Google’s Weird Year + Neeva Goes to Snowflake — With Sridhar Ramaswamy

Channel: Alex Kantrowitz

Published at: 2023-09-06

YouTube video id: dlynM83zjrc

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlynM83zjrc

a long time google executive
entrepreneur and generative AI Builder
discusses how the technology is changing
search in the business world and what's
next for his old employer all that
coming up right after this
welcome to Big technology podcast a show
for cool-headed nuanced conversation of
the tech world and Beyond joining us
today is srida ramaswamy he's a friend
of the program he's the co-founder of
Neva he's an SVP at snowflake currently
as he puts it a minister without a
portfolio we'll get into it we're going
to talk a lot about what's going on
inside Google in the search world and
then also how generative AI might be
applied in the business World in ways
that might not have been covered in
depth up until this point we'll get into
it sweetheart welcome to the show great
to see you thank you Alex good to be
back good to have you back so let's
start with Google it's been a pretty
weird year for Google I would say this
is the weirdest year for Google since
2011 when they introduced Google Plus
I'm curious if you would agree with that
assessment and like how would you really
rate I mean we're almost you know we're
a little bit past the halfway now how
would you rate the 2023 for the company
pretty turbulent right
it is pretty turbulent I think at one
level it exposed
fairly deep gaps
in the ability of Google leadership both
to visualize the future but also execute
towards it it's very clear that the
crazy popularity of chat GPT and the
speed at which others including Neva
rolled out pretty credible AI powered
products I think was pretty surprising
for them
it clearly has led to a bunch of
soul-searching and team alignments you
know things like them is being now the
overall head of AI and stuff like that
and you know so the company has reacted
and it's actually been interesting to
then watch the product developments
coming out I don't know how closely you
follow a Bard but I've been following it
for a while there's now a pretty
credible integration into a regular
search and Bart is getting better by the
day
and this combined with the fact
that you know Sydney Bings chatbot has
not made as much progress I would say
actually puts them in a better position
in the middle of the year than early
this year when it looks like when it
looked like they were truly caught
flat-footed yeah so I want to pick up on
on that part and what you said that they
had an inability to visualize the future
I mean it is interesting because for the
past two years we've been hearing
completely about how search was going
conversational how people want to talk
to search the Google Assistant was
effectively the right product for this
moment just the wrong execution what
happened there
well so that's actually four or five
years ago which was the previous craze
around uh
um voice search and chat Bots and stuff
like that I remember this was the time
of
Alexa and all the devices that Amazon
was rolling out I mean I was still very
much a part of Google at the time and
all of us feared that voice search would
be the new platform
that these devices sitting everywhere
would be the replacement for search and
Google actually put a multi thousand
person team to work on this both in
search but also within my team the
shopping team for example had an
assistant we had Partnerships with
companies like Walmart we took it
seriously but here's the important but
that technology was pretty much a
previous generation it was not based on
Transformers it was not based on the
rapid advances that have happened in Ai
and in many ways for kind of strung
together in ways that limited what it
could do so those were those were pretty
early and all of us as consumers
discovered that Beyond a select few use
cases like
um you know hey Google what time is it
or what's the weather today like or play
this song for me we came to understand
that those devices were very very
limited in what they could do and so
your Alexa became a fairly expensive
remote control for Spotify
um but and in all of these course search
did not
unlock device even worse yeah podcast
guest Uninvited but the thing that has
the thing that did not change
is that Google things like the assistant
that came along there were Vineyards on
top of search they did not change search
in a core fashion meaning that you
retrieved some sites and you know there
are some sets of things that you would
directly take actions on uh but it was
very limited the power of generative AI
now I think comes from the fact that you
can understand multiple pages and you
can write a fluid answer for way more
queries than what the assistant could
ever do remember with the assistance
whether it's on Alexa or on Google
pretty much if you ask it a complicated
question it will quickly get into
according to so and so site blah blah
blah which is not quite the same as here
is a three sentence summary that truly
captures the gist of what it is that
you're looking for
yeah and it's interesting because you
actually built a product in Neva that is
generative search that's right and
that's right that's right you had this
experience it's a really fascinating
experience getting to see what comes in
through the back and I'm just gonna
