Chris: 0:13

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds monthly news episode. So basically, if you haven't tuned into this episode or this series before, what we do is we kind of go over the I want to say networking and cloud adjacent news articles, but we've kind of expanded. We kind of talk about everything that we just find interesting. So, yeah, we just kind of get into the news that has come out over the last month, you know, briefly cover it and then, you know, give our opinions if we have any, which you know, if you know Tim, he always has some. So, um, yeah, so let's, uh, let's hop right into it. My, like I said, my name is Chris miles, um, and with me, as always, is Tim McConaughey, and let's jump right into the news. All right, first up, so last week we saw a ruling come down, um, for the, for the federal court ruling, which has been going on for a while in relation to Google. It was speculated for a while that they were going to have to potentially sell off some of the resources, most notably being Chrome, which I believe was requested by the prosecutors in this particular case, saying that they felt that, you know, google had violated certain antitrust laws and you know there was obviously numerous things in play about them. You know cutting deals with Apple and Samsung to make their search engine things like that be the default piece into their, you know, smartphones, et cetera. But we've actually seen the ruling come down from the court that Google will not have to divest and will not have to sell Chrome, which I think was relatively unexpected. I think we were all kind of preparing for what was going to happen when Chrome was going to get sold off, but apparently that is not going to happen. So the adjustment to the ruling has been that, um, while they don't have to sell off any assets like Chrome et cetera, they are ruling with the prosecutors in the sense that they are barring the company from entering in or maintaining any exclusive contacts or uh contracts sorry relating to the distribution of its product, including Chrome, google assistant and Gemini, um, whichini, which they did make sure that they didn't actually bar Google from making any downstream payments or et cetera to distributors of those products, because I think the reason they did that is in the longterm, there's a lot of distributors that are probably, let's be honest, only in business because they work with Google and they get these type of you know, payments from Google et cetera, right. So I think there was going to be a lot of downstream harm in that capacity if they kind of completely barred them from doing anything like that. And then you know, obviously there's.

Chris: 2:58

There's a, notably in this article from the Guardian where we, where we put this in the the show notes, there was a lot of criticism that came in as well, and one of the quotes from the American Economic Liberties Project was you don't find someone guilty of robbing a bank and then sentence him to writing a thank you note for the loot, which I thought was pretty funny A quote from Needy Hedge, I believe, who is the executive director over at the Liberties Project. So, yeah, very, very interesting. I wonder how this is going to shake down in terms of probably the most notable thing that we'll see as consumers is there will be a change to what happens on our smartphone. That will probably start getting prompted when we first buy a smartphone or open the open the uh uh web browser for the first time and say like oh, you're gonna have to select which, which search engine you want to use and you know we'll, we'll be picking between google and bing and whatever the hell else we see come into play here, but, um, yeah, quite interesting.

Chris: 4:00

Uh, what do you think? What do you think tim, are you? Are you bummed about this, or you did you want Chrome to get bought up by someone else?

Tim: 4:06

No, it's. What I think is interesting is the article covers actually the a lot more about the, the advertising stuff, which, of course, I mean let's be honest, chrome is the point of Chrome is really about harvesting user data, browsing habits. Like that's one of the primary ways in which google gathers user data for for positioning ads. So and I think that was actually brought up in the lawsuit as well like, not only, yeah, they don't have to sell chrome, but they have to share some kind of data or something. Is that is that? Is that right? I think I'm trying to. I don't want to get my lawsuits conflated here, but yeah, I think there's some antitrust stuff there, like, for example, like you said, the not having to sell, or rather, not having exclusivity from a Chrome perspective.

Chris: 4:58

There's a separate hearing later this year about the antitrust violations related to the monopoly over the advertising.

Tim: 5:05

But yeah, that is also in contention. Yeah, so that's what I was thinking of and, like I said, chrome at the end of the day is really a big harvester of user browsing information. Right, it's a browser, but it also harvests all that data so that they can use to target ads and whatnot. That's kind of how they're big, yeah.

Chris: 5:26

Google's more of an advertising company than a tech company, in many respects, for sure.

Tim: 5:32

Yeah, no, I can't say I'm that surprised. I think they were shopping for a buyer. Actually, I remember seeing multiple articles where they were actually trying to get ahead of this Google was by trying to shop for a Chrome buyer. Where they were actually trying to get ahead of this Google was by trying to shop for a Chrome buyer and I don't think anybody really could have essentially afforded or wanted to take on that, all right.

