. I mean, Google’s just incredible when it comes to that technology. They are.
[Savannah Peterson]
And it’s a huge… I mean, you and I talk a lot about the developer experience. And some big leaps and bounds… Yep. …made this week, I think.
[Rebecca]
Non-Tech Announcements
Rebecca, what about you? I always gravitate toward the announcements that are really for the non-tech people. So, this is really about how normal people do their day-to-day. And so, I’m most intrigued by the announcements that have to do with our personal productivity.
[00:02:01]
So, the Gemini, I’m just going to say. I mean, this is what I think will have the most impact on people’s day-to-day experience of their jobs.
[John]
Unannounced Highlights
John, what about you? That’s a tough call. There’s so many announcements. I think two things. One is what wasn’t announced. You didn’t see the Jensen on stage, the playbook of these big shows where they trot out and they try to do AI washing. They delivered AI goods. So, that’s just kind of categorically just props to Google on that. I love the Gemini 1.5 Pro with the million token context window. Yeah. I know it’s more, and they won’t say the number, but I think it’s like 10 million. So, there’s a ton of headroom there. That’s going to change what I think is my favorite announcement is the combination of the BigQuery, the developer tools. But the cross-modality analysis, that’s going to make things so much better because now you can bring stuff into the cloud like a form that’s got an image on it or a video from the cube that’s got text, audio, and video, or take a cube interview and maybe run it through Google Vid to make a TikTok video.
[00:03:02]
So, I think we’re going to see massively new use cases. So, this multimodal foundation models, I think, will change the app game, and that’s going to add it to the coding thing Dustin said. So, the cross-modality analysis is going to open up productivity gains for stuff that’s going to take a lot of prep and big data, line up the data. So, that was my favorite. It’s kind of geeky, but I think that’s going to have a lot of impact and will enable agents, better coding, just cooler stuff for an average person.
[Savannah Peterson]
Savannah’s Favorite Announcement
How about you, Savannah? What was your favorite? Well, I’m going to go with you, Rebecca. I like to think about, we talk a lot about 2024 being the year that we make AI real. And when I think of real, I think of my mom as a user, for example. And I love my mom. Shout out always to mom. But I think of, when is it going to actually touch her life? And when is it going to make her life easier or more efficient or more fun or help her creativity or whatever that might be? And so, I think a lot of the workspace announcements are really interesting. I love that you brought up Google Vids.
[00:04:00]
I mean, I think the fact that we’re seeing AI tools for creators coming out of a space that’s about collaboration from Google is really interesting.
[Rebecca]
Google’s Familiarity
And one of the things you have said that I found very astute, Savannah, is that Google is such a familiar platform to everyone. We all have Gmail accounts. We’re all very familiar with Google as a verb. And so, it’s an intuitive way to interact with. And so, if they’re introducing AI to the masses, it is something that we all can kind of get behind.
Changing Names and Solution Outcomes
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[John]
Actually, one thing I’d like to point out, Dustin brought up earlier about the naming. They changed names on things. They don’t call certain things they had before. Like in the Kubernetes area, they call it cross-cloud, cross-environment. So, you’re starting to see Google starting to think like it’s about the solution outcome, not so much the product. So, that’s cool, too, because the AI is being driven from boards now. So, it’s like we heard on theCUBE. The big highlight for me was hearing, which was new to me. I knew the board’s pressure was high, but all the actions coming from the board and management.
[00:05:02]
Get AI because the business growth, companies realize that the future value of their business will be impacted by Gen AI, and they don’t know what to do.
[Dustin]
So, get on it. Yeah, I can totally see how much Google is listening to its customers and prospects, watching what the competitors are doing. But I totally can see the Google roadmap, the cloud roadmap here, really being driven by the boardroom all the way down to the developer and everything in between. So, many of the products that we’ve seen launch are solving real needs, and those are solutions at its core.
[Savannah Peterson]
Boardroom Driven Roadmap
I think that’s a really good point that you just made, Dustin.
First Gmail Email Addresses
So, I’m curious. So, I was a Gmail beta tester 19 years ago, back in the day. So, I want to know what your first Gmail email address was.