quote something that you said you said
the thing that surprised me about chat
was how much it has dramatically
expanded the pool of queries and
questions people pose as you likely know
from PI which is another bot people will
type things into a chat bot uh that they
will never dream of typing into a search
engine so I mean tell us a little bit
about what you saw on the other side
like what what do people type into these
Bots and then how does that is it even
search at that point like how does it
change what we
I think it's a very different product
and I think it's fascinating to watch pi
to watch character.ai and all of these
people
create products that are very different
from search and even in the context of
search the kind of questions that you
would ask of it
um have changed in a big way uh the one
example that I'd like to uh you know
give people but there are many such
examples is Jason calacanes I as you
know runs like another podcast
um and the question that he asked Neva
um was hey how are the Knicks doing
and he was this was early this year and
he was offended that uh um we gave him a
summary of Articles uh from like late
December because that was the best that
the search engine could find in terms of
how the Knicks were doing obviously the
season had changed
um once you get used to the idea that
you can just say things I think the set
of questions that you can ask
dramatically uh change you will ask a
lot more subjective questions remember
at the end of the day like the search
engines of today are quite limited if
you ask it a deep complicated question
you get a bunch of like gobbledygook
pages and so I think that is that don't
don't really have a whole lot to do with
the question that you asked
um and so I think we ask a lot more
subjective questions what do you think
this article says this is something I
try with Bard because it has access to
real-time data I will put in a link and
say hey can you sum memorize this link
for me or how is this opinion different
from that other person's opinion so I
think the class of problems that we
expect chat Bots to solve simply by
virtue of the fact that they accept full
full text English or every language
really I think can dramatically expand
the scope of what it is that we asked
them to do of course there's a big gap
between
um you know what they uh what they do
currently and what our expectations are
but nevertheless I think our
expectations are just much higher and
this is purely in the give me
information that exists in the world
kind of mode but I think what pi and
character.ai are showing is the ability
for these things to have like
conversations you know they don't really
have things like long-term memory like
there's a bunch of technical gimmicks
that people
um can use to have these uh Bots pretend
like they have long-term state so
there's a lot of technology to be to be
built but open-ended freewheeling
conversations about your feelings about
your emotions about what you should do
um I think like this this field is just
opening up
and so you were you had access to the
back end there right you were what you
were on this you're running the search
engine and so were people I mean was
that type of the you know how are the
Knicks doing is kind of like okay it's a
nor I would ask that to Google today I
mean maybe I would just type Nyx in
um but so where does that expand like
the range of things that people will
type into a search engine like were they
actually like confessing their feelings
in the chat window like what did you see
that surprised you
um we don't look at
um uh at sort of individual queries
um that's one of the no-nos of any
search engine uh and uh um and so like
we would do things like analysis on the
length of queries what sort of quality
that uh that that we would serve
um uh but as I said comparison queries
Inc uh increased a lot nuanced questions
about how things were working would um
would would also increase quite a bit
hmm like like how things are working in
terms of like how systems work
um how systems work what what what is
your opinion of what's on so did
yesterday
um it's just you know it's it's these
are very different questions not neces
you know as I said we would just not
think of putting them into a search
engine and I would almost say that
um in a search engine Alex is very
likely to type
um you know uh Nick's standings
right you're not likely to die like hey
are the Knicks having a great season
um how are the Knicks doing what has
their performance been recently or what
will it take for them to make the
playoffs these all come naturally in the
context of a chat path that we somehow
think is omniscient
um but are not things that we will type
into a search engine
did you worry a little bit about how
much people trusted the responses that
evil was given 100 talk a little bit
more about that yeah we are we
um and I think this is one of the
um like
societal problems that like are going to
be pretty tough for the next 10 20 years
um it took
um
what's the right way to put it we were
very clear that Neva represented what
was on the internet you're like Hey
listen we are not God
many of these things we just don't know
but what we are good at is finding out
Pages ideally trustworthy Pages
um and summarizing them for you if you
ask a question for which there are only
conspiracy theories
um those are the pages we will find and
we will summarize them for you and this
