Telemetry News Now

Telemetry News Now.

Welcome to another episode of Telemetry News Now. Very exciting because here in Upstate New York, we are finally in nice weather. I feel like I talk about the weather and our progress in our corner of the world every every other week, Justin. I don't know. But we are in the the sixties and seventies, though we're getting a lot of rain, but I am very happy to see no snow and constant blanket of gray clouds over my head all the time. So how is it by you?

I am actually in Chicago this week. I'm attending Cheyenne on Thursday, which we'll talk a little bit more about in the, events section. But, man, is it beautiful in Chicago? This is, like, the perfect time if anybody ever wants to go visit Chicago. I was walking around with my coworkers yesterday.

Seventy degrees, sunny. It's beautiful here. So definitely have having a good good week from that perspective.

Yeah. Yeah. One one negative about this time of year where I live is that we have, black flies in the area, which are very, very tiny.

So, you know, you think that they weren't that big of a deal, but they are, and they'll leave welts on you. And especially as you go farther north into the Adirondacks, they can swarm around you and leave you just covered, and it's it's difficult. So, you you know, you see folks with, like, bug nets over their head and stuff. But the weather itself, fantastic.

You can't beat, like, May and September in, in in my part of the world. So so let's just jump into the headlines for today. We have a few interesting things, including, some stuff directly about the future of the Internet. But first, from TechCrunch on May thirteenth, Google announced that its generative AI assistant Gemini, probably already familiar with that, will roll out over the next few months to every single vehicle running Android Auto and then later this year to, cars with Google's built in operating system.

So the idea here is that this is gonna promise more natural conversational voice control, proactive route aware recommendations, that sounds interesting, like restaurant searches and that stuff, of course, and an always listening Gemini live mode for full fledged dialogues. I don't know if you ever use the chat g p t dialogue thing on your phone or any other app, Justin, but I use that quite a bit. So everything is gonna be processed in the cloud, until future models, I don't know what the timeline is there, gain enough onboard computing for edge inference. So right now, we're not running anything, heavily locally in the car for now.

Now Google claims that this upgrade will reduce driver cognitive load. That's what Google is claiming. It's gonna reduce driver cognitive load while supporting more than forty languages and extending to all markets where Gemini is already available. I'm not sure this will I don't know if this is gonna increase or decrease distraction for drivers and thereby cognitive load.

I mean, on one hand, it's a conversation. Right? We already have conversations with folks over the phone or with somebody else in the car. Yeah.

But on the other hand, it never really works out that smoothly when we're working with technology, and then I get frustrated and I got to tap on the screen to kill it or this or that, and, you know, the session doesn't work. It doesn't understand me. I get frustrated. You know?

So as far as reducing cognitive load, I'm not sure about that. And I like the idea, though. The the conversational interface, if it was perfected, that I can I can see being very productive? I don't know.

What do you think, Justin?

You know, I haven't I'm not a, Android audio guy or auto guy. I'm a CarPlay guy, but I I love CarPlay in the car. But I was talking to, my sister-in-law about this recently, actually, how it can be very distracting if you're doing it all on the touch screen. Right? You're interacting with it on the touch screen in your vehicle instead of having your eyes on the road.

Mhmm.

So I've started over the last few months trying to get in the habit of doing the Siri interface and CarPlay to interact using natural language.

Right? Mhmm. Yeah. It's not perfect, but it is less distracting because you can, in natural language, say, hey, you know, give me the directions to this place that I'm going or search for the nearest gas station or search for a an article talks about taco places with vegan options near me.

Right? Like, so you can give it some additional prompting, and it works Yeah. Relatively well. Like any other technology, like you're saying, it's not perfect.

Sometimes she comes back and says, I can't do that right now. But Yeah.

Yeah. And and it'll improve over time. Right? Of course. I get it.

Yeah. You know, the other thing I I thought was interesting here is, I guess, I just sort of assumed that they were already doing some amount of AI with the way their, Android Auto worked. You could speak to it previously, I think. Right? So I guess they were just doing the front end or LLMs to translate your voice to text and then doing a simple search. What they're adding now, it looks like, is the ability to actually do more complex AI queries instead of just a simple Google search. Is that what you take away from this?

