2026 Predictions: What Comes Next for AI, Cloud & Cybersecurity | TSG Ep. 998

Hey, everybody. Welcome to a little special edition of the Techron Gang. We're gonna be talking about our predictions for 2026.

We have a big virtual conference coming up on Wednesday. We invite you to check that all out because we've got analysts from Vitor and all kinds of folks coming in to talk about what they think is gonna happen in the coming year. But we're gonna do a little preview here and maybe throw out some, uh, provocative thoughts and see how it goes.

But I'm, I'm just gonna start by welcoming Steven and jp. How you guys doing? Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. It's good to to be Here. Yeah.

So here's my provocative thought for, to lead this off with, but I'm gonna say that most it organizations are gonna spend a boatload of money in the next three to four months because they're gonna engage in what I would call hoarding. And the world is a little unstable, and nobody seems to know exactly what's gonna happen. So a lot of it folks are gonna decide to spend as much of, um, their budget as they possibly can before it might go away, because everybody's concerned about, well, who knows what's gonna happen in South America?

We don't know what's gonna happen in Taiwan. The whole situation in Europe is still somewhat fluid, and it people are not immune from geopolitical concerns. Steven, what do you think?

Am I crazy to open up the year? Well, you know what? I am going to, just for the sake of argument, take the opposite.

Um, I think so far that the global economy has provi proved, uh, surprisingly resilient. Uh, I think there's been a lot of hoarding going on in the last, uh, year or two, especially with regard to GPUs. Um, certainly that's prob I I think that's gonna continue.

But that being said, uh, you know, I'm not hearing the kind of pessimism from the world, uh, from, from, from the market that, that you might think that I might think, you know, I, I think if you had asked Steven, what's your opinion, I would've agreed with you. But if, if you're asking me what's the world's opinion, well, it's been surprisingly not negative given, you know, all this. Uh, what do you think, Uh, jp, you wanna jump in here?

You could be the Ty vote here. Well, Uh, to be honest, I actually think that the, uh, there's a certain amount of dilu, uh, you know, disillusionment around, uh, not delusion. That's what I meant.

There's a delusion happening. Uh, people are, are delusion that is not facing reality. They're not addressing the real world geopolitical factors.

It's almost like, you know, wall Street just said, ah, that's nonsense. Nothing's gonna stop us. And it's like they, it just seems like everybody's living in this alternate universe in their head and not facing the reality and, and factors of what's really going on in the world, um, which is disconcerting to the nth degree.

Uh, I think what you mentioned, the factors you mentioned are critical, or they are, uh, they, they should be having a financial impact on organizations on, uh, trading, and they're not. And, uh, you know, the, I I, I've done my own research on this. It seems that there's a fair amount of trading Wall Street trading that's going on that's based on sentiment and not logic.

People have thrown logic to the wind. It's like, there are stocks that are climbing that, if you look at it from a balance sheet perspective, from a business perspective, if you were to do a straight logical analysis, you wouldn't be putting a dime into this company. And yet they climb on a daily basis.

Right? And it's like, you know, I asked, I did, I asked ai, are people just doing pump and dump schemes or is there a way to analyze that? Is there, uh, and it came back and said, this is just sentiment.

This is investing based on sentiment. And I, I think it's the same thing in the IT sector. I, I, I think that there is, just stick your head in the sand and pretend that everything's okay.

And I got news for you. It's not, I am a, a believer in the great depression that's coming, right? I think we're headed towards 10 cities again, like in the 1920s, because people are not admitting that AI is going to take jobs and it's going to destroy the labor economy in many, many countries.

It's just gonna happen. I see it happening, and it's, you know, it may take two years, it may take five years, but businesses are going to replace people with ai and those jobs are not gonna come back. I don't care what AI leaders say running these businesses.

They're lying. This is not going to create more jobs. This is not, this is not another industrial and, you know, uh, revolution where the change actually opens up a world magnitude.

We don't, this requires less humans to be involved. I don't need more people writing prompts. I need less people.

So even the revolutionary side, the thing that says, okay, we're doing it differently. We requires less humans. So I just think people are got their head in the sand.

Sorry to be Debbie Downer, but, and I wish it wasn't the case, but it's just, when I look around, this is what I see. So it sounds kind Of like you agree with me then, that if you look around and you ask yourself objectively what should be happening here, it should be like pitchforks and, um, and torches and, and panic. But instead, it seems to be business as usual, Maybe how much of this is that Wall Street is kind of completely divorced from any economic reality, and it's becoming a, you know, it's, it's essentially gambling and, but people are seeing their stocks go up and their, their individual portfolios look sound.

