Techstrong Gang – April 1, 2025

Hey everybody. We've got Elon Engineering, Oracle Obfuscation, and some emerging tech in Miami. You're watching Textron Gang.

We'll be back in a minute. Hello, everybody. We're back in.

We got a jam packed episode for you with lots of things that are happening late last week that we're gonna discuss today. But our guests today, or some of us, are the usual suspects, but two of us are maybe not in the spots that we normally are, but let's figure all this out as we go along. John, how you doing?

You are at home again? I'm at home. I'm here.

I'm near Oracle. I can see it right across the Way. Still, still.

Master of all you survey in the West Coast there in the valley. I try, I try. It's kind of foggy though.

It's a little hazy, so I'm not seeing very well today. All right. And coming down to Florida, Chris Blas is on his boat once again.

Chris, how are you doing, buddy? I am good. I'm in Key West, more or less.

Uh, have the, uh, blue Angels flying a hundred feet overhead this weekend? This life is good. All right.

You see any pirate action down there while you're looking for boats Every day, all time, every day. This is, this is Pirate Heaven KA panel for your local Enough. Yeah, this is Pirate World.

All right. Stephen Foskett is joining us once again from Ohio. Steven, good to see you as always.

How are you? It is great to be here on this, uh, beautiful day. Thanks.

And, uh, really glad to be sharing the SA stage with Chris. Uh, somebody I see, but don't always, uh, get to get to interact with. All right.

It's to it. There's always a new experience here on the gang somewhere. Speaking of new experiences, Bonnie Schneider is joining us.

She's still in Boca Raton. She's just in a smaller studio for us today and working remotely. 'cause Alan Shimmel, who's normally on this show for us, is well on his way to London, where I am at the moment.

Bonnie, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks. Great to be here in Boca Raton and connect with everybody on the show.

I'm all over. There you go. And I, of course, am in London here for the CubeCon Cloud Native Europe Show is this week.

We'll have more on that on the tomorrow's show, but today we're gonna get started with some weirdness that's going on involving surprisingly Elon Musk, who's Gold X to his AI company. I guess the premise of this thing is that somehow or other, the X data is gonna be used to train the AI rock engines that he's building over there. But I'm scratching my head a little bit about the amount that this went for, given how what they previously valued, uh, X one, it was known as Twitter.

John, what's your take on what's going on here? Is this actual engineering or what we call financial engineering? Uh, I think it's, uh, the latter.

I think it's financial engineering, but then again, it's Elon Musk who was our, um, fearless leader in terms of Doge. So I guess, you know, if there's a theme here, and it, we could even apply OpenAI in in the end, but if there's a theme here, it's consolidation. So he is consolidating, essentially merging together x ai and X and he said it was a $33 billion deal.

These numbers, to me, are just kind of bizarre in a sense. He's, he's saying that this, this combination of the two companies is gonna value Xai at $80 billion and exit $33 billion. He bought X for $44 billion a few years ago.

And, and basically it's kind of laying and ruins. So he is decided in a sense, like he did with SolarCity and Tesla. He is gonna combine these companies and properties and try to create some sort of synergy between the two of 'em.

As you said, Mike, um, grok has been trained off of X for a couple of years, actually. They've used data from Expost to train the model since 2023. And the idea also is to continue not only to do that, but the X platform would also distribute the X AI products and continue to get real time feedback from users, their thoughts, their screenshots, their data.

You know, what's interesting is that this happened a few weeks after this bizarre, nearly a hundred billion dollars acquisition attempt of OpenAI. Who must, who Musk is it war with? That was a, a very bizarre for, uh, um, nonprofit, uh, or for-profit debate.

That's, that's ongoing. Um, there's so many moving pieces in all this, which makes it a little bit kind of hard to understand or or believe the, the numbers here that are, that are being bandied about. While all this is going on, by the way, we've got these two, these two companies merging at a time when there's yet another report at the end of the week that OpenAI is on the verge of, um, raising another round.

An incredible amount of money, $40 billion. But part of the contingency of that is that the company transitioned for from non-profit to for-profit in order to get all the money. So again, a lot of moving pieces, a lot of money at stake, a lot of, a lot of chutzpah and, uh, chest puffing by Musk as usual.

And, um, again, he's just kind of roiling things. He's, he's kind of playing games. He is, he's antagonizing open eyes.

He always does. It's just an Elon Musk playbook action. Well, let me ask you a quick question about that.

