The World According to Me | Shimmy Says Ep. 37

This Isn't steady evolution, it's collision. And what comes next will be defined by how we steer through the impact. Hey everyone, it's Shimmy.

Hope you liked that little AI video we did there. Of course, that was a fake of me on the video, but this is the real shimmy right here. And you know, this week's episode is a fun one.

I think it's called Shimmy Says the World, according to me, if you've been following what I've been writing and speaking and doing videos about over the last couple weeks, you know, sometimes you get lost in the forest for the trees because I write each piece and I do each segment based upon something I see or something I'm thinking about. And I, I get in on it. But when you step back and look at the bulk of it at the body of it, you see there's a pattern there, right?

And I'm, today I'm gonna be specifically talking about the last, well, not the last couple, but some of the last articles and segments I've been doing, right? That dealt around, uh, AI of course, and data centers. And what I saw at AWS reinvent and what I've been hearing and seeing and reading about the VC market and the economic market in general, and a potential bubble, or at least how AI is driving the economic economics here.

And I want to talk a little bit about a crazy how far we've come in robotics and what we're seeing there. And then how do we be responsible? How do we be mindful of all these things to make sure that we, we do it the right way?

And that one day when your children or grandchildren ask, what did you do when all of this was happening? You could answer with a clear conscience that said, I helped and I did the right thing. Because make no mistake, what all of this adds up to me, guys, is we are at the dawn of a new era in so many ways.

You know, I remember when the 20th century turned into the 21st century and I kept asking, when are we gonna stop living off of what we did in the century before? You know? 'cause even the internet was kind of from the nineties, cell phones were from the nineties.

Cloud was a 21st century thing. But really where we are now with AI and robotics, and I think quantum is, is going to define the rest of this century, or at least for the next 30 to 50 years. So, you know, it's not good.

What I get excited, it's not just one thing. It's like multiple tectonic plates coming together, causing massive earthquakes, volcanoes, all kinds of disruption. So don't, you know, you're not alone feeling that the ground is shifting under your feet.

It is. That's the kind of thing we're seeing. And that's what Shimmy says.

And this is the world according to me. I wanna start with an article I had written coming out of, uh, some comments by IBM, uh, CEO Arvin, uh, Krishna's comments. And, you know, he, he wasn't afraid to say that the emperor forgot his pants, that in all of this talk about an $8 trillion data center billed out and, and all of the great things that can come, he thinks there's like a one to 2% chance that we actually achieve a GI given current levels, um, current technology, that the cost of these data centers, the economics and IBM is a company that knows something about data centers just don't add up.

And unless something fundamentally changes, it's broken. And sooner or later someone's gonna pay the piper for that. Um, we've gotta, we've gotta figure it out.

'cause this is not just being a skeptic or, or pundit. It's, it's a arithmetic guys. And so I think we need to, you know, that's one factoid that we gotta put in our pipe here to smoke.

Um, secondly, I was at Vegas last week with 60,000 other people or so for AWS reinvent. And it was painfully clear AI AWS came out of the chute and they wanted you to know one thing, they're big, they're bullish on agentic ai. It was agentic ai, all agentic AI all the time.

At least you would get that from the keynotes. It's when you peeled the back a little bit and went to the sessions when you spoke to people in the hallways, when you spoke on the floor that you saw that this whole AI and this agentic AI thing doesn't live in a vacuum. It's not just gonna work on, on Nvidia processors and Cuda, right?

There's got the, there's the train, there's the inference, there's so many things going on, but it's built on cloud. It's funny, you didn't hear the word cloud very much as you would think at an AWS conference 'cause they were so busy talking ai. But this whole thing is built on the cloud.

It may not all be public cloud, it's hybrid, it's multi it's edge, it's everywhere. But it's built on cloud. It's built on DevOps.

It's built on platforms. It's built on cloud native, it's built on the building blocks that we've been building our technology on, the infrastructure that we've been building on all along. It sits on top of it.