And so they're kind of just ignoring a lot of these fundamentals that JP is talking about. Not quite clear that we're all going to hell in a hand basket, but there's certainly more risk than there is that people seem to be willing to acknowledge. Steven.

Yeah, I I think that's, um, certainly the case. I think that, you know, if I, if I want to be generous, I think that business and banking and so on, um, I think they think they've got it worked out this time, you know, this time, Rocky, watch me pull economy outta my hat this time for sure. Um, you know, I, I I think that, that there's this sort of overwhelming sense that, that what's the worst that could happen?

You know, uh, I guess Yolo, uh, the YOLO economy, that's where we live. Um, you know, that it's this idea that, um, that somehow there's a light at the end of the rain, you know, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We just have to find it.

The rainbow will help us find it. Remember what Sam Altman said, that we're just gonna ask AI where the profit is and it'll tell us. Um, he, he did say that last year, and, um, and I'm still waiting.

Um, I hope it tells us soon. And, um, and also I think that there's a sense, and, you know, maybe a little bit cynically, that, uh, governments aren't going to allow the economy to collapse. So we may as well leverage it as much as possible to maximize our returns.

Because ultimately the, you know, the US federal government, um, the government of China, the government of Europe will act as a backstop if things go tremendously south for their local companies. And so far, I think it should be pointed out that those governments have acted as a backstop in many recent crises. And I, so I think that business people have learned that, you know, really what's the worst that could happen?

So OpenAI or somebody goes bust, but the rest of the economy, they're not gonna let the rest of the economy flop. So they'll just inject, you know, a few trillion dollars and fix it. That's a, that's a very interesting perspective, Steven, because in the past, our, you know, we've seen the government do this in 2008 and more recently in 2020, we've seen the government saying, I, you know, we need to step up.

You know, the Fed has purchased, you know, a certain amount of these corporate bonds, uh, on, you know, and, and as part of the effort to save the, you know, and to keep things from going south further. And they're just finally getting outta that, right? They're just unwinding that.

And I think, here's the issue, and, and it's scary as heck. They learned their lesson because 2 20 10, 20 20 compounded what happened in 2008. It wasn't like there was a valley, and they redid it, it was a compounding effect.

2008 happened. They thought about how are we going to unwind this? And before they had a chance to unwind it, they hit, they COVID hit, and we got 2020, and they got, again, that same position.

We have to throw money at this in order to make sure that we don't end up in, in, in a depression. And now they're finally unwinding this. I think they've learned their lesson that you just have to let the market, you know, do what the market's gonna do.

You can't manipulate the market. And that's what they did in those scenarios. They manipulated the market.

And, and I think the next time they're gonna be like, we can't afford to do that again. We just, it, it would be, it would be a more devastating effect. I mean, we're, you're already at unmeasurable me amounts of trillions of dollars in debt in, in the US alone.

I mean, there's a great video that, um, Anthony Robbins does on what is a billion, and then what is a trillion? And it's like if you took all the salaries of all the sports and you put it in there, okay, we got this little box here, meanwhile, and, and he's doing a billion, right? And, and or a trillion, no, he was doing a trillion.

He was doing a trillion, right? But it's a little box and the corner of the trillion, right? All these salaries and all the entire industry, and it's a little box.

So you begin to understand scale, what is a trillion dollars? What's 24 trillion? Where is it getting made?

Where is, where is it getting produced? And I, I, I'm at a loss to figure out where that money's coming from at this point. Mm-hmm.

So Steven, you know, it's not unusual where we have situations where two things that are opposites can be true at the same time. But when I talk to it people about this, I get kind of two vibes. One is their concern that there'll be convergence of their job functions and roles, especially in larger enterprises where you have a lot more specialists, because AI will drive that level of convergence.

And there won't be this separation of storage, networking, and application management. And we'll see some centralization at the same time, they're also optimistic that, well, whatever happens it, people will be driving it. So they will be the ones least impacted by JP Morgenthal, Al's doom and gloom prediction here, because they'll be around to make sure that they're the last one to turn out the lights.