is why we were very Persnickety about
making sure that every sentence that we
provided came with a citation so you
could see whether it came from you know
New York Times
um or the Wall Street Journal or whether
it came from a conspiracy site so for
example
um you know Neva would provide an AI
answer to questions like what are
Hitler's good qualities because there
are some sites that say like okay here
are this person's good qualities it'd be
like according to so and so
um but the thing that still shocked me
was how much there was a tendency to
look at those three sentences and say
okay done I'm good trusted
I'm gonna trust it
this is the same problem that people
have had with Facebook which is the
tendency to trust something that's like
on your phone that looks kind of
authentic is very very real
similarly any text that is generated by
a chatbot is and this is part of the
reason why Google has been hesitant is
if they put up some text even if there's
a citation people are going to say oh
Google said so this must be true and I
think that you know this this sort of
critical thinking that one needs in
order to figure out when is a chatbot
representing some site and is the site
trustworthy when is a chat bot
generating an answer or an opinion that
we really should be careful about
um and now beyond the realm of chat path
you basically cannot trust any content
that's on a page because that could be
an AI model that is spewing it out and
somebody doing SEO to get traffic I
think um and then it goes on and on like
we can't trust what we hear anymore
because people can replicate voice
people can soon make videos of everybody
and everything I I think like our notion
of reality is going to be subject to
such a barrage of like fake and real
signals that I think it's going to be a
real problem for us to keep our heads
straight
um and by the way the way search engines
would deal with things like that is um
you know Google had this system that was
roughly called flight to Quality
um Whenever there would be a new
untrending topic
um the search algorithm would basically
say I'm going to go to trustworthy sites
because if it is a brand new topic the
likelihood that someone spots a
conspiracy theory about that is super
high so we all need mechanisms like that
for us to really figure out what is it
do we trust
so how does this change like what the
nature of search is because you can
build you can you can build like
something purpose-built like a character
AI right where you can like chat with
Thomas Jefferson or I can go into like
Bing and say pretend you're Thomas
Jefferson or a Bard and have that
conversation so the search now I mean it
seems like the use case is blend where
search becomes part of conversation
partner in part a discovery engine and
these discovery engine or these
conversation Partners like a character
AI which lets you chat with historical
figures you can ask you what the weather
is today and it should have some sort of
discussion so how does this how does
search evolve from this moment
well I think we are living in a grand
experiment uh I don't think anyone knows
uh I think there are several things that
are happening at the same time first as
you point out
um the uh you can chat with a lot of
chat Bots they have access to a certain
amount of let's call it like real
information
um and so we are going to type things
into these chatbots and expect answers
that are backed by
um Authority uh it'll make it much
easier for us to get information from
like honestly completely untrustworthy
sites but there's also a second other
thing that is going on people are
understanding that there is a lot of
traffic or go money to be made from
generating pages and feeding them into
these search engines uh we worried about
it we did some experiments at Neva on
can you detect content that's generated
by AI but that's already happening
um and uh I'm sure you've seen articles
that have come out recently that talk
about you know there's a a if these
language models learn on content that
other language models have generated
Beyond a point they just generate trash
so I think there is that real-time
experiment going on
um around new content that is being
generated which is of course going to be
reabsorbed back into these language
models is going to be indexed by search
engines right like API eating itself
yeah so it's like the the AI eating
itself so I don't think anyone you know
these are long powerful Cycles
um with Millions if not hundreds of
millions of people all actively trying
to game it
um I don't Hazard to pretend that I know
exactly what the outcome is going to be
exactly and let's say we stick with like
what search is in general right like
search uh you know let's say we stick
with Google and there's a generative
layer on it it still changes right like
even if you're not using it for these
like what is the meaning of life
questions now what happens I'm sure
you're in the generative AI lab right
you write a question and it thinks for a
second and then your entire window is
content that's generated from Google so
it goes from like a tool that you use to
explore the web to effectively the
entire answer you know to help you find
answers that becomes the answer yep so
I'm curious like what you think that
means for search and I know some of
these are unanswerable but I'm going to
keep fire them at you um what do you
think it means research
