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Im training for muscle strength, endurance, and stamina. Know the difference? I couldn't care less about your perception of your skills. You can be good for a short period of time. Or be great the whole way. #BuildToPlayBuiltToLast #IWillNotBeAtWork #AthleteLife #MyDay #BeDifferent #StayReady #AthleteLife #MyDay #BeDiffrent #BuiltToLast Kentucky Football... show more
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Catsby902 年前
What I really respect about you as a player is a lot of players talk about putting in the work, but you show it every day. I can't wait to see you play for Kentucky next season!
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![Just in $AMD Anush "Speed is the moat"|ROCm🎙️ In the race to define the future of AI, what's the one advantage that truly lasts? It's not proprietary tech, argues Anush Elangovan Elangovan, VP of AI Software at AMD , but the sustainable speed of innovation. He explains why AMD is rejecting the "walled garden" model for its open source ROCm stack, betting that an open community flywheel is the key to victory. Listen to understand how this open strategy is designed to out-innovate closed systems by empowering developers to solve everything from frontier-model challenges to the mundane, everyday problems that define the "last mile" of AI. AMD ROCm Software: Part 1 Transcript [00:00:00] Andrew Zigler: Joining me is Anush Elangovan, VP of AI software at AMD. And when people talk about AI compute, the conversation often stops at hardware specs, but it's more than just physical chips that win the game. It's also the software ecosystems supporting them. [00:00:18] Andrew Zigler: The prevailing strategy in the industry has been to build something like a walled garden. You know, something closed, proprietary locks, developers in. But AMD is betting on an entirely different play, open source acceleration, and with rock, their open source AI software stack. AMD is building not just hardware parity, but an innovation flywheel that's powered by the community with interoperability and the freedom to scale without all of that pesky lockin. [00:00:48] Andrew Zigler: And in this world, speed is your moat and how fast you can innovate while your platform remains open, flexible, and standardize across all of its applications. That's what we're gonna explore [00:01:00] today. So Anush, I'm really excited to have you here. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. [00:01:04] Anush Elangovan: Thanks for having me. Uh, super excited to chat about it. [00:01:07] Andrew Zigler: Amazing. Well, let's go ahead and dive right in with kind of what I laid it out with in the beginning, the idea of the moat and it being about speed. I wanna unpack that a bit because that came from you when you and I first spoke. And I, and I want to know, you know, how do you define speed inside of AMD beyond just things like hardware, benchmarks. [00:01:27] Anush Elangovan: Yeah, that's a very good question. So when we typically talk about speed, everyone's like, Hey, hardware benchmark specs, right? Like, uh, memory bandwidth or, or flops. And that is one important part of it, uh, AMD does very well. With that, we do have, a, a very good history of executing on that axis. [00:01:47] Anush Elangovan: But when I say speed is the moat, it is about, uh, how we prepare, how we build the muscle to run the race for a long time and run it fast. And it is [00:02:00] not about a single point in time that you've, you've beat some you know, benchmark and, and you declare victory. It's about building the ability to consistently develop and deliver. [00:02:13] Anush Elangovan: Both hardware and software innovation at scale and do it fast, right? Like, you know, we we're increasingly getting to a point where models come out and they're, uh, you know, a year or two ago it was like, Hey, they work on AMD on day zero, which is great, but now they are performing on AMD the day it releases, right? [00:02:32] Anush Elangovan: So, what does it take to Prefetch where the industry is going? Be prepared to intercept. At that point is what you know, I, I refer to as you know, the, the speed factor in, in creating this mode, right? And the mode is just shed all things that hold you back and run as fast as you can. [00:02:53] Anush Elangovan: Uh, because the pace of innovation that is, uh, being seen in, in AI [00:03:00] industries is just. Amazing. Right? And it's like, it's transformational at at how you generate electricity. It's transformational as at how you build data centers. It's transformational at how you deploy compute, networking. It's transformational at what kind of use cases you, you know, uh, use AI for. [00:03:17] Anush Elangovan: Uh, and for that, you need to be prepared to, see what comes tomorrow and be prepared to run the race tomorrow. [00:03:23] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, it's a really great perspective because it highlights that it's not just like a checkpoint that you run through. I like how you called out, like it's not just hitting that benchmark or being the best in class at that moment, in that snapshot, it's about having a. The throughput and about having that dedication to the idea and continuing to deliver on it. [00:03:43] Andrew Zigler: It's not just crossing the threshold, but it's also being the engine. And that's what, that's what protects a business. That is the moat, because the moat is that innovation layer, the faster and more, uh, future forward. That you can work and think, [00:04:00] you know, the better. Uh, we, we talk a lot about like future forward work styles. [00:04:04] Andrew Zigler: Like what are the things I could be doing right now today that are gonna be like, way more useful tomorrow? Let, let's abandon those, workflows that are older and that kind of like, that translates into. An advantage when you work that way. You know, what kind of things have you learned working with, uh, like across all spectrums of people who would use ROCm, right? [00:04:23] Andrew Zigler: You have like the developers, but then you also have the enterprises and you have this large span of adoptees, right? So what is the, what does that look like that you learn? [00:04:32] Anush Elangovan: Yeah, so, so the way I look at it is there are gonna be pockets of different, uh, you know, cadences, right? Like, so people who are deploying in enterprises, for example, right? The validation and how long it takes for them to deploy an LLM that's secure. It's, with guardrails, et