Where do those numbers come from? I mean, who decided that? Oh, They, he just, he just tweets them out and, and, you know, this is what he does.

This is what he does. This is what, uh, he and his, his buddy in the White House, and I won't get, I'm, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna channel Alan right now, but I'm gonna gonna say that they, right, they throw these numbers out. So let's go back to the $500 billion for Stargate.

Remember that we were laughing at that number in terms of the AI infrastructure. You know, I read a book a couple of weeks ago, um, by Bob Woodward called Fear, which was about the first couple of years of the Trump administration. And in that book, Trump is, says he loves round numbers, and the number he loves the most to throw out is $500 billion.

So I think Musk's just kind of using the same tactic, you know, just throw around, here's 30 million, 50 million. I'm surprised he didn't say he bought the company for, uh, you know, for 40 million or 50 billion, 40 bi 40 billion or 50 billion, uh, what he said Friday. So take it for what it's worth.

Well, I, I think the numbers are very, very specific. So there's $12 billion of debt and $33 billion purchase price. Now purchase price.

Um, you know, in other news, I sold my car to my house at, um, a a thousand dollars over what I bought it for, and therefore I'm a financial genius. Uh, no, in, in reality, he sold XA, he sold the X Twitter, uh, for, um, what is it, a billion dollars more than he bought it for. I think that this is all about protecting those investors that went with him into xai and basically allowing them to show no loss, even though, obviously, like we said, you know, fidelity BA values to, uh, X Twitter at 12 billion, uh, or it, it did last week, last year, and it may be more or maybe less now, but, um, you know, the, the, the, the number that $80 billion and the $33 billion and all that, all of that is about those investors that went in with Musk to back him on this.

And he allows them now to show on paper at least that they haven't lost money. But of course, they haven't lost money. Only if X AI is worth $80 billion.

And so that's the question we should be asking, You know, so there, there are two things just really quickly, Steven, that, that, I'm glad you brought that up. There are two things that really remain murky there. We don't know how investors would be compensated, and we don't know the role the X leaders would play in this new company, whatever it's called, I guess, is it called X?

Is it still XI, who knows? But, um, there hasn't been any common for X or XAI, uh, it, I don't know. I always feel like this is like a game of three card money to me at times.

And it's being cynical about it because this guy is, um, pushing the boundaries of, of reality at, at the last few months. Who would assess that whether or not X or AI is worth $80 billion though? I mean, would that be someday going public kind of money?

Or how does that number come to be? I guess that's what it has to be, right? It has to be an investor, whether it's the public markets or a private investor that wants to fork over that kind of money.

And, uh, basically he just kicked the can down the road so he doesn't have to answer that question for another few years. Oh, well, how government, like, Bonnie, sorry, I cut you off. What were you gonna say?

Oh, no, I was just thinking about all the users that are on X and if they're aware of their, everything they put out as training, you know, X ai, I just wonder how much transparency there is with all that and how, let's say the, the cohort of people on X their opinions are going to affect, you know, you know, the AI model. There's a lot of unanswered questions in the those areas. Yeah.

You know, what's even more confusing to me is that XAI recently raised $10 billion in funding in a funding round that valued, valued it at $75 billion. So again, you know, as you see these, these numbers, and it's just not, there's a lack of consist a little bit of a lack of consistency for me. But, you know, also, Bonnie, you're right about the, this idea that your data, if you use X if you still use x, uh, is being used to train these models.

I mean, in a sense, I guess if you use X, you understand that it's a wide open territory at this point, right? There's no content moderation to speak of. It's kind of a wild west mentality.

So, you know, use it as, use it at your own discretion and, and see what happens, right? So where do I send the bill for entering my data into X for training rock? 'cause ultimately I'm doing the work for this.

Am I not? Yes. He, he, you know, talking about the, the finances all, uh, see if I can think about the technical fundamentals, right?

You know, so X as we all know, I think is a, is a suspect, right? And we know that training AI on bad data, we all remember what was it 10, 15 years ago when the first ai, you know, took the internet, trained themselves and turned into, you know, you know, fascist loons. Um, and as you're saying, the transparency and the actual finances, what is this transaction all about?

I think as an external interest, whether I invested in it or not, it worries me. There's fundamental flaws. So they, I think the only way that I could see, you know, practically, if this, you know, is that X ai actually worth what people think it is, is whether or not there's a big enough market selling disinformation, you know, AI generated disinformation, because that's the fundamentals, and that's a sloppily put together untransparent AI play fed with data that is widely, I believe, you know, to be heavily influenced with bots and garbage and nation state influence campaigns.