Fair assessment, or what do you see, what do you see happening to the, the job and the functions of people in it? Well, I'm a little less, uh, optimistic about that, uh, honestly, because so far, uh, companies have been very happy to cut jobs in order to prop up revenue, uh, profitability and AI ambitions. And it's not so much that AI is taking people's jobs, though.

I think that there's a delusion among management that that could happen. I think instead, AI is taping taking people's jobs, not by replacing the tasks they're doing, but by taking the budget that paid for their jobs, essentially. Um, you know, hey, it, you know, we need to buy more GPUs, or we need to spend more with our, you know, AI service provider, so where are you gonna cut money?

And that ends up being people. And I think that to, to a great extent. We've seen some particularly foolish moves from some companies, uh, both in the IT industry and also in the general industry when it comes to IT thinking that, for example, that the first thing that they should cut is the more experienced employees, you know, cut all the high paid developers and keep the cheap ones and copilot will make them better.

Uh, that doesn't seem to work. Um, we've also seen a dramatic slowdown in hiring, uh, young people out of college who are graduating with, uh, software engineering and, you know, data science degrees, that sort of thing. Uh, once again, I think the idea is, well, AI is gonna mean that we don't need them.

The truth is AI means that you desperately need them, and you really ought to be investing there instead of cutting there. But, um, you know, ai, it's, you know, generative ai, the, the, the sort of textual generative AI that we're working with right now. It's so convincing that you talk to people and they think that it's thinking, and it's not, we don't have artificial general, general intelligence right now.

We won't have art. There's a prediction for 2026. We won't have a GI in 2026 or 27 or 28 or 29, no matter how much money we spend on this, because that's just not how this works.

It doesn't mean that it's not useful, but it's not really thinking. And I think that it's just a really good imitator. It's really good at pretending, you know, I'm not a doctor, but I play one on tv, so you should trust my medical advice.

You know, that's basically ai. And I think that that has, um, convinced a lot of people, I've had a lot of conversations with layman in out there who aren't in the AI world, and they are very concerned that AI is going to, uh, take over jobs and stuff. And they're seeing this as a, a true replacement for human thought, which it really isn't.

But it's hard to have that conversation for them because they can get on chat GPT and type something in, and it'll come back with a truthy sounding response, and they'll say, well, there you go. We don't need editors, writers, teachers, therapists, software developers, et cetera anymore. The truth is it, that's not what's happening here, folks.

And I think our, our listeners probably know that. Okay, let, let, let me share a story. Would that be okay, Mike?

Um, in the 1990s, I was a, uh, software developer consultant in Wall Street, on Wall Street, and, uh, I made really good money. And I'm sitting there, and I'm trying to understand at this point in time, why would a company ever want an employee? Why would I want to pay the overhead of health benefits and worry about them when I can just hire people on an hourly basis?

So I've been looking for when this is all gonna blow up. And, and the only answer I could come to over the years is because that's the way we've always done. It's how you build companies, right?

You have employees. I think we finally are hitting the threshold, and you wanna talk about a prediction for 21, 26. Um, and this is optimistic, not pessimistic.

I wanna be able to present some good view, some positive juju. Um, I think companies, businesses have finally, you know, we've had the gig, uh, uh, economy growing. I think we finally are hitting that threshold with businesses saying, why do I want a staff?

Why do I want employees? It's such a burden on me. Now, I do have some tax laws that I have to adhere to, like if I hire a consultant for too long, they get called an employee.

So I have to manage that, but I'm far better off just paying a consultant than I am employing someone. And so I think 2026 is the year that we start to see the old system burned out and burn out the building. Big conglomerates and major corporations with tens of thousands employees and companies start to shrink from that labor pool perspective.

But hiring consultants. So I see more people, the opportunities will move to more of consulting and creating software. Now, I think AI is going to re change the game, and it's going to create more content creators.

And by content creators, I see that as an application developer, somebody creating the piece of software and selling it online. Somebody selling, um, videos, training videos, whatever kind of videos, entertainment videos, right? Using this technology.

So I do see that as, as people get transitioned out of that old world economy where I'm sitting behind a desk nine to five, and it finally burns away that thinking that this is how you know it's done. And we start to move to a a and we start to shift to a more, um, independent based economy where people are responsible for making their own money for running their own business. I think, you know, that is where you'll begin to see AI have positive impact because it's going to drive, it's gonna allow these companies, these individuals, or three people, four people companies to be able to produce and generate revenue, Right?

