Drew Houston: prediction

Transcript context

…And you were one of the first companies in the cloud repatriation. You kind of brought back all the storage into your own data centers. Where are we in the AI wave for that? I don't think people really care today to bring the models in-house. Like, do you think people will care in the future? Like, especially as you have more small models that you want to control more of the economics? Or are the tokens so subsidized that like it just doesn't matter? It's more like a principle. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there's another one where like thinking about the future is a lot easier if you start with the past. So, I mean, there's definitely this like big surge in demand as like there's sort of this FOMO driven bubble of like all of big tech taking their headings and shipping them to Jensen for a couple of years. And then you're like, all right, well, first of all, we've seen this kind of thing before. And in the late 90s with like Fiber, you know, this huge race to like own the internet, own the information superhighway, literally, and then way overbuilt. And then there was this like crash. I don't know to what extent, like maybe it is really different this time. Or, you know, maybe if we create AGI that will sort of solve the rest of the, or we'll just have a different set of things to worry about. But, you know, the simplest way I think about it is like this is sort of a rent not buy phase because, you know, I wouldn't want to be, we're still so early in the maturity, you know, I wouldn't want to be buying like pallets of over like of 286s at a 5x markup when like the 386 and 486 and Pentium and everything are like clearly coming there around the corner. And again, because of open source, there's just been a lot more competition at every layer in the stack. And so product developers are basically beneficiaries of that. You know, the things we can do with the sort of cost estimates I was looking at a year or two ago to like provide different capabilities in the product, you know, cut, right, you know, slashing by 10, 100, 1000x. I think about coming back around. I mean, I think, you know, at some point you have to believe that the sort of supply and demand will even out as it always does. And then there's also like non-NVIDIA stacks like the Grok or Cerebris or some of these custom silicon companies that are super interesting and outperformed NVIDIA stack in terms of latency and things like that. So I guess it'd be a pretty exciting change. I think we're not close to the point where we were with like hard drives or storage when we sort of went back from the public cloud because like there it was like, yeah, the cost curves are super predictable. We know what the cost of a hard drive and a server and, you know, terabyte of bandwidth and all the inputs are going to just keep going down, riding down this cost curve. But to like rely on the public cloud to pass that along is sort of, we need a better strategy than like relying on the kindness of strangers. So we decided to bring that in house and still do, and we still get a lot of advantages. That said, like the public cloud is like scaled and been like a lot more reliable and just good all around than we would have predicted because actually back then we were worried like, is the public cloud going to even scale fast enough to where to keep up with us? But yeah, I think we're in the early innings. It's a little too chaotic right now. ally back then we were worried like, is the public cloud going to even scale fast enough to where to keep up with us? But yeah, I think we're in the early innings. It's a little too chaotic right now. So I think renting and not sort of preserving agility is pretty important in times like these. Yeah.…

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