I mean you uh let's face it
um if that is the format that we want
and uh you know again from a personal
experience I just much preferred a
four-line summary that told me what I
wanted and it was just fine 95 98 of the
time there was no reason to click on
anything and go elsewhere
um so this entity that's been one of the
main sources of traffic to all of our
sites your site whatever site I know
Neva created I created
um it is just going to behave very very
differently
of course there are going to be second
order effects
um like a Reddit saying wait wait you
don't get to do this right
um You don't get to take my content and
use that to generate answers but there
is a further Cascade from there a bunch
of Reddit moderators are going very very
I don't understand how you make money
off of content that we um that that we
are going to create
um so you know we might yet come to a
place where uh uh content creators
essentially for their own survival
um have to
um essentially like collapse together
and so there might very much uh be a
consolidation when it comes to when it
comes to content creation uh just like
out of the you know all information
should be free and the web is free uh
let's face it the sort of two credible
pure information businesses newspapers
that have come out of that or the New
York Times And The Wall Street Journal
and everybody else is a little bit off
and also ran so I think those kinds of
consolidation effects are most
definitely possible
um and I think there's a technology
opportunity which we explored towards
the end of Neva which is um any content
creator especially if they are part of
this conglomerate type organization is
basically going to work as hard as they
can to keep everybody that came to them
meaning that chat Bots are going to be
the norm for how information is
discovered on a on a site once you get
that person to come uh to that site and
part of the fun of Technology like this
um is on your side for example to be
able to say hey you can talk uh to any
of the podcasts that I have put up here
just ask a question and we will fish out
the right segment for you so I think
there are all this there's going to be
like this Cascade of actions that are
happening both at the center of Google
but also towards the periphery where
content is being created and there's an
impact for Google's advertising business
as well I mean you ran ads at Google for
a number of years right when the content
all of a sudden comes down takes up the
whole browser window and doesn't have
you go on a fishing Expedition for the
website you're trying to find trying to
find hey there's less room for ads and B
uh you're not you're not going to click
on those booling says often as you would
have otherwise what happens there
I think there's more opportunity uh
coming there I think uh you know it
would not surprise me if uh uh you know
like the advertising arm of Google
essentially comes up with the chatbot
for how you should get
um your your local plumber or something
um and maybe that becomes an entirely
paid experience now Google's already
gone back and forth uh Google used to
have organic shopping I famously made uh
combined organic shopping and paid
shopping because I was like all of this
is commercial content
um I can't have four search engines on
one search page with organic shopping
paid shopping paid text advertising and
organic search so I think you will see
business model Innovation
um I think part of the exciting
technology that is being developed by
lots of people this is something we are
looking into from Enterprise use cases
as well is essentially API calling
driving tools so I think you're going to
see experiences where you can again chat
with a with a website and be able to
drive purchases off of it this was the
kind of thing that was really hard with
the previous generation a voice
technology there is hope that the
technology has gotten significantly
better so that shopping becomes easier I
don't know about you but I find shopping
on the web to be incredibly difficult if
it is not like the 20 items that I keep
buying from Amazon over and over again
anything that is like meaningfully
complicated is actually really really
hard to find on the web and we have also
gone to you shall talk to no one so most
of the time I'm just like lost trying to
figure out what to do so I think there's
a lot of business model Innovation to
come as well and Sydney as you likely
know is also experimenting with things
like you know sponsored sentences I
don't know what to call it very strange
there's a part of me that like you know
my heart sinks when I see stuff like
that I'm like this is an assault on my
real
so I think there's lots to come here
this is part of the reason why Google's
kind of slow I think in an ideal case
they um
you know the way to deal with this is to
say Alex for all your informational
queries we have the perfect AI answer
for you but the minute you type best
headphones my man uh we're gonna show
you a bunch of links and you're going to
clicked and you're going to give us
money yeah so what about the competitive
side of this thing so Google uh you
mentioned earlier right they developed
the Transformer model which is it
basically sprung a lot of this
Innovation and that was a model that
they they put the paper out they open
sourced a lot of this technology
um was that a mistake
I would just think that you put the mode