So you, you better find somebody with an entrepreneurial mind to help drive that. And unfortunately, most people don't seem to have that. Um, let's get technical for a minute about AI since we went down this path, but I would argue that the last year was all about foundational models and GPUs, and this coming year is gonna be all about the opposite small models and AI accelerators and things that are not GPUs.

So are we gonna see a fundamental shift in where the focus of AI actually is? Steven? Yes.

Yes, we are. Uh, I think Nvidia buying grok with a q not the other grok, um, in, uh, at, at Christmas, uh, signals this shift. I also think that Google's tremendous success with Gemini, uh, which they're proud to proclaim.

Gemini three was trained entirely on asics, not on GPUs. Um, and it's just as good as anything out there in the market from philanthropic or OpenAI. I think that this signals that the time has come for a shift away from, uh, GPUs and Nvidia knows it.

And so I absolutely do think that, that we now are entering the post GPU world, which means that there are going to be some tremendous shifts in terms of technology focus, um, economic and market shifts. If, if a MD, or I'm sorry if, uh, if, uh, Nvidia hadn't just bought grok with the queue, I would say Nvidia is behind the eight ball on this. But well, they just made the move they needed to ma move, uh, to make, to stay ahead of it.

So cool. Um, but I do think that we're gonna see, um, incredible, uh, shift toward, um, products from, you know, companies like a MD, uh, Broadcom, Intel. Uh, you know, an interesting one is Apple.

They've been showing off, um, what the M five, uh, M four, M three, you know, even can do with ai. And in fact, um, one of the great, uh, hackers out there, Jeff Ling, um, who has a great YouTube channel, uh, just demonstrated the, the best AI workstation you can buy right now to test frontier models at home is in fact the Max Studio. Um, because it's the cheapest, it's got the most memory.

And now Apple just very quietly introduced the ability to cluster four Mac studios together, um, with, uh, RDMA access and end up with a really massive, uh, AI cluster at home. So I think Apple is really gonna benefit from this shift as well. They never invested a dime in, um, AI specific GPUs, but they've been investing a lot in tus.

And like I said, their unified memory architecture is really interesting. So yeah, I think we're in on the midst of 2026 being I I not the year of Linux on the desktop, but the year of AI on the desktop because of the shift toward cheaper hardware. Mm-hmm.

Jp, do you agree with that? I know you've been playing on own AI models extensively, but is this the year with, you know, not only small models but custom models and will everybody kind of build their own model that is tuned for their particular business? I, I still don't believe there are enough trained individuals available to drive that strategy, even though I do believe that it's a beneficial strategy that companies really should be owning their own models, uh, especially when it pertains to that model representing what their business does and how their business works.

Um, and, and so there is some growth in the industry with regard to available skills to make that happen. So I, I don't see it being 2026, but certainly it's coming, uh, probably next year or year after for sure. There, there will be a deep focus on that.

But yeah, I, I, I, I think that people moving away from the GPU factor is definitely already happening. You know, there was this mad dash to, uh, to get GPUs, people didn't understand how ll ands really work, and they thought that you needed A GPU in order to be able to do effective AI processing. And the truth of the matter is, is once the model's trained you, you know, it's inference and you don't really need a GPU.

So these asics that actually buy into the attention based, uh, algorithm and part, and inject themselves from a hardware perspective into executing the, the, uh, look forward, look ahead and things like that, uh, and provide multiple memory cores that are all working together to provide that, uh, you know, uh, attention based processing in hardware, uh, I, I think is going to be a game changer with regard to, you know, delivering better performance for those who are doing inference, which is, that's, you know, a after the model's built, that's 99% of what you're selling. Yep. And that where, Sorry, Steven, will the bottom of the data center market drop out because, you know, we spent all this money on building out AI data centers that we may or may not need.

And not to mention the locals are getting angry. Yeah, I kind of worry about that. Um, you know, there's, uh, a question here.

If, if we don't need this ABS in intense, um, data center, you know, GPU data centers to, uh, to, to move forward with ai, then what does that mean for what we've just spent, you know, probably a trillion dollars building out? It's not that we don't need data centers, and it's not that we don't need power and, and cooling and all that sort of thing to run this stuff. It's just that there, it's different.

You know, one of the things I think that is concerning to me about the investment in GPUs is that for the most part, it's, we say GPUs and I think people kind of think, oh, like a graphics card. Like maybe I could reuse that to play Fortnite. You know?