It doesn't replace it. So I think that's important to remember these, these other communities, these other talents and skill sets will be enhanced by ai, but not replaced by ai. So they're essential.

And we may not mention cloud as much as we can, but you can't take the cloud outta cloud. And, and that's a, a, a point there to say, okay, next, here's a clear sign of the bubble. I read a, I read a, uh, an op-ed over the, over in the New York Times that caused me to write one.

It was about VCs chasing AI startups. They had one VC who was driving a, an entrepreneur to his rock climbing session because that was the only time the entrepreneur had to talk to the vc. It used to be a time where an entrepreneur would, would give their eye teeth or some other body part to have to be able to get a VC's time to sit and pitch them and tell them about their product.

But that's turned on its head. The VCs are chasing the entrepreneurs now trying to give them money, whether it's going to a rock climbing session or another example in the Times article. They're flying entrepreneurs out to Vegas to drive Ferraris, right?

And then while they're driving the Ferraris, or on their way back and forth trying to get 'em to sign a term sheet, they're not doing due diligence. They're not, you know, this is like vibe coding your VC business without testing. It don't make sense.

com bubble. So to me, this screamed like, what the hell's going on? Two one, and I wrote an article about this.

You can find it on, uh, on tech strong, uh, it or tech Strong ai, excuse me. And, but you know, the, it's one of two things. Either, you know, the old saying, a fool in their money is quickly parted or something else is going on here and it, it's something else is going on here.

So, but we've seen how this plays out before, right? And it, and it wor works its way down. And guys, when I wrote this and what I put in there, please go read this article 'cause it was really near and dear to me, guys, I've lived this for 20 years, right?

com bubble. I did companies then I, I saw how it trickled down. And you know what, the VCs are fine.

Their model is, if they get one outta 10 companies that do a 10 Xer or even even a little less than that, they get a few singles and doubles. It's okay if they get a lot of failures. And you know what the founders look, they're playing OPM other people's money, right?

And so if things go south, they'll go found another company. In the meantime, they made a nice salary and then maybe they'll get something salvageable and come out of it. You know, who really gets hurt?

You do. The workers, the workers who get promised stock options and stocks take a flyer that this thing gets a great exit work for a little less work a little harder. It's the workers who get caught.

Yeah, there'll be some of you who are lucky who get the Willy Wonka golden ticket. But you know, those are the minority, those are the lucky ones. Not everyone gets the brass ring.

So, you know, you look at, uh, Arvin Krishna, and then you look at this VC article, and we may not have an AI tech bubble 'cause AI tech is real, but we may have an AI financial bubble and someone's going to get left holding that bag. The next thing I wanted to talk to you about is physical ai, as some call it, I call it robotics. There was an article, it wasn't by me, but it was on our tech strong ai, I think it was by John Schwartz about, uh, over in China.

They, they had a, uh, demonstration of a couple of their leading robot companies. And you know, here in the US we, we have Boston Scientific, we have figure, and we have the Tesla robots. China has their whole own robotic economy rocking.

And what they showed was absolutely scary legions of robots goosestepping in unison, like a military, you know, it, it was right out of attack of the clones in Star Wars. They had another robot that looked like a T nine at a Terminator. Man, this guy, you know, and there's no doubt they could break your bones and, and he looked mean, or it looked mean.

Then they had another robot that was a agile enough to like do jujitsu with you. Man, this isn't that clunky. You know, like we saw at the Russian demo a month or two ago, they marched out a robot who fell flat on its face and had to pick it up and walk it off the stage like it had too much vodka.

No, these were Chinese ninja warriors doing kung fu and stuff. And, and they did it well, it was absolutely scary, right? The question becomes, what are we using robots for?

Are they tomorrow's cyborg warriors? Are they butlers? Are they manual workers?

All of the above. Look robots paired with AI could be a bigger influence on our lives as humans, on civilization than on how we're using AI to even develop software, which is where the bulk of our kind of attention is right now. But guys, don't sleep on the robot revolution.