Doesn't sound like, Oh man, it's great, Steven, what are you thinking here? So here's the thing, I'm gonna take a, I'm gonna, you guys are, you guys are never gonna believe this. You'll never believe what happens next.

I'm gonna take the argument that it is worth it. I'm gonna take the argument that this thing is greater than the sum of its parts. So think about it this way.

It's not about training. Gr gr is already grok three is great. It, it already is one of the top, uh, LLMs.

This is not about that. Um, think about some of the recent news stories that we've heard. Um, when Goldberg was trying to validate the Hofi PC small group chat, what did he do?

He watched, where did he get that news X? This is about mining X for realtime information so that it has a demonstrably better chatbot than anyone else. And you know what?

I think it's gonna work. I'm not gonna argue that this is necessarily worth $80 billion because the actual dollar figure is based on magical mystery bio math. But what I will argue is that X plus X ai, as long as they don't have a mass exodus of users, and frankly they haven't had a mass exodus of users yet, and with all the crazy stuff that's happened so far, I don't expect that that's gonna start happening.

Now, uh, this thing could be actually a transformatively different AI experience because it has its finger on the pulse of the global consciousness in a way that no other platform can. And I am not a Musk fan boy by any means. I am not an apologist for this.

I am as mad as anyone about this, but I am also looking at it and thinking, you know what, this makes incredible sense and this thing is gonna be amazing. Can you imagine being able to ask, uh, a chat assistant literally, like, what is the opinion of Trump in Canada right now? Or what is the opinion of Maureen Lapin in France this morning?

And having it give you a correct and concise and nuanced answer to that question is something that no other company can offer. And frankly, I think something that makes Xai potentially worth as much or more as OpenAI. And if we're gonna say that OpenAI is worth about a hundred billion dollars, XAI is too, You know, if, if, uh, OpenAI gets that, that for $40 billion, it'll be worth $300 billion.

But you're right. I think you're right, Steve. I think you're onto something because I was looking at this, trying to figure out what these parties bring to one another, and I, I, I think your reasoning is, is actually very, very accurate.

I think it does bring a lot of value to what, to what was left of XI think it, it revitalizes x in a, in a major way. I might argue that X is only interesting as a news vehicle as long as it is the, uh, official voice of the United States government. But the minute that changes X is not so interesting.

So, um, you know, I don't know if X is the dominant news vehicle for all things, including the latest news at the Yankees, for instance, or, um, for anything that's coming out of the stock market. So I'm a little dubious about saying that X is gonna be this great vehicle for staying current. 'cause I think there's other mediums out there that might do a better job with a broader set of content that, to Chris's point, is not full of a bunch of people spewing hate and all kinds of noise that would shall say skew the results of mine gro output In our modern world where nothing matters, but people's opinions owning X and combining X with a chatbot, in my opinion, is the equivalent of, um, owning, uh, ad words and ad sense and the Google algorithm.

It is just a, a, a really differentiated thing. And, and yes, you're right that there's a lot of loons and nonsense out there, but frankly, almost every other thing you can think of publishes first on X and appears first on X Yankee news. Well, I get all my Red Sox news, unfortunately, from X via my favorite blog because I don't log into X.

But, um, almost everything, almost all the news they report comes from posts on that platform. And it's the same with hobbies. It's the same with international news.

You know, how do we find out about the earthquakes in Myanmar? We found out about it through X. It is globally, it is a platform.

And, and frankly, the, let me say one more thing. There's one company that can beat X AI at its own game meta. They've got just as good information.

They've got just as good ai. And I wanna see what they can do with this once they see what, uh, Musk is gonna do with X. All right.

I wanna be clear here. Did you just express an opinion as a fact that we were supposed to just nod our heads on, or that's an actual opinion? I don't know.

I'm just opinion. We're all just opinionating here opinions. That's my reality, and I reject your reality.

That's how life works these Days. It sounds like X right now you're so 20, 25, Steven. Yeah.

