The Ledger, every show

“My take is that us deciding to monetize storage was a long-term strategic mistake. I think we simply should have said, we will pass through storage costs.”

“You're not going to switch from ChatGPT to DeepSeq. It's a product. It's not a model.”

“What is happening right now is that it's the Chinese companies that are publishing their work. And what then happens is all the universities, all the students and professors in our country are looking at their work and figuring out how to build on top of it. A…”

“So from a macro perspective, I would say that that is actually a positive because Mistral is going to figure out how to reverse engineer all of this stuff, stuff, and go one step forward, which will be good for Europe. And Reflection will figure out how to do …”

“There's a reason why Anthropic hasn't done as well because it operates sort of at The model level. It's all of the additional things that go into ChatGPD that I think has staying power.”

“It's also now becoming clear that they are good at misdirection in terms of where, you know, where they tell people hard problems are and it is good that people like DeepSeek, you know, went and busted some of those some of those myths.”

“It's very clear that they're buying a bunch of business. That they don't have to worry about things like you know free cash flow. They have doubled the number of sales people that we have.”

“Even if you look at, you know the competitor that we talked about for a few months, it was all about like amazing. AI is going through the roof. I haven't heard much from them about AI recently. All of a sudden, amazing. It's equal going through the roof. It f…”

“I find Amazon search experience a joke because it is so full of ads and it's actually misleading ads where it's really hard to find what is going on.”

“I find this whole thing of ads enable Google to make free products or ads enable Facebook to be available for Ecuadorian people made by billionaires sitting in Palo Alto to be entirely self-serving.”

“When you're a monopoly with a two trillion dollar market cap for you to pretend that it is day zero is A, not the truth, B, positively stupid.”

“This just means that OpenAI and Anthropic need to understand that any kind of lead that they get is not going to be a long-lived one, and they really have to work hard and compete.”

“What this current moment is pointing out is that that's a very dangerous place to be, and a lot of these players risk becoming dumb backends to the models, which is why Snowflake is so leaning forward on agentic AI and living by what we speak, because that's t…”

“AI as a bolt-on to SaaS software does not feel like a winning strategy.”

“The big model makers want to create a world in which all of the data for all of the enterprises is easily available to them. I, and you know, everything else, the world is just a dumb data pipe that feeds into that big brain.”

“A new Quen model came out yesterday that is shockingly close to the best Sonnet model that there is from Anthropic.”

“So we test them. We use them. We try to we try to learn from them. We also partner with US companies that are trying to create open source models. There's actually a company that's based in in, in Brooklyn and San Francisco that is that, that, that we work wit…”

“This is a moment where It feels very much like a company has only two outcomes. It's either is going to become a trillion dollar behemoth or disappear without a trace.”

“I will never say that we are like, you know, confident about getting through the AI era because no company has any business being confident about getting through the AI era.”

“I think it's more of, if somebody is very heavy in a seat-based licensing model, And someone else shows up that, you know, has a better product and is also cheaper. That's a very dangerous combination. I think those are the companies that are going to struggle…”

“I think what happened was the company was a little slow to reacting to changes from things like machine learning and AI. And that was a little bit of, honestly, the reason why Frank voluntarily pushed for the change, because he felt presently that we are heade…”

“But on the other hand, I think the line between what an agentic system like this is going to be and what like pure software is going to be will be absolutely is going to be bloody.”

“Google, for example, stopped that information. God knows I spent enough time trying to get into physical things like shopping or airline purchases or hotels. We didn't really succeed because we didn't have core competence really in some fundamental way beyond …”

“A data platform that especially spans CSPs has the right, you have to earn it, has the right to be as large as a CSP itself.”

“It will reinvent itself in the chat world.”

“The insight that powered Google was PageRank. It was a way of harnessing the power of the entire internet to figure out what was popular and what was not. But PageRank ran out of juice. Like in six years, like 2004 or five. And while Google never really liked …”

“And the thing that I always tell any partner is unless there's someone in snowflake whose career and future depends on you succeeding, you don't have a partnership. And by the way, that's true for every company.”

“And so part of the difficulty that Snowflake had with machine learning and AI was they brought a similar mentality. You're going to write a design doc. It's going to take us 18 months. It's going to be great. Opposite of what you need to succeed in iterative e…”

“In five years, in three years, if you and I want auto insurance, we are going to go to some conversational interface.”

“They can't make Gemini into a consumer hit unless it's 10 times better than ChatGPT, and that's a really tall order.”

“This is also where Iceberg or just a data lake strategy or a lake house strategy is not an immediate answer because formats like Iceberg do not understand governance rules, do not understand role-level access control, they don't understand users, they don't un…”

“I expect us, me and the team, To drive way more revenue in new things we can do with Iceberg, then we are going to lose, potentially, by some of our storage revenue going out to cloud storage”

“If you were to compare them to XAI, I would say they are definitely one or two steps behind in terms of their ability to come from nothing and train a world-class foundation model.”

“I think it is terrifying to be a startup building on top of OpenAI.”

“I was like, yeah, don't pick these noble professions that we all pretend we value, but in fact, we don't. I was like, being a teacher is really hard.”

“OpenAI, I think, will be successful, not because they are always going to be the best and cheapest at creating foundation models, because they have a product experience that by some accounts has half a billion loyal users.”

“It's OpenAI and Anthropic that have created the best models on the planet for the last three years. It's not Microsoft. It's not Amazon. It's not Google. It looks like, you know, Gemini is good, but let's face it, it's at best a fast follow.”

“They were first to market. That was their sweet spot, and they've been good at it for a for a while. We were very much in in catch up mode. But AI is a much younger field. Didn't really exist, let's call it pre-ChatGPT. There, I feel incredibly confident that …”

“I mean, with a bubble bursting, as all bubbles do”

“I think Harvey is a great company. I don't think it's going to get disrupted by open AI.”

“On the consumer side, I know you disagree, I think ChatGPT is getting to be that entry point, and so if I were a betting person on the consumer side, To the extent that there are variations in models and specializations I think that'll include to the incumbent…”

“On the enterprise side, I absolutely see there being all kinds of specializations because so far in whatever the last 50 years, it's not the case that there's been an equivalent of Google search.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And remember Google's lack of progress in generative AI like, you know, that's internally driven. Nothing stopped them from creating ChatGPT. They chose not to.”

“The blunt truth is that the very best of the models out there, whether it's GPT-IV or Claude's biggest model, are a clear step ahead of the pack when it comes to quality. When it comes to reasoning, when it comes to the quality of the text that they produce th…”

“I don't think the mere presence of open source models threaten the existing businesses as much.”

“For a lot of like known problems model size is not really going to be an issue and there's going to be an ongoing reduction both in the size and therefore the cost to serve them.”