It's happening. And it is crazy. So another, you know, a couple weeks ago I was on shimmy sets here, and I, and I talked about tech used to be the good guys, right?

We got all of this promise, all this potential. Are we going to use it to just make a couple of tech bros, couple more zeros at the end of their billions? Are we going to use it for the good of humanity?

Right? And this goes back to what I said in the beginning. When your children and grandchildren ask you, what do you, what did you do when, when things were being formed, when it was still moldable, did you help or did you just ride that gravy train?

You wanna say, I was responsible. And so I was really happy to see the launch of something called the Resonant Computing Manifesto that really brings this home. We need to be responsible the tech industry.

It's, it's our destiny. It's our, but it's more than our destiny. It's also our heritage, right?

So from the beginning to now to the future, we have an obligation to do the right thing here. Don't let the tech bro sell us out for 16 pieces of silver to, to the government or anyone else. We, we have got it while we can.

Right now is the time to make sure we do this in a meaningful, impactful, responsible way. So, and I, I wrote an article on this also on the manifesto moment, resident computing. So I, you know, please check that out.

So I've been busy, boy, I've been a busy boy. What does this all mean? I think you take all of these pieces together, you start to see the patterns.

There's an emerging view here of a new world, a new era, right? AI is advancing faster than our infrastructure that's gonna be required to power it as we've gotta get that aligned. Cloud DevOps, cloud native platform engineering, agile, all of the ways we've been building software all this time ain't going away.

We gotta double down and use that. Leverage AI with it. VCs here are Overclocking.

If you remember Overclocking CPUs, they're overclocking and overheating the moment, right? John Chamber said it. He doesn't think the AI bubble burst in 26, but there's gonna be some violent collisions.

There's gonna be some big winners, there's gonna be some big losers. The VCs are okay with that. The founders are okay with that.

You've gotta be okay with that. AI is embodied and embedded and becoming part of the fabric of everything. We do embrace it.

We don't have the guardrails to do that now. We need things like that resident computing manifesto to make it happen, right? As an industry, the tech industry's facing its biggest scale scaling challenge.

Since the birth of the internet, enterprises are being forced to rethink architecture. Regulators are gonna be scrambling to catch up. They're gonna be three years behind.

And all of us humans, humanity, we need to decide what role we play in a world where intelligence is no longer solely biological. So what does this mean to you? I'll tell you what, if you're a practitioner, a leader, a founder, or an even just an enthusiastic enthusiast watching, here's the deal guys.

Your skills are more valuable than ever, but you can't sit on them. You gotta advance them. You gotta incorporate AI into it.

You can't sit this one out. If you think you're gonna sit out the AI wave, you're rip Van Weel and I'll wake you in a hundred years and you're obsolete. Get curious about constraints.

Understand where the boundaries are. Be intentional and responsible and meaningful about the systems you're building and what you're working on. Because here's the truth, man, the future's not being just handed to us.

We're building it in real time, in real time. And the values we embed now will last for decades. So where does shimming land?

We're at a crossroads. We're at the dawn of a new era. It's a rare, maybe once in a lifetime moment for most of us, not as companies, not as governments, but as builders and as humans, we need to set the right tone for the next half century.

It's not about greed. Um, ai, cloud, robotics, the economics. They're not separate stories or silos.

Just like DevOps bust down silos, we've gotta bust down the silos. This has to all be coming in here. 'cause history, as I said before, history is gonna ask a simple question.

When the foundations were still wet and the future was malleable, what did you do? Ask yourself that. What are you doing?

My hope in Shimmy's world, according to Shimmy, is that we choose stewardship over speed, clarity over chaos, collaboration over fragmentation. Because the next era of tech isn't just about innovation, it's about responsibility. And that folks is the world according to Shimmy.

Have a great week. I'll see you next week. Shi says, says.