[Dustin]
Oh, it’s the same Gmail email address I have, yeah. But do you remember you used to have to get invites?
[Savannah Peterson]
You had to get an invitation, right? No, I remember.
[00:06:00]
[Dustin]
Who did you get your invitation from? How about that?
[Savannah Peterson]
So, I was the yearbook editor-in-chief, and it was the co-editor of the publication. But we were chosen because we were creators to be testers from Google. So, we got a little bit of an allocation. So, then I had, I think I ended up getting some.
[John]
How many Gmail addresses do you have?
[Savannah Peterson]
John, that’s a number I don’t reveal on camera.
[John]
That’s a personal question.
[Savannah Peterson]
But I have, I definitely have more than one, and they are used for multiple purposes. Can you share your first? Yes. So, my first email, I don’t know why I didn’t think to use my name. Like most people would have, I didn’t. This was kind of back in the AIM days when you had your screen name, you know, your AIM name. So, I was Jumping Goose. Because I was a triple jumper, and my mom always called me a goose.
[Rebecca]
Oh, a track gal.
[Savannah Peterson]
Okay, I like it. So, when Bobby was talking about track earlier, I was thinking about that. That’s pretty cool. Yeah, so I was Jumping Goose. Sure, whoever has that email now, hopefully they’re enjoying it.
[John]
Jumping Goose, if you’re out there, I’d love to buy that from you right now. Just for personal vanity, and I’ll sell it back to Savannah.
[00:07:03]
Hotmail, I had an AT&T.worldnet email address. I had Hotmail. Yeah, Prodigy. I didn’t have a Prodigy. I didn’t have a Prodigy. AOL, of course. AOL, I went with a… What was your screen name, John? JF781 was my… But I did Google Gmails, John, before I got the name. Then I realized there’s other furries. I’m like, I’m going to get the family name. That was early adopter, so everyone…
[Dustin]
Take this back to AI and say, you remember how groundbreaking it was to get an email address, right? And that was like, are you on the line?
[John]
I shared my first email with my mom.
[Savannah Peterson]
I mean, I shared an email address with my mom.
[John]
Did you have an MSN email? Yeah. Did you have an MSN? Because it was expensive.
[Savannah Peterson]
MSN.com. So you just shared one, right? Yeah. Which is crazy to think about now. Yeah.
[Dustin]
I mean, I was just bringing this to the AI point, which is like, at some point, email just became taken for granted. Everybody had one. It’s the way we did everything. And I don’t know. It feels like we’re right at that crossover point where AI just becomes part of our every expectation of every piece of software that we have.
[00:08:07]
Just like everything is going to have an email address, or every business is going to have a website or an email address, right?
[Rebecca]
And ChatGBT will seem so quaint and antiquated. Remember how we were all awed that ChatGBT could pretend to be Shakespeare? I mean, it was just…
[John]
We’re so old, we used to write emails.
[Savannah Peterson]
Yeah. I know, right? We didn’t just prompt them.
[John]
We didn’t just prompt them.
[Savannah Peterson]
AI and the Internet
It just brought up an interesting point. I think… Yeah, I love… Someone smarter than me once said something to me when I started working in 3D printing. And when we got the Internet and we got computers, we did what we’ve always done. We wrote letters. We just called it email. So I’m curious to see, with this new tool, with AI, with AI everywhere, okay, great. So we have this thing, and it’s like the Internet. What’s the real power going to be? And so I’m curious if… And don’t worry. I have not forgotten. We have not talked about your first email, Rebecca, and we’re coming back to that. It’s right logged in my brain. But I’m curious if you… What you think are going to be…
[00:09:01]
Or if anything you heard this week made you think bigger picture what some of these solutions are.
Life Science and Edge Devices
Not just the tech behind the solutions, but some of the most powerful solutions that are going to come out of this. I got a lot of talking to the life science guys.
[John]
I mean, I’ll start. I thought having the arm guy on with Mark Lohmeyer from the CPU, it wouldn’t reveal the nanometer size. It’s probably seven or maybe five. Not three. It was three. They’d be bragging.