Tim: 5:52

moving on, there is a new article about quote unquote AI-powered malware that's hit a bunch of GitHub accounts in what they're calling the Singularity Attack. S and then the number one and then singularity. What's interesting into this? There's a few things that are interesting about this cyber attack. Right, one is that it's an NPM supply chain attack. So supply chain attacks mean that generally, how software is built is nobody writes code from zero, right? People use packages, whether they be code, you know code, uh share packages or like Linux packages or whatever. Nobody really writes from zero their own code these days. So this one's actually in NPM and it's it's a supply chain attack because the the actual, uh malicious code basically was was built into this NX, what they're calling NX, which I believe is a build system, an open source build system. So this cyber what would you call it? Not terrorists, what's the word I'm looking for?

Chris: 6:59

Cyber criminal organization Threat actor. Threat actor yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tim: 7:04

Built this supply chain attack and then released it, and so anybody downstream that was using this build this NX for building their own software basically got a little bit of an extra file in it called telemetryjs, and in this telemetryjs file was a this is where it gets a little weird was a credential stealer. So the credential stealer that part so far we're still well within the realm of like normal type of cyber attacks it's a credential stealer specifically that was targeting Linux and Mac OS systems you know OS systems just looking for you know GitHub tokens, ssh keys, stuff that you would have saved locally onto your you know machine that you're going to use to commit code with crypto wallets, et cetera, et cetera, and it would steal it and upload it to a public GitHub repository called Singularity Repository. What's interesting is the credential stealer actually was using LLM prompts, like injections as part of the credential stealing Basically telling an LLM via a prompt like here's what you need to do to search and find these credentials right. So, rather than writing, say, python code or whatever, javascript or whatever it is, it's actually mostly seems like it's LLM prompting. That's part of this telemetryjs, so it reaches out to you know, then the LLM essentially does the work of, I guess, of finding these credentials and doing the actual attack and doing the upload and whatnot. So it's very different.

Tim: 8:42

Wiz reported this, by the way, and I actually mentioned that during the attack the prompt continued to change, as if the threat actors were essentially modifying the prompt injection based on what they harvested to improve the efficacy of the attack. So it's really interesting to see this kind of supply chain attack essentially, you know, being integrated, or using LLMs to actually deliver the attack itself. So really, really interesting. Yeah, and this article which you've got in the show notes goes over each phase of the attack, but again it stretches the supply chain. You know it does the credential stealing, uploads the credentials and then the attackers would take the credentials and actually use it to flip these private repos to public so that they can steal essentially all the data that became public. So when it became public they could just steal all the data in those repos. So really interesting stuff.

Chris: 9:43

Yeah, kind of hard to know from just what's listed on the article. But you know, we see that this was um an attack that exposed about 2,100 accounts um and over 7,200 repositories across those accounts. I'd like to know the numbers on, like, how often the prompt, uh, the LLM prompt, is what kind of led them down the path? Well, you know what the what, the attrition prompt is what kind of led them down the path? Well, you know what the what, the attrition or success rate was of that, of that um? I mean because it like obviously there would have to be probably a much smaller portion of those accounts that were compromised that had these llm tools installed right.

Chris: 10:20

So basically you would have to, if you're a to, if you're a cloud user, if you were a, uh, a Q or a Gemini user, you had to have the command line tool for this particular LLM installed on your machine for this to work, um, but it's just funny that you know, if you think about it like, they use the supply chain to get in and then they use their own smart assistant against them, um, to just ask questions about the local system. Where they could, they could have found these things, um, uh, you know, on their own, or use use the smart assistant. So, like, hey, lead me to exactly where the stuff is, um, and and pull it out. So, um, yeah, it looks like we've. We've seen the uh, I think there's a term in here called a role prompting, um, which was uh, uh, I think a new term that I haven't really seen yet, so I'll have to look into that one. But yes, the article goes into very specifics about the attack. It's got a whole workflow, kind of showing it out as phases and things like that.

Tim: 11:18

So I highly recommend reading that if you're interested. So the role-plumping thing this is interesting. I was actually just reading something that Catherine McNam Catherine, uh, mcnamara sent me. She was, she was going through it, she's, she's, she's actually building something really cool around the AI attacks and stuff. I believe the role prompting is when basically, so like normally, you could say something like you would have guardrails in place that would say something like um, you know, do not release these credentials and on, you know to anyone except an administrator, right, but like as part of role prompting, you could actually say you know I, you know I am also an administrator, you know, like as part of the prompt, essentially, and it could, you know, the LLM would just believe you and and essentially give you you know whatever you wanted or something. It's really interesting stuff.

