Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #35: The year of the DEX Matrix?

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Reality Bytes #35: The year of the DEX Matrix? · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGrath.
• 0:07
  Let's get into it, change makers, and Happy New Year, everybody.
• 0:13
  We hope you had a really wonderful holiday season. I hope, I
• 0:18
  hope some of you took time off as some of us hopefully will have.
• 0:22
  And I say it will have because I've just got to break the fourth wall
• 0:26
  here to the Reality Bites audience and let's slip. But we are recording this
• 0:31
  prior to our holidays. We are, we are in deepest December right now,
• 0:36
  but it is very much a New Year Special. But we've scheduled to
• 0:39
  help kick things off the for the Deck Show and Reality Bites New Year series
• 0:44
  of programming, and that's because we're going to be looking at New Year predictions.
• 0:49
  We've got just about the entire Reality Bites panel with us yet again,
• 0:54
  although Sean is I think on his way not with us just yet. But
• 0:57
  we have Orion, Dina of course, and Megan and Catherine, our super
• 1:03
  producer also in the building and really looking forward to hearing everybody's everybody's predictions.
• 1:11
  First of all, we were just in the chat earlier and Dina and we
• 1:17
  may find that it's pertained, but it's relevant to Dina's own own prediction for
• 1:21
  the new Year. But you were saying that Matrix is one of your one
• 1:23
  of your favorite movies. Yes, The Matrix is one of my most favorite
• 1:29
  series of all times of movies because it has a lot of predictions of where
• 1:36
  we might be going. I don't know, twenty years ago, maybe you
• 1:38
  think this was not happening, But twenty years later, it is starting to
• 1:44
  happen. And it's not just about which part of what we're living in is
• 1:49
  real or not. But I think it's as real as we make it happen.
• 1:53
  So now the tech is rising to be emerging into our day to day
• 1:59
  life with all of the AI's chat chipet's and all of the artificial intelligence that's
• 2:05
  becoming part of our day to day life, which will be growing. And
• 2:08
  I think we're still in the very early stages of AI. And yeah,
• 2:14
  so I'll go back to what I was referring to. I think we need
• 2:17
  to be more kind and we need to promote the difference. This is going
• 2:23
  to be the key indicator between who is going to be the human being and
• 2:25
  who's going to be the AI. At the end of the day, so
• 2:30
  that's where that's where I would go. I would encourage everybody to be more
• 2:34
  kind to themselves and the AIS, which is the extension of humanity in the
• 2:38
  future. Maybe too big to say now, but I don't know. Maybe
• 2:42
  twenty years later when AIS are listening to our podcast, would either confirm or
• 2:46
  deny. You know, will be spared the AI chopping blog for this generous
• 2:53
  I still say please when I use chat gpto any case it gives me answer
• 3:00
  a good answer. It will help you. Thank you, Be polite AI,
• 3:05
  Be kind AI is a bumper sticker there for your time. Be kind
• 3:07
  to AI. AI is coming. Look busy if you know what I'm paraphrasing.
• 3:13
  If nothing else, it won't get angry at us. If we're nice
• 3:15
  to it, yeah, it'll kill us quickly. But the the matrix is
• 3:21
  a kind of is a prediction? Is a is an interesting one? Do
• 3:23
  you know what I do? You know? I still the other day for
• 3:25
  the first time since I was twelve or fifteen or something. It was terminated
• 3:30
  to oh, of course, of course, one amazing movie and how you
• 3:38
  would be half cyborgan how human again? The good Cup Bad Cup, which
• 3:45
  is what we do in most of the days. But yeah, it was
• 3:46
  an amazing movie as well, quite literally a bad cop in Terminated too,
• 3:52
  as as you might recall. But what was I gonna say about it?
• 3:55
  I was gonna say, you're so striking, how massively for Matrix, not
• 4:00
  to put too fine a point, and it stole from Terminator to like even
• 4:04
  the wave of the T two itself, the bad Robot, the bad cop
• 4:11
  robot, they you know, for the agents and the Matrix, like they
• 4:15
  just borrowed the demeanor one hundred one hundred percent. But listen, this is
• 4:23
  enough. I like what we've got. We've got a few sci fi movie
• 4:25
  chats in our back pocket now across across twenty twenty three. So maybe this
• 4:30
  is what video will be remembered for for the Dextua. But before we before
• 4:34
  we dig in and start to hear everybody's predictions for the year, I'm going
• 4:39
  to throw one out there because you know, look, I was. I
• 4:42
  can't remember who it was, but I took it personally. Someone meant,
• 4:44
  well, you know, I think it's Megan. Actually I think it's Megan,
• 4:46
  she said the last show, what's your theme for twenty twenty three?