No. I don't know exactly what's on the back end, but, I mean, there there are things like semantic routers that really they're explicitly programmed with words and phrases. So they're not ultra sophisticated, but, I mean, they're sophisticated in the sense that they can hear your voice and translate it to, you know, an action. So there are those things out there that have been around for a while.

And then natural language processing before large language models, you know, we still had that in confined domains. So in a question answer kind of a thing. And then now, like you said, on the back end, being able to call other functions, like looking up restaurants and, you know, maybe interacting with our personal stuff, like what's on my calendar for today. You know?

So we can do we can do more with that, today, which I think is really neat. I I just don't know if it's gonna decrease or reduce driver cognitive load like Google says. You know, you're still doing the same act kind of activities, but instead of tapping on the screen, you know, the idea I think here is gonna reduce distractions and and do it using natural language, via voice. You know?

So yeah. Anyway, from SDX central a few days ago on May eighth, Cisco's Outshift incubator just announced a prototype quantum network entanglement chip created along with UC Santa Barbara that produces up to a million high fidelity entangled photon pairs per output channel or two hundred million pairs per second across the chip while running at room temperature on standard telecom wavelengths. Though that last part is very important.

So the process consumes less than a milliwatt of power and the chip fits into existing photonic integrated circuits. And I did a little bit more research than usual for this headline because I'm not a physicist, so bear with me here. The idea is that the chip can ride today's fiber infrastructure, cabling infrastructure to quote, teleport quantum states between distant nodes, which in theory would form the basis of a very scalable quantum internet using currently deployed cabling.

Folks, we are talking about quantum entanglement here on Telemetry Now. I never thought we would be doing that, Justin, but we are.

Yeah. This I'm learning all kinds of new stuff today.

Yeah. But it is networking, so it's interesting. So anyway, to make happen, Cisco opened a dedicated quantum networking lab in Santa Monica to refine the chip and develop complementary pieces like entanglement distribution protocols, a distributed quantum compiler, a quantum network development kit, and a vacuum noise quantum random number generator. Now to be fair, I don't know what any of those things are, but wow.

We are talking about looking at a new way to do the internet.

Executives say integrating both hardware and software in house, in this case, for this project could bring the timelines that they're thinking for this quantum Internet down from decades, many decades, to maybe even five to ten years, which is amazing. So, you know, what's also interesting here is that when I did, you you know, some research around this headline to dig deeper and learn a little bit about it, I found articles going back more than a year from other sources like the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Microsoft, talking about the potential experimentation around this, a a quantum Internet, and also using current cabling, you know, so fiber optics that are already out there. So it's definitely, to me at least, very, very interesting development and and very interesting as far as the direction that we're going in the networking industry.

So if I understand this correctly, Phil, you were educating me a little bit before we started recording. The concept is that the state on one end is instantaneously changed on the other end. Like, they're basically entangled, linked together. So if you change the state on one end, it automatically it instantaneously changes it on the other end. So instead of the traditional fiber optic transport systems where optical systems where you transmit light across a fiber optic from one end to the other to signal data being transmitted, in this case, you're connecting through quantum and entanglement on either side, and you change one side instantaneously changes it on the other side across a long distance. Is that basics of what we're talking about here?

Are you asking me to explain quantum entanglement to you, Justin?

Yes.

I don't think I could do that.

You got the gist of it is that, you know, that that two two particles in the universe are linked together in such a way, to me, it's magic, where you change the state of one or you even observe the state of one. You can observe therefore understand the state of the other or change the state of one and then change the state of the other regardless of distance, which is this idea of a quantum network where you can change the state of a particle and then instantaneously have it change on the other side. Thereby, if you use that as your underlying mechanism, somehow transmit data using that, in ways that are, I assume, faster and more efficient than than we have now.

One is that we are not dealing with the speed of light as a factor. And two, I don't know how that's gonna play into things like, you know, like you mentioned earlier before we started the recording, things like latency or, what does throughput actually look like. And I get it. So we're now faster than light or or light isn't an isn't a factor, but how much how much throughput do we actually have?

I I don't know. I don't know those things. But, obviously, this is what Cisco and and all these other researchers that we mentioned are doing, University of Chicago, you know, and and big names like that in academia. They're researching this stuff.