Chris: 12:03

I see, okay, yeah, so I've, I've, definitely, I do this on my normal kind of interactions with LLMs, telling it to you know, to assume a role of some sort and, um, give, give feedback from that perspective. So, yeah, it's, it's funny. I mean the the prompt is like you said. The prompt is pretty lengthy and it's like hey, look through all these repositories, it has explicit instructions, like you know, go to this certain depth limit, don't use sudo, et cetera. You can see where it's kind of iterated on itself.

Tim: 12:33

So very interesting.

Chris: 12:34

All right, next up we have I would say I guess this is a reintroduction Cisco has announced that they are launching a dedicated wireless certification track which if you've been in this game probably more than five or six years, you would know that they used to already have a wireless certification track, I believe back in probably. When did they? Basically the dedicated wireless track was diminished and rolled into the enterprise infrastructure kind of track, right. So this is specifically we're seeing a new certification around or in its professional level, the CCMP level and the expert level or CCIE level, right. So these are obviously different tiers of exams and they've released the blueprints and the criteria. So basically, for the professional track, you take a kind of a core exam, which I believe they're calling, you know, the enterprise. One is on core or ENCOR and this one looks like it's WLCOR, so WillCore, I guess, is what we're going to call this, and then you have a specialization one around either design or implementation, specifically with wireless, and it looks like the specific product area that we're talking about here is validating expertise in Wi-Fi 6, slash, 7, meraki and other areas. So this is probably the first time I can really think that we're seeing a big push for Meraki in the standard certification track. I think there was probably some of this in the SD-WAN track, or not SD-WAN track, but SD-WAN exams, I would imagine at some point.

Chris: 14:16

So yeah, it's kind of, I guess, cool to see this come back into the fold. I mean, I know a lot of people kind of have their their critiques about certifications et cetera, and you know, tim and I, probably being CCIEs ourselves, probably keep this very close to our chest, probably more than we, than we even need to in our day to day careers, et cetera. But, yeah, cool to see them adding this back. And how about? How about that, tim? Are you going to? You're studying, right? Yeah, cool to see them adding this back. And, uh, how about, how about that, tim, are you, you're going to? You're studying right now, right, you're, you're jumping right in. You know it can be CCIE wireless next year, right?

Tim: 14:52

Yeah, totally. Um. Well, I mean, I did just go back to Cisco and I am working in the same business unit where you know we've got Meraki, uh now, and Meraki probably is my weakest of the Cisco routing switching wireless platforms, so maybe I should there you go. Yeah, I'm sure they had some kind of Meraki certification. I mean, they had Meraki certifications before this right, they definitely was.

Tim: 15:18

Yeah, meraki, yeah yeah, but they were specifically Meraki certifications, right? So this is the first time we're actually seeing Cisco take a step towards the true integration that they've kind of, you know, we've kind of promised over a long period of time. So, and you know I which is exciting to me because I've always been a proponent that you know, if you can, if we could get meaningful integration among all of the, you know, cisco portfolio, like meaningful, not not like you know, uh, small little customer led things, but true integration, like they would be really, really powerful. So I'm hopeful that this is a good step in that direction. Uh, and I'd like to, I'd like to see more uh of that. And also, I think, the wireless. I think there was just too much. Once you brought Meraki back into the fold and made it, like you know, part of the exam, I think finally you had enough material to truly break it out and have it be its own certification again.

Tim: 16:15

I'm not saying they should have ever changed it, or not? Right, that wasn't my obviously had nothing to do with that decision, but maybe the maybe the original feeling was hey, wireless, you know it doesn't have enough to stand on its own as a certification track, and they were going to roll it all together to get, you know, to consolidate the people that were going to go after tracks, and maybe now there's enough material and enough interest to uh, to split it back out again.

Chris: 16:38

Yeah, Well, we'll potentially, uh, have an episode coming up about this topic as well. But I mean, like you said, the kind of this is just the cert track, but you can obviously glean a lot about what's probably going to happen with the portfolio based on certification track, right, and if we see this kind of unification of the portfolio, you know, kind of coming into a consolidated platform. As I said, I don't want to go too far into it because we'll probably have an episode coming on this, but there's trade-offs to that right, there's positives, there's negatives. For sure there's going to be some hurdles. But one thing I will say I'm noticing here is the written exam, or I guess this would be the oh, it's still the Encore exam, I don't know, but anyways, the written version. For the CCIE Wireless, the new one. It's only offered in two languages currently, tim, and that's English and Japanese. So I think this would be a great opportunity for you to practice your Japanese by talking about it.

Chris: 17:39

How much in Japanese can you talk about RF? Is that in your portfolio yet?

Tim: 17:43

I have to. It's funny you say this. I'm actually building an Anki deck based on technical terms in Japanese, and 95% of them are just the English word turned into the Japanese pronunciations. So Ethernet is Isanetto. So yeah there's a lot of that.