[(Unidentified)]
It was three.
[John]
The arm is very good for, like, edge devices. So to me, I think when you start thinking about data personalization, we talk about this all the time, Dustin, the user experiences that are voice-interacted or automatic to users or invisible, as we talked about earlier. I think you said that, Savannah, is key. That’s going to be, I think, where the dots connect with AI, when things become so abstracted away and they just happen. So if you’re in your daily life, the edge devices will pick it up and that your personal LLM will be there. I think we’re going to have our own kind of foundation model, and we’ll have our own agents acting on our behalf.
[00:10:05]
AI Agents
We don’t want to do QBD. We just say, go, agent, you know, holograms.
[Savannah Peterson]
I don’t like to think of them being more charming than us. I feel like, you know.
[Rebecca]
AI Doctors
They’re there, though. Remember, we did an interview with a McKinsey consultant, and he was describing a study that patients said that their AI doctors, they knew it was an AI doctor, so they knew they weren’t talking to a human, but that they preferred the AI doctor because the AI seemed to empathize with them more and seemed to listen to them more. And I think, most importantly, which is where I’m going with this, I see the power in medicine, because as if you’ve ever had any kind of medical issue, you know you have to go see the specialist, and then you have to talk to consult with that specialist, and you really need everyone’s brains working to create a diagnosis and then a treatment plan. But that’s what AI can do. They can be the specialist over here, and that general practitioner, and also…
[00:11:01]
[John]
AI in Medicine
I interviewed Radiation in the cloud. They’re doing stuff now on a large scale where they can detect stuff at the point of scanning. So today, you scan, someone gets here, they got to call a doctor, is he available, you leave, you come back, oh, let’s get a different angle. They got it so good now where the AI assist can help the operator be the doctor on the help, and then shoot angles to get better pictures at the point of… And now, that’s all done in the cloud. And you have the collective scans of everyone else working. So that’s happening now. I just interviewed someone here at the show on that, and that’s a game changer. Because the alternative was the old way. Misdiagnosis, cancer, breast cancer’s huge, that’s a big area.
[Rebecca]
These two, we’re talking about these two, SIOS.
[Dustin]
Connecting the Dots
Connecting the dots. This all starts with big data, machine learning, and now we’re able to make inferences and better decisions about it. So I’m going to bury all the other ideas that I would have talked about and say, Rebecca, wow, the improvements to humanity we can make by applying AI to medicine, yeah, the sky’s the limit, right?
[00:12:12]
[Rebecca]
Yeah, and it’s going to affect all of us.
[Savannah Peterson]
Democratization of AI
It’s really going to improve quality of life. I mean, we talk a lot, we joke a lot, you and I, especially John, about the democratization of AI. It’s not democratized until it’s helping everyone at every income level in every country in different parts of this planet.
Telemedicine Adoption
One of the things I thought was really interesting when I was preparing to speak at CES and talk about AI and healthcare, specifically, I’m so glad you brought it up, was an actually pop quiz for you guys. When telemedicine came out, what demographic do you think used it the most?
[Dustin]
Young people, millennials, or whatever the youngest age was, you know.
[Rebecca]
Okay.
[Dustin]
That’d be my guess.
[Rebecca]
What are your guesses? I’m going to go with old people because they’re the ones who are the sickest.
[John]
Fair guess. No adoption at all. No one wanted to use it. Okay. That’s like Price is Right. I’ve got to go with $1. That’s like, you know.
[Savannah Peterson]
Low income.
[00:13:00]
The lowest income among us are the highest adopters of telemedicine. So when we think about the ability to bring things like medicine to more remote areas or to different places, like you’re talking about, and to be able to engage people who are completely forgotten in a traditional system, we can achieve so many great things for the planet.
[(Unidentified)]
Yeah.
[Savannah Peterson]
So it’s very cool. I am excited. I love the Price is Right chime.
[(Unidentified)]
I’m like, yeah.
[Savannah Peterson]
Rebecca’s First Gmail
Okay. So, Rebecca, what was your first Gmail?
[Rebecca]
It’s my same Gmail now.
