In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I give my thoughts on Larry Ellison’s response to an analyst’s near-metaphysical question during the recent Oracle earnings call.
Highlights
00:21 — Larry Ellison could be known as the Oracle of Oracle. Last week, during Oracle’s Q1 earnings call, he had a chance to show off the high-level thinking he’s brought to this business for almost half a century.
01:14 — An analyst on the call said he’d “recently heard someone say, we’re moving from a world of data gravity to one of AI gravity…” He went on to ask, “Does AI plus cloud in any way break what we’ve always understood about data gravity? And what does that mean for Oracle?”
02:20 — One of Ellison’s key points in response was that data and AI have become fused. They’re greatly interdependent. In terms of a shift away from data or change in gravity with AI, he said that AI is utterly dependent on vast amounts of training data. This is very good for Oracle’s database business.
03:43 — I’m taking nothing away from AI. It’s a remarkable new technology. But this notion that the next shiny new object is going to obscure and make everything else seem irrelevant or trivial is just goofy.
04:19 — We all need to be sure that we don’t get too swept up and fail to see that these things, from cloud to data to AI and the other things, are on a continuum. The pieces are interrelated. The best solutions by companies are going to keep this fully in balance.
04:46 — In a metaphysical sense, you can read a longer version of this later today, and, this week, as Oracle CloudWorld opens up, we may get some further glimpses into the future of gravity, and whether the cosmos is going to be pulled apart by AI or whether this is going to be some unified field impact.