All right, well, we're gonna have to just wait and see what Ilan does next with this whole thing. But, um, don't forget, you know, there's Microsoft is out there with LinkedIn and there are other players in this game. So I think, uh, other people will be looking at this same playbook, but we'll see what happens, folks, we'll be back in a minute.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back with another item that we're not entirely clear what's going on about either. It seems to be a trend these days, but there's, uh, the cybersecurity community is in something of a uproar over some breaches that may or may not have occurred in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

And, um, I guess the issue is that there's 6 million of these records that may have been exposed, but Oracle is not copping to it. At least not yet. This might be one of those stories that's a work in progress, but Chris, this being your space, um, what's going on here?

I mean, it would seem to me it's pretty straightforward. Either they were breached or not breached. Everybody seems to think that they were.

And why is Oracle kind of not just kind of saying, yeah, these, these things happen. I mean, frankly, they seem to happen every day. Yeah, I think this one is a tale of two transparencies, right?

You know, they've, they, you know, in one inbound and excusable and one outbound and honestly not, right? And the first one, you know, how, you know, how do you end up having a vulnerability, you know, linger around your system for a long, long time? You know, that takes me to my favorite topic of the day, supply chain security, and, you know, what does it actually take for any organization, even a big one like Oracle, to keep track of all of that and execute well, right?

And that's, you know, that's cybersecurity as we know it today, which consumes all of the time and budget of companies everywhere. And there are huge gaps. All the pla all over, all over the place.

We know it all the time to something like this. Yeah, I understand, right? Maybe there's a fault, you know, somebody involved in not dealing with it earlier.

But, but again, yeah, that's normal. 'cause it's been too difficult to have transparency into where everything comes from. It's what all of this software bill material and stuff has been about, and it's, you know, and I think this may be, you may be able to trace this directly through the s bond lineal, uh, lineage, but it's really not about that.

You know, it's, uh, you know, do you know, you know, is it possible? Has it been possible logistically, economically to keep track of everything? No.

Alright, so this stuff happens. The other half is, it makes this a story, right? You know, I firmly believe, you know, as a corporate actor who spent my entire career almost, you know, almost my entire career as a commercial vendor, we made a lot of public statements and own it, aren't a, aren't a little extra of it, right?

I think as an organization, your butter loft saying, yes, that was our funnel, and if your coffee's cold, maybe that was us too here, here's what we're going to do, you know, move past it. You know, defendant deny is not a reduced customer problems, increased customer satisfaction, retention sort of thing. And obviously somebody at this corporation fought otherwise an issue, the statement that makes it necessary for us to have this conversation.

John, you're just down the road from Oracle. Is there something different about, about the culture there when it comes to this stuff? I mean, You read my minds.

You read my minds. I'm just thinking when Chris was talking how Oracle has a history of bending the truth or just evading. You know, one of the running jokes I have with a, a very good friend of mine works there.

She's a lawyer. She's to handle PR for Larry Ellison. She doesn't do it as often, but she would tell me, you're never going to get a direct answer from me.

I'm always gonna give you a no comment whether it's right or wrong or indifferent, or if I don't even know the answer, I'm always gonna say no comment. And I think part of the culture there is just kind of deny and evade. And the, the one thing that that jumped out at me about this that was just like galling was the cause of the data breach is thought to be a previously known vulnerability that has existed since 2014.

And yet Oracle is, is in deny mode. I mean, that is so classic of this company. Um, and it's been a, it's been a reputation.

I'm sure you've come across this Mike and, and, um, and, and everyone else is that for years, this is a company that is never quite trusted by those in the Silicon Valley area, like Ellison in particular, you know, is fast and and loose with the truth. And when I, when I read this, I, I was not surprised the least When I think about this. And I wonder if somebody could be what you're describing, but I also think Oracle goes out of its way to kind of say one of its differentiators is a cloud service provider, is that it is more secure.

I don't think anybody believes them when they say that, but maybe they do, and so they don't want to cop to it. But Steven, I know you've been kicking around this Oracle cloud thing for a while. Um, what is your sense of what does differentiate Oracle in the cloud?

And are they any different than any anybody else? Well, To be honest, all of my experiences with OCI specifically have been pretty positive. Um, I have to say that I know a lot of the staff over there from, uh, previous companies that have presented at Field Day and OCI has presented at Field Day.

We've been on site, uh, across the water there from, uh, John, uh, uh, with the company. And, um, I've been pretty impressed by the crew that I saw over there. And, um, frankly, I'd be one to buy into the fact that maybe it's a little bit more secure, a little bit more enterprise, a little bit more solid than some of the kind of fast and loose cloud competitors.