up right and say all right we have this
technology this is probably going to
change I mean it's conversational is
probably going to change the way that we
operate
I'm keeping it remember six years ago
um it was not clear that this technology
was going to be transformational
and at that time the currency for a lot
of researchers was the ability to
publish
if you have told these people at that
time that they could not publish they
would have gone and worked for
universities that have gone and worked
for Microsoft erdogan and worked for
other people
um and so you know yes there is a
I mean there's some altruism but the
altruism at Google as as it should be is
always governed by a combination of you
know we if we do this we will attract
higher quality uh researchers to work
with us
um and a bet that if there is a
commercial application of some paper we
will be as fast if not faster
um you know than anyone else
um so it's easy to say in hindsight that
this was a mistake
um but I actually think that Google got
better about publishing in the 2010s
like first 10 years of Google we really
did not publish much and I think that
drove forward a bunch of innovation
that's generally been good for uh you
know for all of us and remember
Google's lack of progress in generative
AI
like in no that's internally driven
nothing stopped them from creating chat
GPT they chose not to
mm-hmm
so what does that say about the inside
of Google
I mean it's a it's a big place there are
tons and tons of opportunities and
people had been burnt by generative AI
before you remember the Facebook chat
bot as well as the Microsoft chat bot
that went uh that went racist
um you know and so they were you know
it's uh they were cautious they were
hesitant
um and uh those were fine qualities
um at a time where stability mattered
more than Breakneck Innovation but now
that they see the existential threat um
clearly a bunch of people are uh pretty
aggressive about getting getting the
technology out maybe you need a startup
that has nothing to lose this is a
beautiful thing about startups they have
nothing to do well you know they have
something to lose which is they'll
disappear if they don't do interesting
things and make money
um and so perhaps it needed a company
like open AI to pave the way for others
to the and come and figure out how to
exploit it and the question is who
actually is going to win on this so
there was a Google engineer in May who
talked about the open source question
and they said the uncomfortable truth is
we aren't positioned to win this arms
race and neither is open AI while we've
been squabbling a third faction has been
quietly eating our lunch and that's the
open source Community I mean it's kind
of interesting you were running a search
engine right you were building this
stuff oh no open source model open
source yeah mattered so what do you
think about this claim from inside
Google that like by allowing open source
or not even allowing open source that
they don't have real moat against open
source
I think that's a misinformed opinion
simply because products matter
Technologies don't win
um uh businesses uh productsmen and
relationships win I don't think there's
been much of a change uh to Google
Searcher that tells you how powerful the
default position for Google search has
been uh still not trivial to make chat
GPD or search engine even if you wanted
to
uh right and uh there is innovation in
open source models but again the blunt
truth is that the very best of the
models out there whether it's gpd4 or
claude's biggest model or a clear step
ahead of the pack when it comes to
Quality
um when it comes to reasoning when it
comes to the quality of the text that
they produce
um there is a big gap having said that
there is a tremendous amount of
excitement around open source models
there's a lot of innovation and uh there
are a lot of researchers
um who felt cut out of how Google and
open Ai and anthropic operated that are
salivating and going oh wait this is a
chance for us to um you know have a big
deal and so not a week goes by
um without another open source model
coming out and people you know claiming
no I mean and people having a
substantial jump in metrics for some
case or the you know for some case or
the other
um but the fact at least today is that
the very largest models
um are ahead of the curve uh even though
the open source models are are catching
up and there is a tremendous amount of
innovation and behind you know Behind
These models I think that is what makes
this exciting
I'm very unexcited by the prospect of
like you know three companies having uh
a technology that everyone on the planet
has to use again these are well
entrenched companies
um and it will just add to their
strength
um I think it's actually quite nice that
there is a lot more competition uh
having said that you know search still
appears to be a game between Google and
Bing chat GPD you know has had growth
but but it does it has sort of flattened
out
um and uh uh you know I I don't think
the mere presence of Open Source models
um threaten the existing uh businesses
as much
what do you think about the uh
multimodal models right now even
Google's been hinging about the fact
that you're going to build model they're
going to build models or researching
models that are like not only capable of
understanding text but also can process
images and maybe do other things I mean