[Savannah Peterson]
It’s the same here, yeah. None of you wanted to be incognito, so I’ve always had multiple personalities and alter egos.
[Dustin]
I’m going to have other emails.
[Savannah Peterson]
That’s called proton mail. Yeah.
Expectations Not Met
Super fair. Was there anything that either of you expected to see this week that we didn’t?
[John]
I thought it would be more. I know they did on this day, too, and I think they’re holding back because I don’t think they want to release it too much because it may seem overhyped, but I truly predicted, and I still stand by it, that the agents are going to be a big application.
[00:14:03]
Agents and Reasoning
The idea of these agents emerging that are going to augment the human in the loop is going to be a big part of that next gen. It’s a chat bot today. We start getting multimodal ingestion and reasoning. The prompt answer side of AI, everyone knows, but this whole reasoning and reinforced learning piece will be huge, and I think when agents start getting that real knowledge and reliability, that’ll be a game-changer. I thought we’d hear more about that, but we didn’t hear as much as I thought.
[Savannah Peterson]
Collaboration and Interoperability
I thought this was really interesting, Dustin. I’m curious to see how you think. Coming from Paris at KubeCon, where we actually didn’t talk about AI as much as I expected us to. No. The conversations we had on the desk, nowhere near the level of what I was expecting. Versus here, I don’t think we got two minutes into an interview without it coming up. This is kind of the Gen AI party right now, the Gen AI, Gen AI party, which is pretty cool. I would say that that fit where I expected.
[00:15:02]
The thing that surprised me was the level of collaboration happening between these huge, massive companies, and the desire for interoperability, and the awareness that in order to achieve these big dreams that everyone has with AI, that a lot of the huge players in the room here are going to have to work together.
[John]
Show Summary
Can I raise my hand again?
[Savannah Peterson]
You sure can, John.
[John]
I’m going to call on you. The question’s a tough one, because we’re theCUBE. I think as a show, they did check the box. Think about the order of magnitude they had to deal with. Workspace cloud, which they call the collaboration cloud, security cloud, data cloud, developer cloud, modern infrastructure was included, Google distributed compute cloud, cross-cloud network, workload optimization infrastructure, and Vertex AI. All that stuff was on the docket, and they did talk about it. There was still so much stuff buried in there. It’s a tougher question because they kind of talked about it, and you heard different groups. The whole developer side, that didn’t get much play.
[00:16:01]
Gemini Code, it’s a big deal, but it didn’t get buried. It just was so much. So it’s a tough question because we were only here. On theCUBE, we didn’t hear a lot about more of the technical stuff, although we had CPU on. They did check a lot of boxes on the show.
[Savannah Peterson]
Sessions and Show Floor Energy
They did, and there were a lot of really interesting sessions. Sessions on sustainability, sessions on women. They had a whole inclusion lounge here. Show floor was pumping. I would say that was another big surprise for me, was just frankly how many people. This is double the size of Google Cloud Next last time, which is really saying something, and it’s really feeling like the before times in here. There’s just a lot of energy, which helps us here.
[John]
Ecosystem Success
Everything’s lined up, and again, when you start having that AWS effect, I call the fire hose, you’re starting to see it. That’s the signal to me. And again, the big surprise to me is the continued success of the ecosystem. I knew it was going to be big, but not as big this year. They all had bigger booths. They all had parties. There was biz dev activity going on, so there’s action happening here at Google Cloud.
[00:17:00]
[Savannah Peterson]
Food and Fun
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of action happening. We’re in Las Vegas, and we talked a lot about food in Paris. What kind of fun did you get into this week, Dustin?
[Dustin]
I had a dynamite steak last night, and I don’t eat a lot of steak.
[Savannah Peterson]
Did you go to Salt Bae’s place?
[Dustin]
No, but that sounds awesome too.
[Savannah Peterson]
Yeah. There’s a lot of good steaks in Vegas. Well, were you, Rebecca, any memorable?
[Rebecca]
Yeah, I said it this morning. I went to Carson Kitchen in Fremont, which was divine.
[Savannah Peterson]
Highly recommend.