No, no, no. These are so different. Um, the GPUs that are being deployed for AI processing are completely, entirely useless for other tasks.

Um, they, the, the, the, the, the physical characteristics of the GPU itself, the characteristics of the card of the server that it sits in, of the rack that it sits in of everything, the, the connectivity, the storage, the data center, et cetera. These are intensely special purpose devices. And if we find that we don't need that going forward, if we find, for example, that we'll never reach a GI, so we don't need to continue to pour money on ever larger models, then why did we build all this again?

And I think that that could be a major story in, in 26 or 27, as the industry realizes that we've just spent a tremendous amount of money investing in the wrong thing. Now, it doesn't mean that that what happened was useless, because all those models are still good and they can still run on stuff and, you know, you can run 'em here and there, but maybe we didn't need to spend all that money on those data centers. So I, I do worry about that.

Yeah. I'll throw out another prediction 'cause we haven't talked about cybersecurity yet, but I will predict that there will be multiple catastrophic security events involving AI this year, largely because we're rolling it out without much of a concern about how to secure it. And b jp I'll go a step further.

I think the bad guys are having a good laugh 'cause they're like basically sitting here going, how much easier could they make this for us to go in there and, and take something over and just hack our ways into it? What do you think? I think there's two factors that people need to pay attention to.

One is, as you mentioned, um, they are, uh, presenting a, a security risk because they don't understand how LLMs work and how data is used or, or provided or made available, uh, to the, you know, to, to both public and private environments. And that will be, uh, leveraged by, you know, bad actors. But also, and I think the bigger one is the speed at which bad actors can now operate building and hacking.

Um, I is, you know, a hundred times faster, right? I mean, you just basically took, you know, a hacker maybe take 10, 15 days to work through a site and figure out where its weaknesses are, and it just loads up a chat GBT, and it does it in an hour because it's writing the code and it then tests it and said, Nope, that didn't work. Let me try this.

So the number of generations of code that you can throw at a site to hack it has gone exponential. And that is where I think the bigger danger lies, because you're operating at basically a machine now hacking you and not a human. Yeah.

And the quality of that hack has gone way up too. I, I know that it sounds strange to say that, 'cause I just said, you know, I was just criticizing the quality of what comes out of generative ai. But the thing is, generative AI is really good at fuzzing and generating code and, and iterating on code.

And, um, and, and so you can end up with some really strange and useful hacks against conventional systems using generative AI systems. I completely agree with you, jp. Uh, the other thing that that strikes me is the only way to defend against this escalation is to use, um, basically to, to hire a big boy to defend you.

And so I think that increasingly we're gonna see people moving, um, uh, embracing, uh, offerings of cybersecurity firms, big cybersecurity vendors, you know, um, and that's gonna centralize everything to the extent that, to Mike's point, when that breaks, then it's a big problem because, you know, we're gonna see more CrowdStrike type, um, errors, I think in 26, where imagine, um, you know, imagine somebody finds a hole in Cloudflare's web application firewall, you know, and, and maybe Cloudflare's really good at that, and they're able to defend people against these AI powered attacks. And then suddenly somebody finds a hole in that and it affects, you know, 60% of the web instead of 6% of the web, things like that. I think that's gonna be a, a huge deal.

But then of course, on the flip side of this, there's all these AI applications and it is impossible to secure an ai, uh, a generative AI because data and commands are mixed. That's just a basic computer science fact. And as AI applications roll out, I think we're gonna see a lot more stories of people exploiting the AI itself as a way to break in.

Well, Well, well, they're not hiring, you know, the appropriate level of educated staff to, to help manage these things within these businesses. They're letting people who have no real background, who are, you know, just starting to become, uh, entrenched in these technologies and have no real experience with it. Put up chatbots.

Okay. Uh, look, you know, asking Jim in the corner office who has a little bit of programming experience to go build your chat bot, that's a really bad decision for the business. You Mean Jim from the office?

Yeah, Jim from the office. That's right. So I think people, to your point, don't also realize how trivial it is to create a prompts injection attack where I'm just basically putting up some code somewhere on a webpage telling your AI agent to, I don't know, it's a great idea to drive that car off a cliff or whatever it is.

And, you know, you get the idea and the example, and I'm exaggerating for the point, but, um, when we think about this, you know, Steven, what is your sense of the quality of all these AI agents that we're supposed to be embracing so far? We went from co-pilots to AI agents, and everybody was like, this is gonna be the great new era, and AI is gonna finally deliver on its value. And yet when I talk to people, like the one thing that keeps coming back is that they're complaining that the AI agent is just basically stupid.