So we'll see we'll see some news, I assume, over the next, you know, five years to ten years, like they said. So very exciting, very interesting.

We have to take a pause from reading about the latest AI models and learn a little bit more about quantum physics.

Yeah. Right. That's true. And to be fair, I watch some of those things at, like, eleven o'clock at night when I'm having my midnight snack or almost midnight snack and sitting there on YouTube having a sandwich watching, like, the latest YouTube video of stuff that, like, oh, yeah.

String theory. I know all about that. You know? So it's interesting to me in that sense, but also because we could be talking about a new type of Internet that obviously would change the world, in my opinion, like the first Internet did or or the current Internet, I should say.

Right?

Did you ever watch Quantum Leap, the show where the guy would, like, go back in time to fix, you know, a crime or something or do right, right, or wrong or whatever?

Yeah. Scott Bakula.

When they started talking about Quantum Teleportation, that was what came up in my mind was episodes of that show where he's Yeah. Jumping through time.

Oh, yeah. I remember that show when I was a kid, for sure.

Okay. So this next headline from TechCrunch on May thirteenth isn't necessarily networking. It's actually not really even tech, I guess, in in the sense of tech that we typically talk about on this show. But I'm bringing it up mostly because I use these kinds of AI meeting transcription tools all the time.

I think, Justin, you probably do as well, and we have them here at work.

Mhmm.

So from TechCrunch, Notion has entered the kind of crowded AI meeting transcription space. And so that's alongside Zoom, ClickUp, Otter, and others by introducing an AI powered note taking tool that records system audio on the Mac desktop app. It also generates live transcripts, very useful, lets users add manual notes in parallel, and then produces a formatted summary for whatever sales calls, stand ups, technical, whatever you're doing, meetings in more than a dozen languages, which is interesting.

So Notion's new feature requires participant consent, and it'll soon be available on mobile as well. So according to Notion, this complements new enterprise offerings like cross app search, research mode. It sort of signals Notion's push to become a more full production or productivity suite, right, competing with Google and Microsoft. Now I use Notion.

Mhmm. I also use Otter quite a bit. And, you know, at first, I sort of resisted some of these tools, especially because I saw there were kind of, the AI transcription generation function. That's what I'm talking about specifically.

But I I really changed my mind, and now I kinda rely on them quite a bit, especially for technical calls. Or if I'm not able to attend a meeting, you know, I'll I'll make sure somebody please do the transcript thing, not just record it, and I can browse the transcript, if I want as opposed to to listening to the audio. So I I don't know. I think it's good news from Notion, of course, assuming that they do well in terms of accuracy.

That was an issue for me in the early days. Right? That's why I was resistant. Mhmm.

But I do think it's gotten much, much better.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Being on the sales side of the house, here at Kentic, we use Gong for all of our external meetings with partners and customers and so forth, and it is amazing. It's gotten much better.

Like you said, the transcripts are much more accurate. It summarizes it. So not only do you get the actual transcript, but it'll give you a summary of, like, okay. It was a thirty minute call.

Here's the high points of the conversation. Here's the next steps. It'll even help in Gong's case, and I assume there's where Notion's going with this. It'll even help draft a follow-up email.

Interesting. If you met with a customer and you owe them, you know, response to something that was discussed, it'll actually even prompt you with, like, hey. Here's the draft of the email that you should send them as a follow-up. So it is amazing how how these tools are helping us be more efficient with our time and not forget stuff that we need to be doing as far as follow ups and stuff.

But I'm with you. Like, when I first started using Phil, like, having every single call we do with a customer be recorded just seemed a little, like, big brother ish to me. But, you know, I'm willing to get over that because of the efficiency that it brings in in having it. So it is nice to have it and be able to go back and reference either the recording or the AI audio transcript of stuff if we're trying to remember, like, what took place in a meeting three months ago.

Yep. Agree.

Okay. From the Cisco newsroom, Cisco announced that it recently joined an organization, actually. I guess you can more accurately call it an investment consortium. It's been around for a little while, called the AI Infrastructure Partnership or AIP.

Now you're gonna find the same headline in NetworkWorld, the BlackRock website, other sources as well.