cetera, maybe longer. [00:04:52] Anush Elangovan: but you still have to go through the process and you have to be prepared to like, walk that walk to deploy an enterprises. That doesn't mean it's [00:05:00] not fast, that's as fast as you can do for that industry, right? And if you are deploying AI in healthcare, right, it's, it's got its own, uh, cycle. [00:05:07] Anush Elangovan: but in each one of these, you want to see how, like, go down to the essence of what is it that you actually have to do. And, you know, I, I, I like how you framed it. It's like it's, you shed your prior assumptions of how things are done, right. And, and you kind of build up from a, uh, first principles, uh, approach to say, this is how I could use AI to unlock, whatever I'm doing. [00:05:33] Anush Elangovan: And, and, some of it, you know, it's good to really step back and look at. Just question every part of it, right? Like right now you're getting chat GPT and, Gemini competing for like, math, olympiads and, and, uh, college, uh, reasoning, uh, tests. Right? And, and those are like that, that is amazing and increasingly like complex tasks that they're trying to do. [00:05:58] Anush Elangovan: But there may also be like. [00:06:00] More mundane things that AI could, could get applied to. Right? And, and so when we think about shedding old ways, you wanna shed it not just in like the tip of the spear. It's like, you know, I'm gonna see what's the frontier model. It's also, it could be something as simple as. [00:06:18] Anush Elangovan: How do you choose a, a movie, uh, you know, like a recommendation system, right? Or, or, uh, an automated, uh, flight, uh, rebooking system. So the moment, you know, your flight is late, uh, right now it's a notification, right? It's like, oh, you got a text message saying your flight's late. And I got that like three times this week. [00:06:38] Anush Elangovan: But anyway, uh, and, and, and, and, I was just like, okay, so if I were to rethink this. All this MCPs that we have that should be hooked up into an MCP that says, your flight's delayed. Here are your options. If you want, you know, these are the paid options. Yeah. Here are the free options. This will get you back into your you know, Toronto airport [00:07:00] tonight. [00:07:00] Anush Elangovan: Or if you stay, here's a hotel plus this, plus this, plus. It's just like, go ahead is all I should say. Versus now I'm like, okay, can someone, you know, can I call a travel agent? Can I do this? Can I go online and log into And you know, so we gotta fundamentally rethink even those like small, nuances of, things that we do that can be automated out and AI is really, really good at doing something like this, right? Maybe I just explained an AI startup idea right now. Somebody should just start that. [00:07:29] Andrew Zigler: I think you did. Yeah, you definitely did. Someone, one of our listeners is definitely going to lift that off of you. I, I, I, you know, I hate being on the receiving end of those. You feel a little helpless and then you have to like, follow the whole flow. So I know what you mean. Like I, I like how you called out that the build and this like. [00:07:45] Andrew Zigler: Where speed is your moat and the innovation layer is protecting you, is what makes you better than your competitors. How you scale that and you bring that to market. So by understanding the problems that you're solving, uh, throwing away those older assumptions, but also [00:08:00] recognizing that like. We're building every single day, new things and new ways of using stuff that we're still figuring out the implications of. [00:08:08] Andrew Zigler: And so when you have a lot of velocity and you're introducing a lot of new ideas, and maybe you have that workflow now that automatically rebook your flight off of your late flight text message, and uh, I know I would certainly use it, but you know, what kind of philosophies guide the way that y'all think about building this ecosystem to manage that stability while letting folks. [00:08:29] Andrew Zigler: Play with the speed and the assumptions and the airplane re bookings. [00:08:34] Anush Elangovan: so, so I think, you know, we need to peel one layer down, right? and the philosophy is, Hey, we, we just discovered electricity, right? And you know what we're gonna do? We are gonna make motors, uh, or dynamos, right? Like engines. Uh, sure. We don't know if it's gonna be a Ferrari that you're gonna make, or it's a a a a dump truck. [00:08:57] Anush Elangovan: That's good for doing this. But let's [00:09:00] let, which is also required, right? You need a dump truck. You need a garbage truck. And, [00:09:04] Andrew Zigler: Yeah. You need the [00:09:04] Anush Elangovan: course you need, uh, a Ferrari for a midlife crisis, right? So, [00:09:09] Andrew Zigler: precisely. [00:09:10] Anush Elangovan: But, but my, uh, point is what do we build next? And, uh, and this is what I meant by like, okay, let's, let's take those baby steps to build the. [00:09:20] Anush Elangovan: Infrastructure that's required that we know we'll have to use, right? So, so if I just discovered electricity, okay, great. Now one, how do I save this electricity and how do I use it? So there's battery technology, so you need to do something like that, right? Like so. But then you also want to make it into an actionable thing. [00:09:37] Anush Elangovan: You want to make it for like automobiles, or you wanna use it for, you know, powering, uh, entire cities. So it is that transformational. So, uh, AI is that transformational. So, if you distill down, it'll, it'll come down to how do we think about, what we can do with this this fundamental technology that, We may not be aware of what it [00:10:00] is gonna unlock next, but at least you know the next step is clear, right? It's like a dense fog, you know, it's gonna be like, it, it's the right path. You see the light, but it's kind of like out there and, and the steps you're taking are concrete and you're like, okay, this is good. [00:10:16] Anush Elangovan: I, this is better than where I was or where we were. So we are moving forward. So you can build with the. Intuition from what you see in the short term and a tactical view, but towards what you think the future is gonna be. [00:10:28] Andrew Zigler: Right. You almost like we're all in this like fog of war, right? And like you said, you're reaching out and you're trying to step through it. You could think of it too, as like you're in the dark and your hands are up in front of you and you know that. You're, you're