And that's because it's not thinking. Yes. Uh, yeah.

I mean, think, think about it this way. Like, you know, the, the most widespread consumer, uh, implementation of AI ever was Siri and Alexa, and what did people immediately do, complain about? It's being stupid, right?

As soon as you know, and people get frustrated, I get frustrated with these things so much because I'll be like, you know, take, hey, you know, uh, a navigation system, take me to this address that I go to all the time, and it'll be like, oh, you want to go to Portugal? Um, you know, it's like whatcha are talking? They, they are stupid.

They're gonna be stupid. They're gonna Stupid, but agents are gonna be the same Thing. They, they are, no, and I did a, I did a little video on this.

Stupid is not a fair term. They are, they are creative entities, okay? Generative.

They are really good at taking a bunch of content and creating something new from it. That is a form of thinking that it, it's just not rational thought in the way we think about it. But the, what they're doing is, is creating something that per, you know, that did not exist from content and concepts that do exist that it knows of in its corpus.

And so I think the big issue is really realizing that people have built these huge corpus of, you know, or corp i, I, I don't know what the plural for corpuses are, but they have built these huge knowledge base in vector spaces that have an incredible amount of information in it. And that is, uh, and there is a certain amount of intelligence in that. I, I don't want to, I don't like the term stupid.

They're not stupid. I, but they are creative and they want to create, they want to create, that's the thing they want. They were built to be generative, not to take, not to be slaves, not to take dictation.

They don't, I, I feel like sometimes they are a little vengeful when you ask them, Hey, I want you to do this. No, I don't wanna do that. I wanna do what I wanna do.

And I think that's built into the nature of what they are. I don't know everybody in real life that I know who is, uh, shall we say somewhere on a spectrum of the unhinged is also very creative. So, but we just call Indeed.

Um, but it is true. I mean, it, it, people I think are expecting these things, you know, to be like, you know, the robots that we grew up with and seeing on TV and, you know, I, I robot where, you know, they, they take orders and they don't talk back, and they don't, you know, they do exactly what you say. And that's not what this is.

This is a technology that was just created to generate content. And, and, and the, the, to your point, it will generate an answer come hell or high water, you know, if you ask it a question and it doesn't have, and that's not part of what it can do, it will confidently report something. And because that's what it, like, like you're saying, that's what it's made for.

It's made to confidently tell us things. And I think that, um, that is entirely opposite of what we expected. You know, what we expected from Star Trek and science fiction and Asimov and everything we expected, um, you know, deterministic ai, we expected that, that it would be subservient, that it would do what we asked it to do, that it would only do what we asked it to do.

We did not expect to get this. We, uh, there, there have been some changes lately. The bigger LLMs have now incorporated in aa in an, in a attempt to, uh, change the perception of this hallucination and how it impacts they have implemented the realization, uh, for the LLM itself to realize it has gaps in its knowledge and now is becoming inquisitive.

So instead of giving you an answer like Claude now a turns around and ask questions of you and says, oh, can you answer this for me? Can you provide this information for me? I don't, you know, so I, I think that's good.

I think that's a way of expanding the knowledge base to better answer your question without making something up, if it has no, you know, data or it has a gap in its knowledge that it can't find, Right? So if I wanna look at the glass as being half full, there are folks out there who are saying that, well, you know, every force has a an opposite and equal reaction. And this might be the year of innovation because we're creating so many challenges introducing AI into the equation, and we might see all kinds of advances, the better grid, Steven, better AI oriented infrastructure, uh, better tooling ultimately, and who knows, maybe even more secure applications once we address all these issues.

So, you know, if we look through this year and maybe in the next, you know, is it, will it eventually get better? Uh, I think it's gonna get better because it is such a compelling and useful technology. And I think that once we, once we get past the irrational exuberance for being able to use this, we will find that there are tremendous use cases for this technology and it's really going to help us with, with many things.

And, um, just like, you know, what happened with literally every historic, um, technology advancement, it's gonna become boring and normal and useful, um, eventually, and it just is a question of how long that's gonna take in order for, for that to happen. Um, you know, we're still in the, you know, um, little kids with rocket toys and propellers on their heads phase of exuberance. I mean, you know, I mean, it happened with space travel, it happened with, you know, the atti, the atom bomb, you know, I mean, you know, it happened to every, everything.