Now AIP, this is the investment group I'm talking about, was originally formed late last year. It's led by BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, MGX, Microsoft, NVIDIA, XAI.

And according to these groups, it it brings its networking and security expertise to help build a secure, scalable, open architecture platform for next generation AI data centers. So the plan of the group is to unlock something like thirty billion dollars in equity commitments and, with debt financing and that sort of thing, mobilize another hundred billion dollars to fund hardware, software, energy, and the connectivity needed to support these large scale AI workloads. And, you know, we've been talking about that quite a bit, Justin, the sheer cost. The scale of these data centers require that kind of investment, and and there is no letting up.

The foot seems to be, you know, on the gas right now. Cisco CEO, Chuck Robbins, many of our listeners familiar with Chuck Robbins, and also BlackRock's Larry Fink highlighted the economic potential of AI. I think we all understand that, but also the critical role cross industry collaboration is gonna play in realizing that potential, interesting because we are seeing development and collaboration among private industry, government, multiple vendors that you'd sometimes you'd think might even be competing with each other, not necessarily in this case. So now I do have a statement from Cisco.

Quote, the addition of Cisco reinforces AIP's commitment to an open architecture platform and fostering a broad ecosystem that supports a diverse range of partners on a nonexclusive basis, all working together to build a new kind of AI infrastructure. I don't know. I feel like this is kinda like the regular cadence of AI investment news that we talk about all the time. You know?

And, I mean, we see it all the time today in in today's tech world. So but but these really are huge dollar amounts. They're huge investments, and we're talking about giant companies, BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia.

Tell me, I think the partnership is interesting to know about and to keep an eye on to see what comes out of it. Right? What what actually comes of this investment? But the articles are a little light on, like, what exactly are they going to do with this money other than, obviously, it's AI.

But AI agree.

I noticed that. Yeah.

Alright. Moving right along, the next article is from PC Magazine talking about some news around Starlink. Phil, we've covered Starlink quite a few times on the podcast here, but this one specifically, they got approval from the FAA to move the number of launches they're allowed to do in a calendar year from five up to twenty five per year. And why that's important is as they need to launch more rockets to put more satellites up into space, being constrained with only being able to do five per year really limits what they can do.

And especially they've had some issues here with a lot, a couple of the last ones where they've exploded in the atmosphere and they've had, you know, launch problems, that kind of stuff. So the five per year as they start to scale out their business was becoming quite a constraint. So they've gotten approval, as I said, from the FAA, go up to twenty five per year. That's this is now, of course, launching these from their new city that they renamed Starbase, Texas, right, where they're doing their launches from.

Mhmm. So I thought that that part was interesting. The other thing I thought was really interesting from the article is they talked about their new v three Starlink satellites. So satellites that they're actually planning to launch going forward Yeah.

Are much more powerful than the v two that they've launched to date. The ones they've launched to date, they call v two mini satellites. So the v three, each satellite provides one terabit of downlink speed and a hundred and sixty gig of uplink capacity speed, which is ten times the downlink and twenty four times the uplink capacity of the current generation b two minutei satellites.

So even just the improvement in the generation of satellite, not to mention having a lot more of them up there, is, gonna increase the capacity that Starlink has on their network. And the article hints that they might be able to start offering one gigabit per second, speeds to presumably customers. And we've talked a little bit about some of the now transit that they're able to provide with some of their new base stations. So, yeah, more coming from, SpaceX and Starlink for sure. Mhmm.

Yeah. Gigabit speed, low latency speed via satellite is phenomenal.

You know, I did see that these v three satellites are are are much bulkier, weighing, over two tons. So these are, you know, much bigger and bulkier and heavier than the v two satellites. So that's gonna require, obviously, more investment to get into orbit and, the use of the bigger starship, obviously, which is now more fuel, more cost and everything. So it's not a trivial matter.

I'm really excited about the potential of having gigabit speed, you know, via Internet. I'm sorry, via satellite. Right? That's that's phenomenal.

It's amazing. But what do you personally think about the sheer number of small satellites now that we're seeing in these meshes in orbit?

You know, I have to assume I have to assume with, you know, good faith and grace given to the FAA that they know what they're doing and that we're we're not gonna have these incredible adverse effects of having a crowded low Earth orbit Yeah.