not gonna run your face into a wall because your hands are out in front of you, but you're not gonna maybe do much better than that. [00:10:45] Andrew Zigler: So that's kind of like, I think the eco, the, the industry, the world that we find ourselves in, uh, and we all have to, then this becomes the power of an ecosystem, of a group of people working together to create that layer of, [00:11:00] uh, of establishing the [00:11:01] Anush Elangovan: exactly. And I, I, I just, instead of, you know, saying fog of war I describe it as like, you're in this. Beautiful valley with like a morning, uh, fog that's in. You can smell the flowers. You, you hear the birds. You are like, okay, it's, we are in like, uh, utopian paradise and yes, I just need to like, continue the walk, right? [00:11:24] Anush Elangovan: and then move forward with that, conviction that you're in the right spot. [00:11:27] Andrew Zigler: Yeah. So let's talk about that ecosystem world. This nice, I love how you describe it, this grassy side of a hill in the morning that's covered in some mist and maybe we can't see 30 feet in one direction, but it sure is a beautiful hill and it smells nice. And so we're all here. And why is, in that world, why is. [00:11:44] Andrew Zigler: You know, open source, their strategic advantage that y'all are going for in the AI hardware market. And, and then how does like ROCm turn that into wins for people within that ecosystem? [00:11:56] Anush Elangovan: you know, the, the way we look at it is this, is kind of like how I view [00:12:00] AI and the ecosystem, right? But, but it is for everyone to enjoy. Uh, and so we do want to make sure that. You know, it is, uh, beneficial for everyone. [00:12:09] Anush Elangovan: The ecosystem can come in and, and innovate. It's an open innovation engine. and uh, it is very different from, you know, having a walled garden with, Hey, only I know how to do this and I'm gonna do it and throw it over the fence and you can use it or keep walking, right? So we'd like to be good citizens that way, but also. [00:12:30] Anush Elangovan: Uh, it is self-fulfilling in a way, right? Like it, the, the pace at which we innovate with open source is unmatched. Like, you know, our serving engines are like VLLM and, and sg l. Those things, uh, those frameworks are like super, super aggressive in terms of how fast they come out with features and how fast they can you know, get performant models out. [00:12:52] Anush Elangovan: And that compared with what, uh, you'd get from, you know, the likes of like T-R-T-L-L-M or something is always lagging, right? Because you [00:13:00] just can't keep up with you know, 200 commits a week just on one particular model to get that model really performant [00:13:06] Andrew Zigler: And, and, and in that world where, you know, everyone can enjoy the winds of this, what kind of customer stories or innovation stories have really stood out to you and excite you about building and creating this place for developers? [00:13:19] Anush Elangovan: Yeah. So I think the parts that are super exciting for me are when when we get to see a customer that is first skeptical. Then they start a little like, okay, fine, we'll give you a chance. Uh, we do a simple, uh, POC and then they're like, huh, this seems to work. Yeah, we told you it works. [00:13:42] Anush Elangovan: You don't have to change one line of code. Really? Yes, no need to change one line of code. Okay, let's try a production workload. So then they try it. Oh, you're more performant than the competition. Yes. We're more performant than, than the competition. So how much does it cost? And we're like, oh, it's your TCO is better with, uh, [00:14:00] AMD. [00:14:00] Anush Elangovan: So again, they're like, wow, okay, good. So now how do we deploy at scale? And then we go deploy it at scale. And when they give a thumbs up on that and they say, this is good, right? That's when you know, you, you see it go full circle from like, oh, we, we've never heard about AMD to like actually deploy to tens of thousands of GPUs In the order of a few months, right? It, it, it really is fascinating to see and very exciting and invigorating to [00:14:28] Andrew Zigler: Yeah. At like a great exposure to a lot of interesting problems. And, and then people using the infrastructure, the, the technology available to solve those problems. Really specific problems by the way, that's often why they're bringing their data and AI to it, uh, is because it is really specific and important for them. [00:14:45] Andrew Zigler: And there's a, a lot I think that other engineering orgs can learn and even emulate from AMD's success and, and having this open source ecosystem and it causing this acceleration within. You [00:15:00] know, uh, customers and enterprises that use and adopt the tools and, and, and that creates an advantage. And that goes back to why we're talking and like the real thesis of our conversation today. [00:15:10] Andrew Zigler: So how do you think engineering leaders that are listening to this and obviously tapping into this great success AMD has from an open source flywheel, how do you think other, other folks building in the same space can foster that open, first, that open source oriented culture in order to, you know, accelerate their innovation goals? [00:15:29] Anush Elangovan: Yeah, that's a very good question. So the startup that um, was acquired by AMD we, we built, I mean, we started off doing iot stuff and you know, smart ring and all that, right? But in the, the end of like, uh, and not the end, the last six years of the company was building ML compilers. [00:15:47] Anush Elangovan: And ml, ML compilers are like super, uh, complicated, sophisticated, advanced algorithms, dah, dah, dah. but it was all open source, right? So our VCs were like, wait, what do you mean your core [00:16:00] IP is open source? And um, the speed is the moat applied even then, right? It was just like, yes, if you have an idea that. [00:16:08] Anush Elangovan: Because someone saw this idea that you are, they're gonna be able to catch up, then you probably have the wrong idea anyway. But if they are, you know, you execute and they're gonna catch up, that you should assume they're gonna catch up. Right? So you gotta move forward. So keeping it open source is super important. [00:16:25] Anush Elangovan: But also to your question on like, you know, the learnings from an AMD standpoint, right? If there are, hard problems, I'd say dig in and work through it, right? Like there's no way but through it, right? That should be