Uh, but that being said, uh, this sure looks damning and, um, assuming that it's true now, as, as Chris, I'm sure would know it is possible for somebody to create a fake breach. That happens a lot if you, if you watch some of these things. You know, people will sometimes put together a breach to polish their own credentials or something like that.

But the, the details of this are, in my opinion, a little too specific and a little too credible to say that this is a fake breach. So assuming that it's a real breach, I feel like it just shows kind of the world that we live in where, um, you know, one little c***k in the armor is enough for somebody to sneak an arrow right through. Um, I am a little bit surprised, but not surprised by the Oracle reaction.

It reminds me of what reportedly Ray Kung taught Donald Trump, you know, deny, deflect, delay and don't write about it. That's exactly what we're getting here. And, um, you know, what is reality anymore, right?

It's just, uh, you know, that's just like your opinion, man. You say that we were hacked, we say we weren't, you know, and that's just really where we're at. And, um, I don't wanna live in that world where a company can just deny, deny, deny, and hope it goes away because it looks like it's real.

I mean, my, my favorite Mark queen story is a one pager, right? And the story is there's two little boys, well, a good little boy and a bad little boy, and the bad little boy grows up merely as well, gets rich and ties happy. That's it.

The end. And you can read that two ways. The way I've always read that is just because you see something work doesn't mean it's a bloody good idea, right?

And I have been through, I've been the vendor with vulnerabilities and breaches and so forth, and in as much as I've ever had a say in it, we've taken, you know, the embrace the sock approach, right? Okay. You know, how was this, what is the value?

What is the benefit? I mean, how do you actually, you know, I know quantifying you know, you know, risk may be a little easier for folks is what is the benefit of goodwill and trust in the market? Um, I don't know, but I have sold billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of, of gear, and I was sold it that way.

So this may be working for Oracle John, as you say that, you know, I frankly don't have pay that much attention, but they've gotten that sort of reputation. Apparently they've earned it. If they're still in business, happy day for them.

But I go back to Mark Twain, just because it may work for someone doesn't mean it's a good idea. You know, maybe you would make more money if you didn't do that, John, back in the day, they would say that coverup is the thing that, you know, winds up doing more harm than the actual incident. But going back to our earlier conversations, it seems like a lot of companies are taking a page outta the social media playbook, which is just to deny deny until everybody forgets about it.

Exactly. Exactly. Move on to the next shiny object.

Um, I wonder where they learned that. Um, but you know, the, the, the interesting thing is that the, the company that did was that, that was upfront and and directed about their security flaw, remember last summer, um, was the one that the craft break was, is, is in the sense that the, the playbook is, should kind of follow what they did. I thought in a sense they didn't suffer as much in the long run, even in the short term, the, the pain wasn't as bad as everyone thought it would've been because they were so upfront and, and direct about it.

And, you know, the one thing also I was gonna throw out is the, the irony about Larry Ellison was he is, or he was, when he was talking to the press, a tremendous interview, if you asked him a question, he pretty much would tell you the truth and like to see the, the eruption is going on around his PR staff and the, and the other executives. Um, in, in a sense he couldn't help himself at times in, in that, in that respect. But in, in terms of the corporate side, and I'm, I'm actually talking more about Oracle's corporate side.

There was always the deny, deny, deflect. Um, they were always at odds with, with all the other measure tech companies in the area, because they would play fast and loose with, with things. Um, there were so many incidents.

Um, it, it is kinda like a, almost a kind of a weird dichotomy between Ellison who would just blurt, blurt stuff out. And then the, the corporate side, which is so overly cautious, it still is incredibly overly cautious to the point where even if they know something, they'll just, they'll just deny it. And it, it just creates so much mistrust and animosity between them and, and a number of people, not just the press.

So what is your best advice then, to the folks who might be victimized by this and not know it? Because, well, they don't get an official notice from Oracle. So how do you know that you're, um, you know, got an issue here where, or do you just assume now that all your data's at risk and start acting accordingly?

Steven? Well, uh, I don't wanna be cynical, but I would say that this smells truthy to me. And I would suggest that if you are part of this breach, um, maybe you need to take some active, some actions to protect yourself.

Um, and frankly, if you're using OCI and not part of this breach, maybe you should think about it as well, because, um, it, it looks accurate. And if it is accurate, this is a, this is a pretty big one. And it also shows, you know, for me, the big takeaway here is that the company was using really out of date software with known vulnerabilities in, uh, to store passwords and other information.