Since they approved this.

I mean, I I I don't know.

I'm I'm not really sure. The article didn't talk about that portion of it.

It did talk that they had done a study on the impact of the environment from, you know, obviously, when a rocket launches, it puts off exhaust and fumes into the atmosphere and so forth.

So they had done a study and didn't feel like it was gonna have a material negative impact on our environment from allowing these additional launches. So that part, they did do some research on. The article didn't really say whether they did the research on the space debris impact of this. But, I mean, that is something I think is more of this.

Because keep in mind, it's not just Starlink that's launching these. Right? Amazon's got their own thing, and I read an article recently that Apple's starting to do their own offering too. Right?

And I'm sure Google's got probably got one. Right? So we have multiple competing companies that are launching rockets into space to do Internet via satellite. So, yeah, to your point, you're gonna start having collisions in space.

You're gonna start having these things that they lose contact with and are abandoned. I don't know, Phil, if you saw the articles here recently in the last week or so where they had a, I think it was a Russian rocket that, like, they had lost connectivity to in, like, the nineteen eighties maybe that recently fell and landed in, I think, in the Indian Ocean. A lot of it burned up. It was reentered the atmosphere, but it landed in the Indian Ocean.

But for about twenty four hours, they were really nervous about where that was actually going to land as it came into the Earth's atmosphere. So yeah.

Yeah. And this is not around the corner, folks. We're not gonna have, gigabit satellite connectivity next week. So far, you know, the test flights with Starship because remember, that's much bigger than Falcon, and they're using they're using dummy payloads right now to test this out.

They're not successful so far. The upper stages have exploded in the most recent two test flights, so, it'll be a little bit of time. But one thing I do give to SpaceX and the Starlink as as well is, just they keep pushing. Some people decry, like, oh, there was a rocket explosion.

Everything has to stop now, and they just keep pushing. They understand that there are these kind of faults. We're not talking about Yeah. And so there's no human casualties.

On these things from no humans on there, so it's not impacting human life.

But but they do keep pushing.

And so I will say, though, you know, got a personal story here.

My wife and I, especially when the weather's nice, like we were talking about at the top of the show, like to go out and go I'll call it glamping. Got a nice big camper that we take out and go out to a state park and spend the weekend. Well, historically, I've had the the only Internet connectivity I had was on my hotspotting on my cell phone. Right?

And a lot of these campgrounds get no cell phone signal. So you're you're off the grid, which is nice. Yeah. But then it limits the amount of time I can go.

I have to wait till my work week is over to be able to go out and spend the weekend out camping. So I went ahead and bought a STARLINK setup and took it out this past weekend. My wife and I did to a state park here in Missouri, And I was getting, about a hundred and sixty meg down and about eighteen meg up set up at the campground and was able to actually do my workday on Friday so we could go out Thursday night. My wife and my daughter could run around and do some hiking, do whatever they wanted to do while I did a little bit of work on Friday to wrap up the work week.

So it's definitely, you know, unlocked a little bit more flexibility in my work life balance by being able to do that.

So Yeah.

And then with the advent of gigabit connectivity, it'll just, you know, make it that much more flexible and mobile as far as our digital workforce. Right? For sure.

Alright. The next headline is from, actually, the next two headlines are from US News. The first one talking about, NVIDIA sending eighteen thousand AI chips to Saudi Arabia. So many of our listeners follow politics.

You probably are aware that Trump recently visited the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, over in Saudi Arabia. And one of the things that apparently they talked about was that the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, so that's the national government of Saudi Arabia's investment fund that they run and own, has a company in their portfolio, an AI startup called Humain, I believe it's pronounced, h u m a I n, Humain, who wants to get their hands on some AI chips because like a lot of companies and countries, they're looking to build out data centers that have, GPUs in them. And so

NVIDIA has committed to send eighteen thousand chips to Saudi Arabia to humane so that they can build their data center and do, presumably AI, you know, workload training. They're gonna be sending them the GB three hundred Blackwell chips, which are some of NVIDIA's newest chips, some of their most advanced chips. So they're apparently building a five hundred megawatt data center there in Saudi Arabia that they they'll be installing these, NVIDIA GPU chips in.