the simple mentality. And more, uh, frequently than not. you'll see that you'll just make it through in a, in, in good form. [00:16:52] Anush Elangovan: But if you doubt it and you're like, oh, I don't know if I should commit, if I'm, I, you know, what should just commit to do the right thing [00:17:00] every step, right? Every step, and just keep taking one step in front of the other. And in no time you'll see that you'll be running. Right. And, and yes, the first few steps will be like, yeah, everyone's complaining about your software quality. [00:17:15] Anush Elangovan: Everyone's complaining about this and that, and it doesn't work. And, and a few steps in, you know, you get, you get the hang of all the complaints that are coming in. You get the feedback loop. You're like, okay, what, what are you prioritizing again? One step in front of the other, right? You just keep knocking that out and then you get to a point where you're, it just becomes second nature, right? To do the, to do the right thing. And, and then yes, if someone gives you two options, you'll be like, fine. This is, uh, you know, there's always the resource trade off. There's always a human capital trade off, but what's the right thing to do? of course, I, I'm pragmatic about what we choose, but, but if the right thing for your long-term success is dig in, go first, principles, make it [00:18:00] happen. [00:18:00] Anush Elangovan: Well. Then just go for that. There's, there is no shortcut to [00:18:04] Andrew Zigler: acknowledging, you know, how it aligns with your mission, your core company goals, and what you're looking to achieve. And, and I, I love how you rightfully called out that in the open source world and you know, you have your technology that you've built, what you think is your moat upon, right? [00:18:22] Andrew Zigler: It's your code and, and to open source that, or to just make it where anyone could peer in is, you know. Scary in one regard, but two, it just kind of feels like you're handing away your throne room in some kind of sense, a very direct feeling sense. But the ultimately, you were really right to call out, and this is something I think about all the time, that the real power there is still the speed This the speed. [00:18:42] Andrew Zigler: That was the moat at the beginning of our conversation. It's the speed in combination with your. Very specific domain understanding of what you're building and what you're creating, and your new role as the steward of that world and how people plug into it, which [00:19:00] has frankly, a lot more influence and power than lording over a closed. [00:19:04] Andrew Zigler: You know, repository or an ecosystem, and like you said, like throwing things over the wall. Sure. There, there might be people always on the other side of that wall, but you're not gonna have a great connection with them. You're not gonna be able to really clearly understand them. I, I like your metaphor of the side of the field of the mountain a lot more. [00:19:23] Andrew Zigler: But, but in the, in this world, you know, where. That speed is, is the power and, and open source is just one way that you can harness that speed to get really far ahead and to innovate. , There's other parts of this equation that you can be experimenting with too, and I'd love to pick your brain about them as a software leader and, and, and one of them is about looking forward and kind of understanding that future that we're all building towards and beyond today's models and hardware. [00:19:48] Andrew Zigler: You know, what do you see as the next major bottleneck or opportunity in the AI compute space? As, as you know, enterprises and folks start to get a little more mature about what's available to [00:20:00] them. [00:20:00] Anush Elangovan: Yeah, I think, the bottleneck and opportunity is, uh, what I'd call, call walking the last mile of ai. Right. Uh, and like I I, I gave you an example, uh, previously, but, but it's similar to that. It's like there are cases where Humans have so many, uh, things to do in your day. You know, like the, if we sit down and actually had a customer focus like, okay, these customers lives, I'm gonna save four hours of this customer's life. And if you actually sit down and look at all of that, it'll be. Easily automatable, easily you know, uh, applicable, uh, for ai, right? [00:20:39] Anush Elangovan: Like, but then making it happen is gonna take a little bit, right? It's like maybe it's, uh, paying your utility bill, right? Or something like that, right? Or, or, your healthcare explanation of benefits. Uh, like, I'm sure you get an explanation of benefits, and I'm like, I, I don't even know what that thing is. [00:20:55] Anush Elangovan: It's just like EOB and like. [00:20:57] Andrew Zigler: it's a big, a big old PDF. Yeah, [00:21:00] exactly. [00:21:01] Anush Elangovan: Like, like, I'm like great straight to the, uh, shredder, right? And but that could be, you know, automated with the ai, right? It, it, it'd be like, Hey, the summary of this thing is you went and visited this day. Everything is okay. Everything is paid for, so don't worry, it's not a bill. [00:21:17] Anush Elangovan: That again, the same, uh, thing, but the sense of what that information overload is could be. Digested by ai, uh, accumulated over time and retrieved when you need it. Like, I don't, I actually don't even need to know this EOB right now, unless of course, whenever I need to know it, that maybe, you know, like for some benefits I need to figure out what do, what did I do over the past year and how do I apply it? Source:](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1994972575768727743/amplify_video_thumb/1994972220930621440/img/_5CCZJyz89oDfqQJ.jpg)
