Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dive into Sam Altman’s urgent message from the Snowflake Summit: if you’re not moving fast on AI, you’re already behind.
Highlights
00:28 — Last week, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, participated in the keynote talk at the Snowflake Summit with Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, and he had some very interesting things to say about how he feels CEOs should look at adopting AI, what it can mean for their companies, and how these CEOs can win in the AI Era.
01:00 — One of the points Sam Altman made was: Don’t sit, don’t wait on the sidelines. We’re just at the beginning of what he described as a long, beautiful, incredibly smooth arc in the performance of AI. CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy in their conversation said it’s not just the performance, but it’s going to be easy to use. More people inside companies will be able to use it.
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02:27 — Sam Altman said you can tell it: “Hey, go work on the biggest problem in the company. Work real hard. Come back with some answers — seeing over the horizon.” His point is that AI isn’t just good for handling what he called menial cognitive tasks or fairly basic stuff, but the real payoff will be in attacking bigger problems. He used the example of a biotech company.
03:25 —The whole idea came up in the conversation about AGI — Artificial General Intelligence, or superintelligence that’s prevalent everywhere. Somebody was asking him when it’s going to happen, what’s the target date? Sam Altman’s point was: don’t get caught up in that. It really doesn’t matter. The point is: get into what’s going on now. Be working with it.
04:00 — His final point was about management. You’re going to be managing not just people, but also agents and people who, with AI, are going to have more capabilities, potential, and power. I’ll have a detailed article later where I offer a lot of verbatim excerpts from the comments Altman made and some interesting analogies he used for what’s coming and what’s happening here.