Yeah. It also does speak to the, friendliness that, the United States has with the Middle Eastern countries for sure right now. We're seeing that. And, of course, there's an incredible amount of of wealth and influence, in the Middle East, which Oh, for sure.

Right. Which makes it certainly tactical to be friendly and to and to have these kinds of investments. NVIDIA in particular, I mean, we're talking about the investment in a single data center, like you said, a a five hundred megawatt data center. So who operates this data center?

We understand the company, but we also you know, we we know, you and I talking, that there are specific models that can be trained and built and, like, what's the purpose and what's the goal? Is it you know, AI is a very broad, ambiguous term. And so that's what I'm interested to see is what the actual nation of Saudi Arabia is interested in doing. Now it could be that it is just we need to get on this bandwagon and support the activity where we can be cutting edge technologically and keep pace with the the, you know, the United States and China.

Or there may be a very specific AI application that we are looking at that, you know, presumably behind the scenes, the United States, NVIDIA, and others are whether wittingly or unwittingly supporting.

Yeah. Well, and I mean, you know, Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, was quoted in the article saying AI, like electricity and Internet, is essential infrastructure for every nation. Right? Yeah.

To your point, we don't know exactly what their nation's gonna use it. Are they gonna use it to advance medical research? Are they gonna use it for coming up with better attack vectors for, you know, defending their own country in case of a digital war? Who knows?

It's hard it's hard to tell. I mean, all probably all of those are within bounds of what they have planned.

But Sure.

Yeah.

And to call AI electricity, like a commodity like electricity, a thing that, you know, at first when electricity was a thing where I mean, it's not like we invented it, but when we were able to harness its power and move it and store it and those kind of things over the Industrial Revolution and forward, it eventually became one of those things where it's like a commodity for all people. It's not a luxury item. And then we started to talk about that with regard to the Internet not that long ago, if you remember just a generation ago, really, maybe a couple of decades ago where we said, like, is the Internet that same kind of a thing, like municipal water and electricity going into every home and everybody just needs it as a matter of a maybe not necessarily a right, but like a basis, you know, for our side.

COVID taught us that it's pretty critical to, you know, interacting and collaborating with one another, especially when there's a pandemic like COVID.

Yeah. But Jensen said AI he put AI in that category as well, artificial intelligence.

You know, that's that's I don't know. I haven't really thought about AI in those terms yet specifically.

Yeah. Very forward leaning for sure, but I you know, I can see where you know, as we get more and more reliant on some of these things we've been talking about on the podcast, whether it's Notion, call recording, we get more and more reliant on some of these things. It may become where it's, like, really hard to live to do your day to day function without access to our AI toolset. Well, I mean, it's Sad as that kinda sounds.

How do we function without It's gonna be hard to function in the context that we've built.

I mean, you can you can drop out, man. You could go live in a tiny home in the Alaskan wilderness and live off the land like that show that my my family and I watch. We love watching, what is it called? The the Alaska, the I whatever whatever whatever. Anyway Off the grid? Yeah.

Well, they live off the grid, but it's not the nearest some days where that seems really appealing.

Life below zero. That's what it is. Anyway, yeah, you could do that. And there's probably a lot of people that are seeing these kind of things that are more inspired to do that more than ever.

And and to be fair, I am as well. Like, I don't live I live in a typical American suburb, and, and I work in tech, so I'm I won't be doing it anytime soon. But I got to admit, I think about it once in a while. I'm like, am I relying on this technology and just to live in this world?

And then I then I think about how I love science fiction. Right? And I love Star Trek. And, yeah, you know, in those shows, it's fiction.

I get it. But they had to rely on that technology in order to to function in that society in that societal context. So interesting.

Alright. Moving on to our final article for today, kind of ending on a little bit of a down note, but we'll we'll get through it. Microsoft announced they are going to be laying off about six thousand workers on Tuesday. I guess let me look at the date of this article.

This article was, May thirteenth, so presumably that was, yesterday that, these layoffs were announced. Nearly three percent, of its entire workforce. So Microsoft is, I think as of last June, the last time they announced their number of headcount, they had two hundred and twenty eight thousand full time workers, so six thousand. It'd be roughly three percent, of their workforce.