That's not great. And that's, uh, gonna make me question whether this is a platform I trust. Mm-hmm.

Chris, is there something security people specifically should be thinking about here? 'cause if they do go down to the folks who are managing the Oracle Cloud environment, they might say, well, Oracle told this is not an issue, should go away. 'cause they might side with Oracle.

I, I'm trying to think of something. The add, you know, if you, you know, if you're on the front lines actually doing the work, um, increase your diligence, right? You know, maybe, uh, expect you've got problems anyways, at the highest level, the, uh, strategic level.

Yeah, I think, uh, Steven, you said it so right. I would, you know, even John, it's, I would have less faith in this. That means something and everybody, you know, I can't repeat enough.

Just because you have done security things doesn't mean you've secured your business. Right? You know, every, any security effort may not have worked.

Have a plan, you know, so this may, may, maybe a silver line of this, you know, maybe some organization will say, Hey, we actually don't know what would happen if it turned out this wasn't actually breached. Maybe we should have a plan in case it is, and maybe it is now. I'll go a step further.

And everywhere you've heard in cloud security land, people are talking about cloud security is a shared responsibility. Al is not here. And I'm just calling what it is.

B******t. Security's your responsibility. 'cause when push comes to shove, those guys aren't gonna be there.

And that's all there is to it. So you're on your own. All right guys, we'll be back in a minute.

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Welcome back to the Techron gang. Well, recently I had the chance to go to Miami, to the Emerge Americas Conference, and it's one of the largest tech conferences in, in the region, especially in Florida. Fascinating amount of, of people that showed up from all over the world.

So I wanted to do a really quick recap on the conference and also share an interview that I did with the CEO of Entanglement, which is a quantum computing company. Over 20,000 attendees representing 60 different countries are expected here at Emer Americas in Miami from health tech to FinTech, AI to quantum computing. At this conference, all eyes are on what's next in technology.

Joining me now is Jason Turner, who is the CEO of Entanglement, and we're going to be talking about one of the hottest topics here at this conference, quantum computing. Jason, it's great to have you on. Great To be here.

Thank you for having me. Sure. Now tell me about Quantum, because it's one of the most popular tracks for this conference.

Yes, quantum computing and quantum information science is, looks really magical. I mean, it's something that has been in the works for many years and it's just starting to make some good progress. So quantum computing deals with qubits and not binary bits, ones and zeros, which is what our phones and all the computers do today.

And that qubit allows to get so much more information from it. And then when you entangle and put lots of qubits together, you can solve massive problems at once. So in binary computing today, we're asking multiple questions until we get an answer.

In quantum computing, you ask all the questions at once and get the answers. So that's why it's so much faster. I call it multidimensional computing, and it gives new next generation capabilities to solve and give insights that you can't get today with existing computers.

So what are you showing here? So some of the things that we're showing here are entanglement, what does entanglement look like? And then the other things we're showing a CBO formulation here, which will work on a quantum system.

So it's not just quantum inspired, it's quantum ready. So have any, uh, mathematicians stop by and say, Hey, I know what that is. I haven't been here that much to see.

But you can see what we've put in terms of special constraints, like, you know, quantum ready and Cuba being together. We can solve over a million variables, fully connected variables with CBOs today, which means we can discover things like material science and new molecules. It's, it's really insane.

All of the amazing things we can do with this technology. As I mentioned, quantum computing and ai, I would say was the top track at this conference. They seem to have the most amount of speakers.

And, um, another area that was also very popular, there was defense, there was quite a few people from the military with, um, different technology, uh, for that as well. And then of course you also had universities, particularly those I would say from the southeast, although Northeastern up in Boston, uh, had a booth there and they were showing their innovations in programs like robotics with some really cool demonstrations that I got to see. So it really was, um, cutting edge on on, uh, in terms of what's next in technology and um, climate tech as well.

And I'll be talking about that in a couple more interviews here on the Techron gang. Bonnie, what was the mood and the caliber of the folks that you met there? Because, you know, to be honest, Miami sometimes also has a reputation for being the Bitcoin processing capital of the world, and there's a lot of folks involved in that business who are, uh, perhaps not always, uh, as fully legitimate as we would like, but it sounded like this conference was pretty much, you know, a standard tech event, bleeding edge, what's going on here.