that to me like you know coming from an
age where we really were working with
narrow AIS AIS that were really good at
one task the concept that there's going
to be models that can deal with more
than one tasks is is kind of
mind-blowing to me and somewhat
underrated I think in the popular
discussion or maybe I'm wrong I'm
curious what you think about that
I think multimodal models will have a
lot more business use cases where you're
looking at PDFs
we announced a model at snowflake Summit
that can understand PDFs extract
diagrams from them also understand the
text extract facts so I think that our I
I see lots and lots of use cases for
these models but to me that is one of
many many dimensions of this I think API
calling being able to call actions and
use the output of those actions to drive
further actions I think that is just as
exciting as the multimodal capabilities
so I think it's very very early I have a
harder time
um you know other than for things like
image generation how multi-model is
going to make a humongous difference for
something like like consumer search I
mean think about the last time where you
said you know here's an image and I have
a question and do something interesting
for me
but there are there are tons of use
cases these this is where technology I
think like this this core AI technology
has these angles whether it's
multi-modal
um whether it is tool use that I think
can meaningfully solve a tremendous
number of problems that we can't quite
like you know Envision just yet
is here with us oh go ahead no no my
dream
um that uh there is a a nice model on my
phone that I talked to
um that can copy information from you
know one app to the other that can
actually take a photo that I took and
actually attach it to the
um you know chat that I have with you
all just with voice instructions
um I think like you know even compared
to the web browsers the phones that we
use day to day
um are so whatever 1970s
um I'm waiting for the time when there
is a
um a a real uh language model on the
phone that can truly help us do stuff
much more easily than what we were able
to before yeah that would be amazing I
mean it's been the dream that big tech
companies have been talking about for a
while and to actually come through would
be cool all right let's let's go to a
break we're here with srita ramaswamy he
is the co-founder of Neva the search
engine we've been talking about
throughout this conversation he's also
an SCP at snowflake how'd the two fit
together well he recently sold Neva to
snowflake we'll tell the story and then
go to a bit of a lightning round on the
other side of this break
and we're back here on big technology
podcast with Sarita ramaswami he's the
co-founder of Neva he's also a SVP at
snowflake
and let's talk a little bit about the
Neva story so
um you know we've been dancing around it
a little bit in this conversation but
you built a search engine it was no
there were no ads you subscribed to it
you would sign in you had identity there
and it seemed like a real challenge to
Google you had come from Google
um and you know it's kind of interesting
because then you know right as you're
kind of hitting you know your moment
where you're trying to figure out what
the company is going to be this
generative AI moment hits and all of a
sudden there's a chance that search is
going to reinvent and so it is I find it
kind of interesting that you then
decided to shut down the consumer side
of it and then went and sold it to an
Enterprise company like snowflake so can
you tell us the story about like what
happened there what it's like competing
with a Google what what lessons you
learned
lots of people know this it is um it was
still sobering to deal with it in
practice which is that
getting consumers to change their
behavior about search is hard
um and uh and the players involved the
browsers the companies simply do not
make it easy it is really really hard
outside of the prescribed five you can
change the search engine on Safari to
anything else even today what is that
that's just an apple thing that's an
apple thing so you just can't do it
um and uh and so that was sort of the
reality uh and we have talked about this
before uh the people that tried us a
pretty decent fraction of them were
perfectly willing to say it's like ah 50
bucks a year that's fine they would just
pay the 50 rather than the five dollars
a month
um and um the thing that changed Alex in
a pretty big way
um was we went from an environment 2020
1921
um where a company could get funded at
like 300 times uh next year's earnings
when these I mean next year's Revenue uh
when the revenue was small to suddenly
the expectation being oh your evaluation
is 10 to 15 times
um Revenue
and ironically a whole bunch of
Enterprise opportunities also popped up
earlier this year
um where people are interested in our
crawl table generative AI companies
language like like they wanted language
model companies especially they wanted
access to a search API there were also a
bunch of pricing changes where people
wanted the search API to power search
there are a whole bunch of these
opportunities that that came about early
this year
but our overall conclusion was that in
the new five percent interest rate
environment we could not catch up to can
you be can your valuation be 10 times
Revenue fast enough
we thought about this
um and uh when we had conversations with
snowflake