!["Where the hell are the [NHIs] in all this? Why aren't they coming out?" ~Semivan "What I experienced, you know, physical marks the whole thing, and my wife, worse." ~Semivan on their abduction "I would be very careful giving these entities that are f**king with you, like, all this great credit and putting them on a pedestal." ~DeLonge to Chris Bledsoe "It's indifferent to man." ~Vallée to Semivan "Are we evil when we go fishing and we hurt fish? Are we considered evil to the fish"? ~DeLonge Jay Stratton's, "got orbs flying around in his house, scaring the hell out of his wife and his kids." ~Semivan ( I enjoyed this episode because a lot of this is where I am when it comes to thinking about the phenomenon. I'm not saying this is the truth but it definitely resonates with me.) ~~~ Jim Semivan: "When we started 'To The Stars,' a while back, we took a little bit of flack because we were talking about...we weren't going along with the idea that the phenomenon was always a great, beneficial thing. We were saying, like, 'Look, let's just wait. There's been instances where it hasn't been...' I always like to use Chris Bledsoe as an example. He's just a dear, dear man, but when you listen to his story, up close and personally, and you could see the absolute fear that he went through, and his family went through, when he first encountered these beings, and this phenomena, and then later on how it transformed him into a very, very deeply spiritual man and healer. So you see this dichotomy. "And if you talk to Chris, Chris will tell you, 'No, this is a beneficial thing.' And then, you know, you run into guys like Keel, and even Jacques Vallée to a certain extent, where they'll tell you, 'Well, no, no, hold on a second.' Because I remember when when I had my experience, I was visited. It was years after my experience, I had met John Alexander at a conference and John put me in touch with some people. And then next thing I know, Jacques Vallée, you know, the guy, right? The house god of TTS calls me up and says, 'Can I come out and see you?' "So he flew out from San Francisco, came to my house in Virginia, and spent the day with my wife and I. And we had some very, very long, involved conversations about this. And I asked him, I said, 'Well, you know, what I experienced, you know, physical marks the whole thing, and my wife worse.' (That may be the first time he's said he had physical marks from his abduction-like experience with his wife when he was in grad school. We don't know details of what his wife experienced.) Semivan: "I said (to Vallée), 'Do you think this is evil?' And he said, 'I don't know, I don't think anybody knows. But I will tell you one thing: What I do know is that you can say that it's basically indifferent. It's indifferent to man. In other words, people get harmed by walking into it or getting caught in it, but it doesn't seem to have an evil intention, per se.'" (Reminds me of what Lue Elizondo said to Curt Jaimungal) Lue: "What if it turns out that a lot of the things that we thought were one way, aren’t. Are we prepared to have that honest question with ourselves? Are we prepared to recognize that we’re not at the top of the food chain, potentially?” (Most humans are indifferent to the welfare of most beings that are below us on the food chain. If we're driving and hit a squirrel, and they get hurt or killed, we may feel bad for a little bit, but we get on with our business and enjoy the rest of our day. How many cows, chickens and pigs are killed every day so we can eat them? Most humans, including me, don't give that a second thought. Indifference. That indifference may be happening with an intelligence (or multiple intelligences) that's above us on the food chain. And I'm not saying they're eating us, although that can't be ruled out 100%. I'm saying "they" just do their thing and if we get hurt or killed, it's not a huge deal to them. Indifference. And maybe some of them enjoy messing with us?) Semivan: "But then when you read Keel and you know, you read the Mothman and and a lot of these other stories like 'The Mojave Incident.' Well, holy cow! You look at this stuff. And, you know, you get these hobgoblins flying around, you know, with Jay Stratton. He's got orbs flying around in his house, scaring the hell out of his wife and his kids. I don't see, I don't know where there's any kind of a spiritual turn to that where you could look at all that and all of a sudden you say, 'Oh, now I'm a better person.'" (Most of us have known that Axelrod in "Skinwalkers at the Pentagon" is Jay Stratton but that's the first time one of his colleagues/friends has said it. And I agree: What's the purpose of orbs scaring, and leaving marks on, his kids? And the wolf that his wife, kids and their friends say they saw? Why? To make them better people? It makes zero sense to me.) Semivan: "It happened with Chris (Bledsoe) and, you know, great for him. Sure, as hell didn't happen to me. And I don't think it happened to Jay Stratton, either. I think it gave Jay a different outlook as with me, but sh*t, I mean, nothing I couldn't have got from reading books. What do you think?" Tom DeLonge: "I think like, yeah, you know, the idea of what we might call something evil, but to that, it's like, you know, are we evil when we go fishing and we hurt fish? You know, are we considered evil to the fish? So it's things looking out for its own interest." (100%. Someone asked me about good vs. evil last night and I wrote back, "Not about good vs. evil. About survival and food chain. Somber.") DeLonge: "The thing that I look at, you know, a lot of the ideas of good and evil come from like, religion, all different types of religions where it really defines the metaphysical nature of who we are and what we're living in. But I look at religion... I cannot think of one religion that hasn't left a wake of destruction. I mean, literally, every single one has done so much harm. And the one pattern in all these religions is that most of them, outside of the pagan ones, have really tried to just to get us to believe that the creator of the universe is some kind of human, or something. It's not like a source, an energy, it's like, it's a Jesus or an Allah, or it's a Buddha, or I don't know. Buddhism doesn't really say that, but you know what my point is. It's trying to humanize something. "And so, to me, it's like when Chris Bledsoe, or some of these others that have these kinds of spiritual experiences, these are the exact same experiences that are written about throughout the entire Bible, in the Quran, and like, all these other texts. And all of them are really setting the stage for us to worship the UFO and their occupants, to some degree." (You see this a lot with the folks who think we're dealing with ETs here to uplift humanity. The Space Brothers theory. I don't know the truth but, to me, it doesn't seem like that's the answer.) DeLonge: "And that, to me, is the one strong pattern, is to confuse us and not let us know of our own spiritual nature to source consciousness." (I've said many times that I believe a lot of this is about human potential and our untapped capabilities in the psi (psychic, pk, consciousness, etc.) area) DeLonge: "And as long as we don't know that, then we will think that, 'Okay, the aliens like, f**ked with our DNA and made us like this,' or 'The Tall Whites showed up and they were the