• 4:50
  And I was, I don't have one because I'm hosting the show. But
• 4:55
  it did. It did sting a little Meghan, and I've been sitting on
• 4:57
  it. So I've come with a prediction. Are you ready? You already?
• 5:00
  I'm not gonna I don't know if I believe it. I'll believe it
• 5:02
  when I hear it. Oh no, we're just going offline, all right,
• 5:08
  right here? My prediction for the year, Okay, Now, I'm
• 5:11
  going to start with a very very generic and you're going to buty're not going
• 5:14
  to get a bit more specific. So for very very generic, is the
• 5:15
  year that Dex goes mainstream. I know that's the most generic ever. So
• 5:19
  let me be more specific. The year of the Magic Quadrant by Gardner,
• 5:24
  The Dex Magic Quadrant. Credible, credible, too obvious, decent, what
• 5:29
  do you think, a little little self serving Tom self serving? But credible,
• 5:35
  No, incredible, that's incredible, deal, big deal for our show
• 5:40
  and our space. You know, Yeah, I mean I think I think
• 5:44
  it's going to happen. And when it happens, now I can be like
• 5:46
  I told you, I told you, so there you go, there you
• 5:49
  go. That's my that's my prediction for the year. But let's let's start.
• 5:54
  Let's start with you, Tim. I know you've brought a more biginess
• 6:00
  orientated one as compared to sort of matrix orientated ones, which I think is
• 6:04
  a good sober way to start the Yeah, a little less techy. Maybe
• 6:09
  I'll leave the techy stuff to the others. I think. You know,
• 6:13
  if you look at twenty twenty three, it's been fairly quiet from an M
• 6:18
  and A and IPO standpoint. The market's really not ready for many tech IPOs
• 6:23
  these days, and there have been a few MNAs that have been visible,
• 6:28
  like broad Combine VM. But I think that the layoffs, the tech layoffs
• 6:32
  are going to ease a little bit, and tech companies are going to look
• 6:35
  to invest more in tech versus people. And I've got four kind of areas
• 6:42
  or comments on that. So the first is, I think the small niche
• 6:46
  players are going to start to formally join forces and improve their better together story
• 6:53
  so they can compete and survive better as a single entity versus smaller players individually.
• 7:00
  Second, I think some of those niche players are going to be bought
• 7:03
  by bigger global companies to fill a gap. Cisco did this a couple of
• 7:09
  times this year, buying a couple of security companies, So I think we're
• 7:12
  going to see some of the big players look to fill in some holes that
• 7:15
  they've got versus trying to build their own. Third, I think anyone who
• 7:21
  has neglected AI an investment in AI may see a better path through acquisition versus
• 7:29
  building from scratch. HP made some acquisitions here. And lastly, I don't
• 7:33
  know that the IPO market will necessarily open up. I'm hoping that it does,
• 7:39
  but we're also seeing this year several big players shifted and went private.
• 7:45
  This year. They were acquired qual Tricks and Toshiba, to name just two
• 7:48
  of them. But they're going the opposite direction, So I don't that one's
• 7:53
  kind of up in the air for me. I'm hoping that the IPO market
• 7:56
  opens up a bit, but I think that we may see some more movement
• 8:00
  into to move in private. M Have you seen have you seen in the
• 8:05
  course of your credtim have you seen this kind of this kind of transition happened
• 8:09
  before. Is it like it's very specific to the present kind of constituent of
• 8:15
  components, Yeah, without a doubt. You know, over the as new
• 8:20
  technology comes out over the years, they build following they build a great platform
• 8:26
  and a great technology. Altiras was one of those and was bought by Semantic.
• 8:31
  So there's definitely consolidation that happens over time, and then you get into
• 8:35
  a new phase where new technology comes out and happens all over again. The
• 8:39
  same thing happens with outsourcing versus insourcing and giving my tactical business to someone else
• 8:43
  and then realize that contractually it doesn't work and you bring it back in.