Yeah, and I would say with, um, a-list talent as well, you know, they had, um, Damon John from Shark Tank, um, the musician, Armando, who's known as Pit Bull, who's not just a, you know, obviously a famous musician from Miami, but he's a very successful entrepreneur. He gave the keynote, um, Clem, um, Ang, who is one of the founders of HuggingFace Spoke, uh, you may recall I interviewed his colleague, Thomas Wolf. So they had some major a-list, I would say people in tech and in entrepreneurship speaking.

And that did attract people from all over the world. As I mentioned in the video, there were 60 different countries represented. They had an Israeli tech, um, area designated, um, for cybersecurity, for example, I spoke to a lot of people from South America, Chile, um, and as well as, um, Italy that had a, a booth in Spain.

So it brought an international mix of people and apparently, according to their statistics, this was the largest one they've had since they started in 2014. So it was all well-known companies were represented, but also a, a whole bunch of startups. And some of them, you heard of some of them you, you may not have, but many of them had connections to South Florida and they were in FinTech a lot.

I saw quite a bit in, um, healthcare, digital health was a very big topic and some major, um, physicians and, and hospitals were represented in those spaces as well. I've been covering this now for two years, this conference, and I do see the growth and I also see the shift in what tracks are popular going from year to year as well. Steven, we talk about emerging technologies a lot on this show, and I'm trying to figure out, is there, has there been a change in mindset?

'cause it used to be we would distinguish between Leaning Edge and bleeding edge, and what's your, what is your sense of what is the appetite for bleeding versus bleeding and, and other folks who are like, you know, call me when this thing is super stable in two years. Well, I'd say that when it comes to money, uh, especially to the financial markets, everybody's looking for the next big thing. com boom, from the social media boom, from the AI boom is that there, these booms happen and there is an incredible amount of money to be made or spent or set on fire in these booms.

And I think that that's exactly what we're seeing here. There's sort of a suspension of credibility when people are thinking this could be the next big thing. And Quantum certainly is, I mean, Bonnie, you know, you talked to the CEO of Entanglement.

Um, this, that's an interesting company because essentially nobody in Quantum actually has any productive, practical product that uses Quantum. And yet what they're trying to do is they're trying to use quantum inspired technology in a number of areas, including threat intelligence and tuning AI models and things like that with their, uh, their, uh, subsidiary companies. I think it's an interesting spin if you'll put a, a pardon in the pun on, uh, quantum to try to figure out ways of making productive use of this technology.

And, and I think that a lot of people are still holding their breath and waiting for the moment that Quantum actually delivers on the promise, even though that hasn't happened yet. So yeah, I think people are looking for the next big thing. I think that's why they have conferences like this.

And um, and, and I do think that there still is a lot of, uh, credibility around Quantum that says maybe this could be the next big thing. Mm-hmm. John, to Steven's point, do the folks at Quantum just have a AI envy essentially be, and they're, you know, they're out there.

Yeah. Until, until they become a next big thing. You know, that's interesting.

But there have been, there's over the last several months, right, there have been some advances or some sort of interesting concepts in Microsoft around Quantum. So it's, it's, it's been a while, but I mean there, there is some progress. You know, the interesting thing is before, um, the Nvidia keynotes, they, um, had a brown table that included Pat Gelsinger, our friend from Intel, and he didn't really want to talk so much about NVIDIA's news.

He wanted to actually talk about Quantum. And he is a big proponent in the next couple of years of like, some sort of breakthrough. I mean, he moved up the timetable.

So it's interesting that Bonnie was at this conference where, you know, you assume there's gonna be a lot of hype over ai, but the fact that Quantum is actually being not just whispered about but discussed openly more frequently is, is, is a sign of like some sort of momentum, right? Mm-hmm. And yet, here I am in London and I walk down the street and I turn the corner and I'm standing in front of the IBM building and in the window of the IBM building is a, allegedly a quantum computer.

And I asked myself, well, given how much these things cost, why does it do it in the window? Because it was kind of like dress up for IBM and it was part of a, felt like more like a marketing campaign than I would see on Fifth Avenue selling, you know, fashion or whatever. Then I was kind of like scratching my head go, I thought these things were super complicated and hard to build.

So what is it doing in a window of an IBM building in, in London? Well, that's why they used to call it the Glass House, right? Because they would, uh, you know, you'd show off your mainframe in a glass, uh, uh, facility right off your, uh, your, your lobby so that every visitor could come in and say, Ooh, that thing's cool.