um part of what was really exciting was
the core technology that we had built
around search which Not only was a
keyword based quality based system but
also had things like vector indexing
built in
um we realized that we had a chance to
have a big impact with search
um within within Snowflake and I've
talked a lot about this in my mind one
of the key ingredients for believable AI
for referenceable AI is a great search
retrieval system that sets the context
for how a language model is going to
generate answers so these are the two
broad areas where we were very convinced
we meaning vivekanaya and the Neva team
but also the snowflake team uh in terms
of the impact that we could that we
could bring to bear
um and that was the main reason the
um acquisition uh uh you know went
through and we've been at this for four
weeks
um there are existing teams uh in
Snowflake that I've been doing things
like uh you know uh deep learning models
to better understand documents
um but this is the area that we are
working on which is search and uh and
and generative AI uh we showed some
demos of what is uh of what is possible
um imagine a co-pilot experiences built
into every place that uh um where you
interact with snowflake but imagine also
creating technology that will let our
customers which are most of the Fortune
500 you know top 2000 Enterprises in the
world how do we bring this technology to
all of them so those are sort of roughly
the areas and that's that's sort of that
is that was our motivation for why we
decided to start the consumer journey
and be part of a larger organization
focused on Enterprise data yeah and then
there's been this moment now where it's
like okay the chat the interest in chat
GPT is kind of tailed off and people are
wondering like have we hit the you know
the end of innovation here or is there
more stuff coming and
some of the stuff that you're going to
be able to do with snowflake to me seems
to be the place where we could see some
of the breakthroughs happen on the
existing technology and I guess
incorporating the Innovations and I
think you've made this point in previous
interviews but I think maybe you could
elaborate on it it seems to me like what
people are going to be able to do is
they're going to have all their data in
Snowflake and then basically be able to
speak with it so you could have like
anybody in the organization access you
know whatever part of the data is you
know available to them and actually
start to have a conversation and not
have to run like complex
uh coding algorithms in order to be able
to make sense of what's going on in the
company so is that what's going to
happen like give some practical examples
yeah so you know snowflake is proud
um of its mission to democratize data
access to everybody within the
Enterprise there are companies like
Fidelity that have made snowflake the
centerpiece of their data architecture
what we are excited about being able to
do is use the power of generative AI on
top of this incredible uh platform
that's already been built it ranges from
the simple which is how do we help you
generate much better SQL queries
um we have something called snow site
which is where you type in SQL queries I
don't know about you but you know I've
spent a good chunk of my life writing
SQL even at even at Neva and it's
tedious it is uh it is tricky to get
right we want to make it much easier so
people that are doing this who are
typically analysts data Engineers can do
this 10x faster but even more
importantly and this goes to the point
that you're talking about
um is how do we make it easy for
business users that don't necessarily
understand the ins and outs of the
schemas and the tables and stuff like
that to be able to ask business
questions and for snowflake to then
automatically decide is that an existing
dashboard is that a SQL query that's
been run before do we need to write
something new from scratch and visualize
it it is that ability to offer up this
data and this is everything from hey how
is revenue doing by region for this
quarter to more complicated questions
how do we make that easily available to
lots of people
uh but there's uh definitely more uh
part of the transformation that
snowflake has been going over the past
like five six years now
um is to really become the data Cloud a
platform not just for the data but also
to build applications on top of the data
um and so we bought a company
um that makes it super easy streamlit um
that makes it super easy for you to
write visualization programs on top of
this um of this data so it's almost a
complete programming stack uh these are
the things where I think you know like
our our bet is that we can 10x the
number of users that can use the
platform 100x the number of queries that
are going to be run on the platform but
just as importantly think deeply about
how do we make this deck available to
all of you know our customers
um part of the problem right now
um is that um guess there are big
language models like gpt4 but pretty
much most of the time you're sending
over your proprietary data over to them
and uh at snowflake Vivek and I are
particularly excited about all of the
um great things that are happening with
open source models because we want to
make it really easy for our customers to
be able to then deploy them
um within their snowflake security
parameter and be able to do meaningful
things
um with them this basic Arc of