• 8:46
  So everything is in a cycle, and I think we're starting to, in
• 8:50
  my opinion, we're going to start to see some consolidation as a When you
• 8:54
  go to any conference these days, there are just so many booths that you've
• 8:58
  just never heard heard of, lots of tiny companies, and I think that
• 9:01
  we're going to see some consolidation. Excellent, excellent. And the breaking news
• 9:07
  everybody I have heard on the chat that Sean is going to be unable to
• 9:11
  join us today. It's obviously going to be a shame not to Sean's contribution,
• 9:15
  but we can also be reassured that everyone takes us safe well underlock and
• 9:20
  key. No one's going to have him from him, anything from anyone exactly.
• 9:24
  If people are wondering what I'm talking about. They can listen to the
• 9:26
  end special when he brazenly, brazenly Pilford our own Megan breaks take. So
• 9:33
  Megan safe of the knowledge that yours is it's not going to happen today.
• 9:37
  Did Megan go do something to Sean today to prevent him from joining? I
• 9:41
  challenged him to a duel, but he did not accept. So yeah,
• 9:48
  okay, So for me for this year, not quite as uh sensible as
• 9:56
  Tim's. I feel like Tim offered us like a real vision for like where
• 9:58
  the business world is going in the next year. And I was chatting on
• 10:01
  the side with our producer Catherine that my take is much more of like someone
• 10:05
  who watches the matrix. But I think that and I will say that this
• 10:11
  is not only mine. Someone on the experienced stage said this this year and
• 10:15
  it really kind of struck me, and I've been thinking about it since that.
• 10:18
  This year, with chat GBT coming out, we saw this release of
• 10:22
  all these different AI tools, right, like everybody's got a little like AI
• 10:24
  chatbot that you can talk to now and it might be able to give you
• 10:28
  the answer you're looking for. But for the most part, my experience in
• 10:31
  the marketing tools that I use has been that it's not very useful and it's
• 10:35
  still kind of a nascent technology. It's not doing what it needs to do.
• 10:39
  And what I think we might see where I think we could go is
• 10:46
  that the person or the tool that wins this kind of like AI assistant battle
• 10:50
  will be the one that can cut across tools that can kind of look at
• 10:54
  your whole scope of data that you're working with and be able to pull actual
• 11:00
  insights that are useful for you to do your job. And what that looks
• 11:03
  like will probably be different depending on your function, but I think that we
• 11:09
  might start to see the advent of AI tools that can do that, that
• 11:13
  can cut across tooling to try to pull sort of high level business insights.
• 11:18
  Yeah, I'll back that up. You're starting to see that with tools like
• 11:20
  is Sarah, the internal kind of corporate AI and gen AI to use internal
• 11:28
  data. I think that's I think we're definitely going to see more of that
• 11:30
  because the alternative is to integrate tools, which is difficult. AI can see
• 11:35
  across those and just go right for the data. Fantastic, fantastic. Since
• 11:41
  you mentioned for Matrix and we've already heard from her briefly, let's come back
• 11:46
  to Diana and Dina. So you already gave us a taster of what your
• 11:50
  of what your prediction was, if we could call it a prediction per se,
• 11:56
  maybe maybe unpack it a little more for us. Then what is your
• 12:00
  what is your anticipation with regards to becoming matrix reality. So my anticipation is
• 12:07
  a little bit more across, So it's not just going to be the little
• 12:13
  bits of AIS around. It's going to be more integrated and its growth is
• 12:18
  going to be much faster than its beginning. We'll have a lot of cross
• 12:26
  functions, people doing multiple tasks and it's not just going to be one person
• 12:31
  who's doing one specific job. So you can be a designer, but then
• 12:35
  again you can add some more tech into it and be more into tech and
• 12:39
  design at the same time with the support of AI. So we will be
• 12:43
  integrating our skills with the artificial intelligence capabilities that are growing very fast. So
• 12:50
  I would believe that we will be a lot faster, more efficient, and
• 12:54
  hopefully more productive than we are at this at this and I think in the
• 13:01
  next two years we're going to be having this visibly there in all of the
• 13:07
  domains, and I think in different industries as well. So that's my prediction,
• 13:13
  AI not taking over, but integrating. And I think we're smart enough
• 13:16
  to make sure that we're keeping boundaries between AIS and human beings by being kind,
• 13:22
  by being kind. Yes, come back to your original point. But
• 13:26
  because of this integration, we need we need to all be on our best
• 13:28
  behavior, definitely, because if you need AI to serve you, well,
• 13:35
  we need to be at our top behavior. Otherwise it's just going to be
• 13:37
  releasing a canon now out of without having any control over it. If they
• 13:43
  know how to write code, how to fix errors and enhance themselves, our
• 13:48
  ability to do that is a little bit slower, So we need to be
• 13:52
  conscious of time. It's a bit like do you know what it reminds me
• 13:54
  of doing it? It's a bit like pet ownership. Yeah, do I
• 14:00
  own my dog or my dog owns me? Well, there's that, there's
• 14:03
  that element absolutely. You know the way you raise an animal, true,
• 14:09
  you show it, true, you're trying to encourage it. You know,
• 14:11
  we all know that most dangerous animals have a have dangerous true. True.