Greek gods, too, and they gave us philosophy and all this whatever.' It's like we're always like, giving some kind of humanized form credit for everything. "And the one thing that's common in all these religions is that it's not giving credit to source energy that allows us to heal, that allows us to be telepathic, that allows us to have telekinesis, that allows us to have, like, compassion in energy to healing. Like, whether you do Reiki and meditate, or whether you sit and pray, it doesn't matter. Why does it work in every religion? Because it's source energy, it's not about the religion." (The one thing I could never get behind is healing because there was no data to back it up. That was until I was shown the work of Bill Bengston. Tons of data. How does it work? I don't know. Nobody does.) DeLonge: "But if you look at who's responsible for all the religions? Well, it's whatever UFO the Star of Bethlehem was, or whatever UFO the Fatima thing was, or whatever the Tall White was that met with Joseph Smith and started the Mormon religion was. Whatever the Jinn are that are in the Koran, or whatever the Demons are there in the Old Testament, they seem to be the things that come in, that take you in your sleep, and make you think things and deceive you. It's all the same." (Deception, deception, deception. A lot of this is very similar to what David Icke (and others) has written about.) DeLonge: "So you have all these things f**king with you, as the good ones and the bad ones. But all the religions, the pattern is, is never ever, ever let humans know the physics of their existence. Which is meditate, you can heal somebody and have all your information you need, or pray. It's the same thing, it doesn't matter. "That's more like my line of thinking is, is why it's so important for us to understand the true nature of spirituality, and why I step back when I hear the Chris Bledsoe stories. And it's wonderful that he's gotten to a place that it's helping him, because I really do like him as a person, and I really respect and honor his experiences because I firsthand have heard them from him. And he's just a wonderful human. I mean, it was an incredible story. But I told him personally, I said, I would be very careful giving these entities that are f**king with you, like, all this great credit and putting them on a pedestal, because these are the same groups that have been doing a lot of weird s*it throughout time, good and bad.' (Again, I think Bledsoe has had real experiences but IMO, his interpretation of what he's dealing with is off.) DeLonge: "And that, to me, seems, you know, that seems suspect. You know, it seems like if there is any really, true, beautiful, great force, and entities representing that force, like your angels in the Bible. I mean, even in the Bible, people would, you know, when they saw an angel, they would collapse on the ground in extreme fear, and like, they couldn't even look at them. It was like the scariest thing that's ever happened. And that doesn't sound like a real loving interaction to me (laughs). That sounds like some scary shit, you know? "So I think whatever would represent true love and unparalleled love, that doesn't seem to be showing up and f**king with our society and our timelines, and our behaviors, and trying to manage us. It's letting us do it on our own, you know, like, figure it out on your own, you know? But everything else that's showing up, seems to have its own interest at heart." (I think TD is saying that a loving/caring intelligence wouldn't try to manipulate us into doing things that just benefit THEM. And that's what appears to be going on. "They" only care about themselves. If there were ones here who truly cared about us, they would leave us alone and let us figure it on our own.) Semivan: "I tend to agree with you on this. I did a podcast a while back and somebody related to this. They were talking about why there hasn't been Disclosure? And I said, 'Well, you know, there's two sides of this story.' I said, 'You have the non human-intelligences, you know, or the phenomenon, and then you have the governments.' And I said 'Well, where the hell are the non-human intelligences in all this? Why aren't they coming out? They pretty sneakily running around, and they meet people in weird, obscured circumstances, make their experiences sound crazy. Yet, they sort of wanna be known, but they don't wanna be known.' As I mentioned to somebody once, 'They'll screw around with you but you can't take them home to meet your parents. They're not landing on the White House lawn for a reason.' I'm not quite sure what that is."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1773078284487798811/ext_tw_video_thumb/1773040319740948480/pu/img/LNfQpFjqV8ZVbffs.jpg)
![The most epic 13 minute AI rant I've heard in 2026 PS: My parent's heard this when I was playing it in the car and thought Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin went OFF like Stephen A Smith does on first take PPS: Full transcript below [17:00] Harry Stebbings: I I just wanted to ask Jason, if the people that we want are fundamentally different, the developers that we used to hire, we don't because AI writes the code for us. The marketers we don't want, the sales people we don't want—who who do we want genuinely? Like what is the attractive profile? Because your Anthropic’s and your OpenAIs are hiring, so so what are the people that we want in the companies of the future? [17:18] Jason Lemkin: Look, I know it sounds trite, but but the answer is simple. It's just the expression each year changes. We want folks that are genuinely AI fluent. It's pretty simple. Now you know, maybe last year we called them prompt engineers, right? That used to be a job. I don't know if you remember that actually used to be the hottest job on planet earth. Now no one needs a prompt engineer because it's pretty easy to prompt all these tools. That job died. Okay. Um and now we need go-to-market engineers. Um I think that job's going to die. We need—everyone needs so many forward deployed engineers. Like you can't hire enough forward deployed engineers. But uh you know um but Palantir just announced in whatever their their big their big event—they've gotten their deployment times down over 90% with forward deployed engineers. So that may become—so the this wave of disruption for the titles and the specificity, it's also exhaustingly accelerating. But it's really simple. You meet anyone for any role—sales, marketing, engineering, product, QA—they're they're either they're either they