everything in Snowflake whether it's
writing a SQL query visualizing or
interacting gets an assistant is just
the first part but lots of other
applications in including things like if
you have a table with a set of documents
inside it they can even be sitting in
cloud storage and you can just point
snowflake to it how do you create a
quick conversational interface
um where instead of having
um you know I don't know how you search
through PDFs but like my favorite method
is command f that I put in a word super
painful
um you should be able to Simply talk to
it and say if you have earnings report
how did this company do what were the
growth rates for the past four quarters
um and then the underlying model goes
and figure this figures this out across
a set of documents shows it to you but
also shows the citation so that you can
be sure that it is it is the right
answer that would be cool I would use
that for sure
okay so do you have time for a quick
lightning round before we head out
okay first thing where do you think this
is going to leave us on jobs
are we going to lose jobs for this are
we gonna I mean it seems like you know
everyone said chat GPT is going to take
your job it hasn't really happened yet
why is that
because change is slow
um I think uh definitely when it comes
to uh things like customer support
um you know you need you need tools you
need like much better retrieval systems
um you need much better action taking
systems I definitely think that there
are a whole class of white-collar jobs
that are going to be affected in a
pretty significant way hopefully there
are new jobs that are going to be
created
um but you know one can't bet on stuff
like that
um simple information functions 100 are
going to be done better by AI models
Elon Musk is starting a company called
xai it's his answer to open AI
what do you think is going to happen
there
they have competent people they're going
to generate great people from Google
they're good people University of
Toronto yeah yeah plenty of gpus yeah
yeah yeah
um
you know I uh I don't know what to say I
think it's a way to I think it's a way
to stand out
um let's face it on things like how you
make AI models safe
um is a little bit of an art and uh you
know Art and Science
um and uh Elan sees a way in which uh
this like you know the company can stand
out but competition in general is a good
thing I'll mention that the work that
Facebook is doing to open source some of
their models or to even have them be
commercially usable by lots of people is
an exciting development for uh for
everybody so my attitude generally is
like the more the merrier uh competition
is good I don't know about you but I
love the streaming providers uh there's
lots of competition lots of choice
um do I really want like five
subscriptions probably not but I'm glad
that they're there
why does everyone who is worried about
the future of AI and AI wiping us out
seem to be working on their own project
advancing this state-of-the-art in this
technology Elon included oh
I I sort of genuinely do not know I
found things like the call for a
moratorium for six months uh to be
absurd
um and uh you know uh and and the people
that were starting new efforts in AI
were some of the signatories to that uh
you know to that effort don't get me
wrong
um they're uh you know like yes this
Tech can get out of hand
um but the way I would handle that is to
make sure that existing laws we have
against discrimination or illegal use
are also applied equally aggressively uh
to these uh to these models I don't
think stopping work on AI or uh
declaring it to be the end of humankind
is the right way to think about it there
are lots of positive ways in which AI
can be used and 100 as I said earlier AI
is going to be an assault on our reality
so there's a lot of public education
that needs to happen happen simply about
what is believable but he can't also
necessarily stop Technologies like this
especially once that can no longer be
centralized
um it is you know I'm sure you know this
you can fine tune a model for 500 bucks
in one evening without a whole lot of
technical skill
um and so you know I think this
technology similar to the internet is
going to be widely available to a lot of
people is going to produce some you know
unforeseen consequences we have to be
ready for it
finally what makes Nvidia so special
they made an early bet it's uh I think
such a fascinating story remember for
much of the last 30 years we were like
yeah they make GPU for games it's like
such a niche industry I think it's one
of these cases where it's like there's a
lot of right place right time
um the the same things that made them
really good
um for doing Graphics processing which
is a lot of uh you know fairly simple
operations done at massive scale you
know Graphics processing is like drawing
a lot of triangles on your screen
but the same thing and matrix
multiplication
where wildly uh applicable in the era of
uh of AI and pretty much the world has
centralized around them
um it's it's an amazing story
thank you so much for joining
thank you Alex always great to talk
thank you everybody for listening thank
you Nick Watney for handling the audio
LinkedIn for having me as part of your
podcast Network and all of you for
listening we'll be back on Friday
breaking down the news as we do always
thanks again for listening and we'll see
you next time on big technology podcast