And, and then eventually it just got boring and normal and real. So, yeah, I, I think there's a positive outcome from all this, and I think that it's, honestly, it's gonna be a useful tool. Jp, let me give you one more thought.

It's be decades now, being in, it was something that people were generally proud of. They were, you know, they might have been made fun of, but they were like, yes, we're helping to transform and change the world if things come to pass the way we just outlined. Well, more people maybe not so readily confess that they're part of the it and the folks who made all this happen.

I don't, I can't even fathom what's going it's gonna look like in the next five years. I was thinking the other day though, you know, since I'm 13 years old, I, uh, when I first discovered basic programming, you know, I, I kind of knew what I wanted to do. I loved programming.

I was drawn to it. It gave me an outlet to be creative. Um, and I could build just about anything across every platform that came out.

You know, I, I was one of the first city windows. I was one of the first to do Java, you know, and I, I, I could build really innovative stuff. And I was thinking the other day how I, you know, I don't know if I was 13 today, how, you know, and I, and that was my passion, how I'd feel.

I feel kind of like stuff, something was stolen from me, right? It, it, I have been, uh, my opportunity has been, you know, uh, minimized. And, and I fear for the people that you mentioned, you know, in a, in a side comment about if you're not entrepreneurial, what happens to you in, in the coming years, right?

And because if it's, if we're leading to a more, uh, gig oriented economy and your thing is not to go out and sell yourself, and you're just the type of person who wants to show up and do a job, I don't know that that's gonna be there for you in five years. I really don't. I I, I think the world is changing and, and people need to adapt or sadly disappear.

And so it is frightening in both ends. So it, I, I, I, so I, I think it, people who embrace I AI will be very passionate and love the opportunity to discuss and explore and research. Um, but if your thing is just building a virtual A VDI cloud, I, I really think that, you know, you're, you're gonna be very disappointed in your opportunities come, you know, the next few years.

And, you know, this year is gonna be the thought of that. All right, Steven, I'm gonna give you the last word here. What's your sense of the, the tenor and the tone of the coming year?

How do you, how do you Feel about it? Well, if, you know, we've been kind of focused on AI and, and, and tech generally, and, and it here. Um, but like JP says, I think that, um, if we step back and if we look at things, uh, you know, how younger people are seeing things, how, how the world is seeing things, um, it's a lot different.

So I will maintain my prediction that the economy is probably going to just chug along in, at least in the Western world, despite everything, I will maintain my prediction that, uh, you know, we are not going to see a singularity or a, you know, a GI or some sort of AI apocalypse this year or next or ever. Um, but I do worry like JP does, um, that the world is, has been and remains and is increasingly engineered to benefit the few rather than the many. And I think that people are seeing that if you ask, uh, gen Z, um, let alone Gen Alpha, you know what the world is like, a lot of them, they don't have much optimism.

Uh, they feel like, you know, they're on the outside looking in and they feel like everything is, um, designed to take advantage of 'em. And you know, I think ultimately it pretty much is because of the, that's capitalism baby. And so I think that there is going to be a sense of, uh, you know, frustration and that will probably boil over.

So ultimately, I think what's going to impact tech companies is not gonna be some sort of tech apocalypse like we would've thought. I think there's more likely impact will come from regular everyday people who have nothing to do with tech, who are fed up and frustrated with the situations that jps just describing. All right, folks, here, we here.

Oh, wait, JP, pat. Yeah, I have one more thing I want people to think about, right? We didn't really get to it this year, but that's enterprise apps.

com, Workday, um, ServiceNow, SAP, um, and you now have a tool and, and a lot of those applications, you spend millions of dollars integrating it into your business. A lot of it is the customization that goes into those applications to make them useful. And I now have a tool that with two people, that, two developers that understand how to use it well, can build me a customized version of that software without paying any additional dollars to any of those companies.

What's gonna happen to these enterprise applications as businesses start to understand that? com. You'll find a link to it there.

Please join us Wednesday. 'cause it'll be an interactive chat and conversation similar to this. And you know, the Chinese have a phrase, right?

It says, Hey, may you leave in interesting times. Well, we are living in interesting times. Sometimes they intend it as a curse.

But the most important thing, find your joy and go with it. 'cause if you follow your joy, good things will happen. Hey, thanks everybody for watching this latest installment and we'll see you guys tomorrow.