[Rebecca]
We had chicken skins. We had this bacon and jam on a warmed baguette. We had a beet salad. We had deviled eggs. Oh, yeah, you could have a little bit of healthy. I love that balance.
[Savannah Peterson]
A little bit. Good for you. Yeah, exactly. We’re so virtuous. Yes. John, did you leave the convention center, or did you just eat the complex carbohydrates provided?
[John]
The finger food at all the events was tons of activity, so I did a lot of events. I did hit the noodle Chinese place. They had great lo mein. I thought that was phenomenal. And the rice was phenomenal. Some good dishes there. And then had strip steak last night with the team and some other analysts.
[00:18:01]
That was a good steak, and that was pretty much it. The rest was all grab food here.
[Savannah Peterson]
What Can’t You Say Today
Cookies and whatever else is available. All right, last question for you all, and I’m going to wrap us with a question that I wrap every one of our guests with. What can’t you say today that you hope to be able to say the next time we’re at Google Cloud Next? Dustin, I’m going to go to you first.
[Dustin]
I’m going to go with the security angle. Is that you? Yeah, me. I would love to be able to say that all the AIs and models are secured, that we really have a tight bound on security. I don’t think we can say that yet. I think there’s a lot of work to do. There’s a lot of conversations I had this week around how we do that, what needs to be solved, but we’re not there yet. So hopefully we can put security in our rear view mirror for AI, but I don’t think so.
[Savannah Peterson]
Security Concerns
All right, so security over here. Rebecca, what about you?
[Rebecca]
I’m going to go with my take on things, which is the individuals, your mom.
[00:19:02]
Impact on Individuals
I want her to feel that AI is helping her do her job such that she has more time for you, more time to be creative, and just a better overall quality of life because AI is reducing her toil. Yes. So that’s what I want. I love that. My mom will love that too.
[John]
SiliconANGLE and Model Garden
For me, two things. One is from a personal side with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, I can’t say that right now we would move all of our code off Amazon into Google because we have probably a good use case for Google Cloud, I’d argue. After this show, it’s on the table. Wow. I would say that we’ll evaluate, but we’ll check all the requirements. So I can’t say that right now, but it’s on the table. So it’s a discussion. Next year, maybe. We’ll see. So maybe that’s one. From a reporter’s standpoint, from a research analyst’s perspective, the agent builder component of Model Garden, I hope to say next year that that will be more robust with better use cases, better usability and programmability for customers so that we can have more agents.
[00:20:04]
I think that’s a disruptive because that’ll tear down old technology that was built pre-Gen AI. So I think that’ll bring in the new era of Gen AI technology that will change the app market. So I think that agent, I hope to say next time that’ll be better.
[Savannah Peterson]
New Breed of Entrepreneurs
Cool. Well, I can’t wait to see. I hope that we have a new breed of entrepreneur or business model that comes out of this. I hope we have more customer stories that are actually at scale with data they can share publicly that show the benefits and the impact beyond the hype. I want it to actually be real. We’re in the year of making it real, and then I want the reality next year, which will be great.
Thank You and Sign Off
John, Rebecca, Justin.
[Dustin]
You guys have been amazing. I got to just say. No, this has been really fun. You guys have been amazing. What about the production team, huh? Who? Oh.
[Savannah Peterson]
She’s getting there. Oh, yeah.
[Dustin]
Don’t steal a thunder.
[Savannah Peterson]
Yes, my thunder is actually just a nice one.
[(Unidentified)]
Let’s go.
[Savannah Peterson]
It’s about other people. Let’s go. But I mean, this truly was. I mean, the three of us really had just a blast.
[00:21:00]
Rob as well did an absolutely outstanding job. We had such a massive team. Shout out to everyone behind the camera because they are even more beautiful than us. We’ve got Andrew, Anderson, Noah, Jay, and Don. You guys really held it down all week. Thank you for listening to our voices and making us look good and making the guests feel comfortable, most importantly. And thank all of you for tuning in wherever you might be on this beautiful planet Earth. We’re here in Las Vegas, Nevada, signing off for the last time at Google Cloud Next. My name’s Savannah Peterson. You’re watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.