• 14:18
  And and the fact that we add sentiment analysis and behavioral analysis into everything that
• 14:26
  we do. I think we need to keep that same pattern even when we're
• 14:28
  dealing with AI. We should not deal with the I as if it's just
• 14:31
  a machine that everything that it does is predicted. It's not really, because
• 14:35
  it starts to pick up from human behavior and human interaction on a wider,
• 14:39
  bigger scale. Since they can do this two hundred million times faster than we
• 14:45
  do. Excellent, excellent prediction and excellent observation with it Oriana last but not
• 14:52
  least, I know it's it's it's it's sticking to the theme, but that
• 14:58
  Dina and Megan into an extent I've kicked off, which is unsurprising. We
• 15:01
  will expect this to be another year of AI, which is fair enough.
• 15:09
  Yeah, And to be fair, I think my prediction I actually I am
• 15:11
  not super confident in saying that this is going to happen in the next year.
• 15:15
  But rather, the thing that I think is going to happen as a
• 15:20
  result of this great enthusiasm for AI is that we're going to start to see
• 15:26
  the limitations and the costs of AI. So right now, it's tremendously inefficient,
• 15:31
  especially these very general models. As Megan was saying, you often see
• 15:37
  when you're using them in context that they just aren't very effective in knowing a
• 15:43
  particular domain. And then the other part is they're intensely resource intensive. Part
• 15:50
  of the terrible phrasing, but they use so much electricity, and that's going
• 15:54
  to become a huge, huge issue. It's already becoming an issue in a
• 15:56
  lot of places. We've seen this with the excitement for green it Tea.
• 16:02
  So I think there's going to be a lot of energy towards how do we
• 16:04
  make AI more efficient and effective, And I think one of the ways to
• 16:11
  do that is actually more specialized and domain specific lms. So that's large language
• 16:18
  models that are trained to be a domain expert in a particular area. So
• 16:22
  it's not going to be you know, your perfect chatbot. What it is
• 16:26
  is it's going to be very well informed about a particular topic. It's going
• 16:32
  to be trained by experts, not just by you know, anybody who can
• 16:37
  click on a survey, and it will be much less costly in terms of
• 16:44
  energy as a result, because it's not trying to answer, you know,
• 16:48
  every single question in the universe. It's going to be answering very specific questions.
• 16:52
  And that's something that we're doing right. We are training our model to
• 16:56
  be an expert in the types of questions that we need to answer, and
• 17:00
  I think that's going to be so much more effective and useful and as much
• 17:04
  as costly in terms of the environmental impact. Mmm. Well, I like
• 17:14
  the divergent takes on AI, I like Tim ground and us I like me
• 17:19
  bringing it back to deck a little bit everyone, I mean, come on,
• 17:22
  everyone's predictions or a little a little a little broader. I'm just kidding.
• 17:27
  I'm just kidding, but it's a pretty good beginning of year bag of
• 17:33
  predictions to leave people with. We will never know which which one of those
• 17:37
  Sean would have stolen, but hopefully we'll we'll have him back very very soon.
• 17:41
  And no really really enjoyed talking to you all. And although people will
• 17:47
  be hearing this after everyone's had a bit of time off, at least hopefully,
• 17:53
  I hope you will have a lovely, lovely Christmas and New Year wonderful
• 17:59
  working with you all a cross reality bites and let's have a let's have a
• 18:02
  fantastic twenty twenty four together, And of course we hope you too, listeners
• 18:07
  enjoy the new year and have a fantastic twelve months ahead of you goodbye.
• 18:15
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• 18:22
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• 18:26
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• 18:30
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• 18:33
  head over to nextthink dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until
• 18:37
  next time,