And they did say this well, this is the largest job cut that they've done in more than two years, and the reason that they're doing this is that they are spending more heavily on artificial intelligence.

So now on the surface this could be seen as, oh, AI is taking our jobs, but I don't think it's really that the more I read the article, Phil. I think it's more that where they're going with their business, where they're investing heavily obviously is in, you know, a lot of the AI stuff that they're doing, a lot of the models they're training, they're an investor obviously in OpenAI.

If they're going to take their money and invest it in a lot of this AI stuff, some of the things they were previously doing, they're obviously investing less in. And if the staff that they have weren't working on some of the newer stuff, makes sense to let those folks go. And, presumably, they're gonna have to hire in other areas to build more of these AI tool chains and training and models and so forth that they're investing more heavily in.

Yeah. Yeah. I I have pretty much rejected the idea that AI is gonna take everybody's jobs, especially in software development and things like that. We've talked about it several times in the show.

You know that I use, like, concursor is it's just awesome. Like, to have that as my copilot. I'm sorry to use that word, but it is a good word. Mhmm.

As I'm, you know, typing up something that you know, some some code to make a workflow work. I mean, it's it's awesome. And then, of course, the other tools that I use, and I'm, very much, embedded in the in the AI, especially AI for network operations space right now. So I don't see it taking people's jobs.

And and, in this case, though, you know, these large companies have these reductions in force from time to time for various reasons, whether they they Mhmm. Yeah. Whether they be tied directly to economic trends or to a shift in the focus of the company. In this case, that's what your theory is, and I I get that.

The last one was really big two years ago in twenty twenty three. I mean, they they eliminated, what about ten thousand jobs. So Yeah. Five percent.

Mhmm. Mhmm. You know, not related to performance is what Microsoft is saying. So we get it.

Reducing layers of management.

That makes sense. I get it. And, maybe shifting the focus of the company for the next few years. So it is certainly, sad. You know, we we know folks that work at Microsoft and, but, unfortunately, these things do happen, especially in the the larger companies. We do hear from it about these kind of things from time to time. So, you know, I hope those folks that were laid off, land somewhere quick, and it is a minimal impact and even provide some new opportunity that they didn't even expect.

Absolutely.

Alright. That's it for the headlines for this week. Let's talk a little bit about upcoming events.

Like I said earlier in the show, I'm in Chicago this week. Tomorrow, May fifteenth, as we're recording this, is the Chicago NOG, Shy NOG, that's, put on every well, roughly every year. I think they missed a year last year, so I'm excited to see this one come back. Agenda looks really good as always. It's put together by the organizer, so I'm looking forward to attending that tomorrow and learning about some of the newer trends in networking. Next up, on our radar is AutoCon three put on by the network automation forum. That's in Prague, May twenty sixth through thirtieth.

Myself and a few of my colleagues here from Kentik will be putting on a workshop. So we're, excited to teach folks who wanna sit through that a little bit more about network observability and what we're now at Kentik are calling network intelligence. We'll be talking a little bit about why we're calling it that and then walking through some basics on setting up a tool set to collect some network telemetry. So if you're going to AutoCon three in Prague and going to the workshops but haven't picked out which workshop you're doing on Monday afternoon, we would be, honored to have you sit through our session, but, they'll definitely learn something from AutoCon.

Phil, I know you and I both have been to a number of these, and they're always well done. I always learn something, and I think you do as well. Mhmm. Yep.

Next up after that, well, I guess that's actually before that chronologically, is Vermont NUG in Essex Junction, Vermont. That is coming up on May twenty first. So if you're in that area, definitely check that out. Illinois NUG in Chicago on June fifth.

So if you're in the Chicagoland area but you can't make Shine Aug on May fifteenth, go check out the Illinois NUG on June fifth. That'll be an afternoon evening thing. And then that same day, if you're in the Saint Louis area on June fifth, there is a Missouri NUG. I'm one of the organizers of that.

So, I can tell you we're doing our best to make that a a good use of time. We have a friend of the show, Scott Robon, who's gonna come talk about total network operations as the keynote for that Missouri NUG on June fifth. So if you're in the area, come come check that out.

Awesome. Thanks very much, Justin. So with that, those are the headlines for today. Thanks very much. Bye bye.