can't keep all of the ways they use AI to accelerate their job from spewing out of their mouth, or they're staring at you. It's there's nowhere in the middle. Like, and the person that comes in and says—it's it's it sounds Captain Obvious—but like, you know, you just had the whatever from Lovable, the the marketing head that was super popular on the show, right? She's just spewing AI-native insights into Lovable, right? It's not that complicated. You hire her, Elena, or whatever it is. You just hire her. It doesn't matter whether she's still in college or a junior or a senior or a middler, a left or right. And honestly, if you interview people, I would say of all even of the best startups I've invested in, maybe 30% of the management team meets this standard at best. 30%. Maybe less. And of the interviews I do in general, it's single-digit percents. It's just and in in that sense, it's the same as ever. Like you either lower the bar in hiring or you hire someone that's actually great. And someone that's actually great is so far ahead of you in how to apply to to employ the efficiencies of AI in their role, your jaw falls on the table. The difference is we used to need warm bodies. That's what's changing. We used to need warm bodies to answer the call, to do QA, to do code review, to to get the blue pixel to go from the upper left to the lower right. You laugh, but you need you literally needed to brute force this with humans. With AI, every day that goes by, the AI—you do not need brute force human beings on your team. And that's another reason they're shrinking. Why are all these new companies so efficient? They're just not brute forcing things with humans. They're just not. They're choosing not to. And so these team—all the brute forcers out there—everyone talks about how bloated teams got in 2021. I don't agree with that. I think they got as big as they needed to be when growth was high and you needed humans to do everything. All you look at these teams that that doubled—well if growth continued at 60% like the rate in early 2021 for 5 years or can help me do the math and every single thing a software company did required a human. You were understaffed by your 2021 headcount. You'd be sitting here in 2026. You every office in SoMa would be triple packed and you there wouldn't be enough humans to staff your company. It's just the world changed. [20:33] Harry Stebbings: Jason, you live on the bleeding edge. I think me and Rory see that and I think the world sees that when they hear you every week in terms of how you run SaaS. For all of the CEOs and execs who listen to the show, what would you advise them in terms of determining whether someone is AI fluent when they meet them for jobs, for talent? [20:51] Jason Lemkin: Here's I realized I was just asked this. I just did a review with a super fast startup growing just crossing 100 million and I was asked this question. And one of my favorite executives, I thought his answer was pretty dated and because he gave me an answer that was about 6 months old. The answer 6 months old is: "I look for folks in my team, I look for you know at what tools they play with." Okay, that was a great answer in like summer of 2025. Okay, I tried Lovable last week. Okay, the answer in 2026 is: "What commercial AI tool have you brought into your organization this month?" That's the test. Anyone that is on the bleeding edge that you would want to hire—now there are so many great products in the market. Okay, there is no excuse in any role to have not brought one tool a month into your organization. Okay, there—now there's going to be better and better tools and better and better products as the year goes on. What's the one you did? And you will see folks with their deer in the headlights to this question. What what sales tool? What marketing tool? What product tool? What engineering tool? What did you bring in? Why did you pick it? How does it working? Because if you're at remotely at the cutting edge, you're all over this. You're looking for the next agentic tools that will radically improve how you do business. This is—you think everyone thinks SaaS is at the bleeding edge, right? You know, you know, all we do is we're just looking for the tools and trying them. Okay? Okay, we're one year ahead of everybody else because we did the simplest thing in the world. Like we tried the tools early and we trained them. We trained them for a month. Okay, I'll give you—want hear a horrible example from this week? Super hot AI company valued at 6 billion. Okay, I'm not going to name it. Um, this week yesterday told us we had to quadruple what we spent on their product. Okay, their agent told us, right? And why did this happen? Okay. Well, at this $6 billion company, no one had trained the agent on its pricing properly. No one had tested it. They said, "Well, well, we've been in beta." And we said, "Well, when did the beta launch? A year ago." Okay, these are people asleep at at the wheel. You want somebody who the instant this comes up, they exactly know what the issue is. And "Hey, when I was at Lovable Replit, we trained the agent. This is how we did it. I brought in this tool. I brought in this tool that that Rory invested in last week. It solved all these issues." That's what you want to hear. And if they haven't brought in a tool in the last 30 days, at least deeply evaluated it. I don't really care whether they bought it, but gone so far down the funnel they can tell you—pick whatever tool: Fixie, Regie, GC, AIGC—I don't care how you went through it, you looked at it, you can tell me the eight ways it would improve the productivity of your business and three you didn't. Just don't hire that person because they're going to run your company to the ground. This is the job today. The job today is not to screw around on ChatGPT and to be a prompt engineer. The job today is to bring the best AI and agentic products into your organization and leverage all the hard work that the engineers have done building those products. That's your job. You don't have to screw around. You don't have to be a prompt engineer anymore. You have to be an agent deployment expert. A—this is the new job we're making up today. An Agentic Deployment Expert. That's your job from C-level to junior. Agentic Deployment Expert. Don't hire anybody else. You're going to regret it. They're going to stare at the camera. He's good. Stare at the camera. He's honorable. We could probably just I could slip away, get a coffee, and come back. No. And I I sound exasperated, Rory. And I—but the