Drew Houston: prediction

Transcript context

…It's funny, I gave a talk to a few government people earlier this year with a similar point where we used to make machines to release human labor. And then the kilowatt hour was kind of like the unit for a lot of countries. And now you're doing the same thing with the brain and the data centers are kind of computational power plants, you know, they're kind of on demand tokens. You're on the board of Meta, which is the number one donor of Flops for the open source world. The thing about open source AI is like the model can be open source, but you need to carry a briefcase to actually maybe run a model that is not even that good compared to some of the big ones. How do you think about some of the differences in the open source ethos with like traditional software where it's like really easy to run and act on it versus like models where it's like it might be open source, but like I'm kind of limited, sort of can do with it? Yeah, well, I think with every new era of computing, there's sort of a tug of war between is this going to be like an open one or a closed one? And, you know, there's pros and cons to both. It's not like open is always better or open always wins. But, you know, I think you look at how the mobile, like the PC era and the Internet era started out being more on the open side, like it's very modular. Everybody sort of party that everybody could, you know, come to some downsides of that security. But I think, you know, the advent of AI, I think there's a real question, like given the capital intensity of what it takes to train these foundation models, like are we going to live in a world where oligopoly or cartel or all, you know, there's a few companies that have the keys and we're all just like paying them rent. You know, that's one future. Or is it going to be more open and accessible? And I'm like super happy with how that's just I find it exciting on many levels with all the different hats I wear about it. You know, fortunately, you've seen in real life, yeah, even if people aren't bringing GPUs on a plane or something, you've seen like the price performance of these models improve 10 or 100x year over year, which is sort of like many Moore's laws compounded together for a bunch of reasons like that wouldn't have happened without open source. Right. You know, for a lot of same reasons, it's probably better that we can anyone can sort of spin up a website without having to buy an internet information server license like there was some alternative future. So like things are Linux and really good. And there was a good balance of trade to where like people contribute their code and then also benefit from the community returning the favor. I mean, you're seeing that with open source. So you wouldn't see all this like, you know, this flourishing of research and of just sort of the democratization of access to compute without open source. And so I think it's been like phenomenally successful in terms of just moving the ball forward and pretty much anything you care about, I believe, even like safety. You can have a lot more eyes on it and transparency instead of just something is happening. And there was three places with nuclear power plants attached to them. Right. So I think it's it's been awesome to see. And then and again, for like wearing my Dropbox hat, like anybody who's like scaling a service to millions of people, again, I'm probably not using like frontier models for every request. It's, you know, there are a lot of different configurations, mostly with smaller models. And even before you even talk about getting on the device, like, you know, you need this whole kind of constellation of different options. So open source has been great for that. 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.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.