Was it one of the ones that hangs from the ceiling? 'cause those are cool. Yeah.

When I had like gold kinda wiring all over, it was very classy. I was like, you know, it could have been art deco, I'll throw at the, nobody will ever need more than six 40 K line. Right?

You know, and I, I think, you know, Moore's law was sort of, uh, a little stale maybe for a decade or so there, right. You know, we get faster and faster and bigger things and it doesn't matter. Right.

You know, just, you know, there's no practical difference whatsoever. And the, you know, AI and all this stuff, you know, there's this, this scaling up in the dealing of everything may actually, you know, to Dawn's point, may, maybe that's, you know, maybe we're getting to the point where we actually need to crunch numbers you at the scale that Quantum implies. Um, so yep.

I'm not market analytics in the space. I don't know what spin, you know, is gonna be the one that catches first or what company, but yeah, maybe this is the time, maybe we finally need to actually have that much of a a, a job in processing. All right.

So John, if AI is worth, I don't know, $400 billion, round number Quantum what, 800 pick a number or Yeah, of course I'll channel my inner musk or my inner Trump. Oh, at least a trillion. Yeah.

No, I don't know. I I have no idea. Um, these number, I mean, when I look at OpenAI and it's market valuation, if it gets its, its round of funding and then, then then kind of just juxtapose, it's, it's actual revenue.

It's just always a very, very kind of maddening exercise. It's like mind blowing at times, At times. Steven, I'm deeply concerned that we are losing a quantum race to China and therefore they, we should call the government up and have them pour in, you know, $9 trillion to fund these companies.

What do you say? You're not talking to Trump, are you? Because, uh, the Q Act is just waiting to happen?

Uh, no. I, I, I could totally see, um, in a, in a, I could definitely see, uh, in accelerated investment, um, uh, based on fear of loss of quantum supremacy and, um, we'll see if that actually goes anywhere. I mean, ultimately nobody knows if this technology is actually gonna be practical yet.

And, uh, we're just waiting for it. It's like nuclear fusion. Uh, it's been around for a while.

We just, it does exist. We just haven't been able to find a practical use that beats conventional with it. But if we could, you know, set the world on fire, oh, literally, I mean, to your point, somebody seems to show up about every three weeks after some quantum announcement going, Hey, well yeah, by the way, we figured out how to do that using conventional computers at a third, the cost, right.

I just wanted to also mention an interesting aside that wasn't included in the interview that I asked, uh, Jason Turner, you know, how did he get into Quantum? You know, what attracted him? He's been in it for 10 years now or, or more, and you know what his background is, it's kind of interesting music.

That's, that's what led him to Quantum to computing and, and working with music on videos and, and things like that. I'll, it's, um, it's just an interesting backstory, you know, to see how someone gets into certain types of technology. Just wanna add that, Alright, well, given the money conversation, I can't help but wonder if someday, will our money be in two places at once?

Can that be done at Quantum? Because, well, we get, I'll read that share scale thing again, I think of the music background, right? I, you know, lifelong best friend musician, mu you know, we have a music studio together at home and it's, it's Fal, right?

You know, we talk about digital music and we, you know, took all these, you know, analog curves and turned 'em into ones and zeros and has been good enough. We had CDs and so forth, but that's not how any of this works, right? And Quantum, as I said during, you know, uh, a minute ago, right?

You know, just the sheer volume of all the processing, which really hasn't been a deal. I mean, you know, you know, we keep making things faster over the last decade or two, but our user experience and what we're doing is not the same. Right?

But, you know, my supply chain work, I'm out constantly talking about having systems where I as an operator, wherever, can see the contract language representing the relationships between every organization in my supply chain, all the way back to, you know, somebody taking a shovel and pouring sand in a, in a furnace to make, you know, the crystal to make a chip out of it, right? And what does that actually take in sheer processing? Um, so I, I think yeah, music might be as, as logical a place to come from because we are still, to be clear in, in the eyes of our grandchildren, you know, when they're our age, you know, with stone axes, you know, chipping data out of purist, you know, information foam, right?

There's, we've barely begun. All right, folks. Well, I will tell you I love merging technology.

It has been great to cover for the, and a privilege for the last 30 plus years. But I will tell you, anytime some VC shows up with some valuations that are in the Carl Sagan, billions and billions kind of numbers be suspicious. Hey guys, thanks for being on the show today.

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