reason I am is I can just see I can see my best companies doing it. And I can see some companies I've invested in not doing it. And I want to cry. I just want to cry when they have no ADs on their team. I just—like you're flushing your years of your life down the toilet by not approaching your how you're building this company this way. [24:33] Rory: Yes. And at the risk of being positive, it's worth pointing out two things he didn't say. Well, something implicit why he said—Jason didn't do the only hire, you know, he didn't commit the um employment law, I think it's a civil penalty of saying only employ people below X who get the new new thing because he implicitly said anyone can do it provided you're willing to learn. And I think that's the big aha that's one of the positive statements to make here right? Look and I think it applies—I'm always wary of being "Hey, coming across, hey this this is the things that you all have to do." I think it applies to everyone including investors right? I mean I will say I have found that unless you're willing to invest the time learning these tools you actually shouldn't be investing in them. One of my partners Andy had this expression: "You know, if you decide you want to stop learning new things you probably should retire within 6 to 12 months and never write another check again." Maybe that's down to 3 to 6 months at this stage, right? And I think, you know, it's— [25:27] Harry Stebbings: Yeah, I actually I actually had a meeting with mine and Jason's biggest investor the other day and I—pretend he's not here—I said I think he's the most equipped investor for this generation of investing because I don't think anyone quite sits at the bleeding edge like he does on the investor side. [25:42] Harry Stebbings: Why in terms of using the equip stuff? Yeah. Yeah. In terms of using the stuff, understanding understanding bottlenecks, constraints. For sure. [25:51] Jason Lemkin: But can I just add one point? We can just cuz it's so important if it helps people. Okay, we are—and thank you Harry. We're going through these phases. Okay, and when AI started to blow up for real for us, uh call it early 2024, right? Maybe late '23, I wasn't equipped. It was too technical. I wasn't going to go in and figure out—I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to deal with a massively hallucinating LLM API and turn that and turn that into something magical. Kudos to investors and others that that got it in early '23, '22. I mean I remember I—I guess it was maybe SaaStr Annual '23. I was with David Sacks and I did a Q&A and I said, "How you thinking about AI at Craft?" He's like, "Well we're all in. We want 80% of '23 of investments to be AI." I'm like, "Great but like show me the show me the great ones in market." He's like, "They're all prototypes. We're all they're all they're all proof of concepts but we're all in anyway." That's where you kind of had to be in '23 if you weren't investing at like the LLM level. Okay, I wasn't smart enough. Then we went through this weird-ass prompt engineer era where like you you could torture these products to do something good, right? But you had to torture them. You had to like craft these crazy things that made no sense. Now we are in the era where mere ordinarily smart generalists can make these tools do magical things. And literally I go to these meetings and people be like, "I don't know how to like this is so scary. I don't know how to do this." And we show them our backends. Do you know how to do a workflow generator? Do you know how to do a a decision tree? Like we've been building these since software in the '90s. Okay, if you—I can show you all of our agents. The how they work is novel. They do have to be trained. You can't be lazy and have these agents work. But honestly, the the UI, the UX, the way we interact with them, it's just software. And so my point is: Pick yourself off the ground. This is your time now. If you felt lost in AI era, if you felt like you're behind, you don't understand what all these people are saying on X and Twitter and their Claude and and their and talking about all the 4.6 point Nano point and it's over—like you just it's not your world. This is your time. This is your time for the generalist that knows how to use software tools really really well. And I—this is my last point but it's so important. If ever in your recent life—and this is why you could be all you need to be is young at heart to Rory's point—if in the last three to five years you have successfully deployed a piece of enterprise software of any sort you yourself, not some agency you hired, but if you have deployed it, you can deploy any agentic tool. Any. And you can become the hero in your company and you can become the hero in your functional area. But I watch folks—I'm literally helping a company now that they're adding hundreds of sales folks this year with a new pre-IPO COO—he's not hasn't brought in a single tool, totally scared of it. Okay, it's not that hard. Did you use SalesLoft? Did you use Outreach? Did you use HubSpot? Do you know these tools? If you can deploy these tools, you can deploy a world-changing AI agent. And so this is the time for people like the folks that that were shut out of the AI revolution right now. The generalist folks that are not that know how to deploy software that don't even know how to build software. Like vibe coding for me was folks who knew how to build software, but you didn't have to be an engineer. Now, you just need to know how to deploy software to win with AI agents. That's all you need to know. So many people have these skills and they're petrified of AI. "How did you do that? How did you deploy an AI BDR?" Well, we bought a piece of software, we figured out how it worked for a day, we set it up in an afternoon, and then and then we did spend 30 months training it, which you didn't do with this old software because in the old days, we just had to manually upload all the data, right? And there was no training. The the only non-intuitive part is training these things. And it's it's it's just work. So that's why when I see folks on the management team not doing this, there's no excuse. You do not need to be technical to win with AI agents in Q2 of '26. You do not need to be even 1% technical. Not at all. So it's your time. Or you're going to get laid off. Or you're going to get laid off because you're not going to matter.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2036795243681423518/amplify_video_thumb/2036794127560613888/img/52_cdbzzL6_foTSI.jpg)