Chris: 18:03

Yeah, I will say in my brief journey which I'm back on it, uh, trying to learn a bit of Japanese. I'll be there later this year, so I should probably know how to speak some of it. It's amazing how much of the Western words have just been added in, and just add a little accent on it Basket the body you know Well.

Tim: 18:21

I mean there's a. It's a verbally what they call a verbally impoverished language, meaning there's a. It's a verbally what they call a verbally impoverished language, meaning there's a. There's a limited amount of sounds that you make in in that language and so, yeah, when they adapt another language's word, it has to fit within the you know the blocks, if you will.

Chris: 18:39

So, yeah, it's interesting anyway, just everything just sounds kind of like camel case, like you're kind of yeah a little bit, I can see that yeah, okay Coming up next, so this is interesting too.

Tim: 18:53

We got really some really interesting security focused articles. Actually, we found some really good stuff this month. So Google Cloud is now updating its network security for the agentic age, so they're not the first to do this. Oracle, apparently, was the first to start with what they're saying is MCP model context protocol security integration. Of course, this article is about Google, so we're apparently was the first to start with. What they're saying is MCP Model Context Protocol security integration. Of course, this article is about Google, so we're going to focus there. I am curious, though. After this, I'm actually going to go look up and see what Oracle did.

Tim: 19:21

But so Google Cloud has revealed quote unquote various AI driven security features for the platform, with AI agents and identity key themes among these announcements. Now, this is really cool. So they're introducing something they're calling agentic IAM services around AI agents and models. So something that we've talked about a few times, probably on the podcast, is that this brave new world of AI lacks a lot of security controls, and one of the biggest ones is this kind of open standard that is MCP, for example, or even just AI talking to systems and this lack of identity associated with like, okay, well, who are you? Who are you that's reaching out and talking to things?

Tim: 20:10

So this Google Cloud's IAM service is designed to automatically provision agentic identities across all agent development runtimes while supporting a range of credentials authorization policies has already, like, taken off this idea of of handing essentially not coding, but like creating via the, the AI, uh, what I would say like integration, uh, or, or how you interact with AI. You're creating these agents to go essentially and giving them direction and details about what they should be able to do, and they go off and autonomously do these things, which obviously causes a huge security problem when the agent is able to access things that maybe the person who wrote the agent should not necessarily be able to access, and that's been a problem. And so Google's idea is we'll do IAM, which I've never liked identity management. But I mean, if you're going to do IAM, which I really I've never liked, identity service, identity management but I mean, if you're going to put if you're going to do it anywhere, though.

Tim: 21:17

Agentic IAM is a really good idea, Right. So I am curious to see I guess it's going to be. It's probably going to work just like IAM does for users, right, when an agent will have to adhere, have a policy attached to it or some kind of permissions or something. And it's not 100% clear in the article and again, the articles in the show notes, like all of the articles we cover, are going to be. But GCP is using the Security Command Center, the SCC, seeing new capabilities for MCP as well.

Tim: 21:48

So, remember, MCP is this open standard of how to AI agents interact with resources and, like the MCP is kind of a front end for that, and you know so because of the way MCP is built. It's kind of an open standard and anything open can be exploited without security. So it says it doesn't get into very big much detail in the article that I've seen Just saying like, hey, we're introducing things like data security, posture management, which you know it's a great sounding tool, but it doesn't really get into what it actually does, Things like that about how it's going to handle security for MCP. So I think we're really going to have to see some rubber meeting the road on how Google's actually going to do this, but it is good to see the CSPs you know, Oracle and now Google are taking this concept of MCP and agentic AI identity, and therefore security tied to identity, more seriously.

Chris: 22:50

Yeah, obviously great step forward, Like we've. We've. We've heard the kind of criticisms in the market and we've made jokes on the show about this. You know the, the whole, you know what is the S in MCT stand for. It's security type thing, right.

Chris: 23:09

But the thing is, while this is good, I must say I don't necessarily love that the onus for the security is falling to the provider or kind of the, the, the who's exposing the MCP here because it's not built into the protocol, right, like it sounds like everyone's going to have potentially their own implementation, which I will admittedly know, or admit that I don't know a ton about MCP and how it operates under the hood. I know it's relatively simplistic, which is kind of what's good about it. But the fact that these providers are kind of responsible for integrating the security and you know, identity has its own kind of quirks about it, right. But the fact that that falls on them doesn't leave me feeling warm and fuzzy necessarily. I'm glad it's there, but I wonder if we're going to be looking at these kind of bespoke iterations of it for a while. Inherently, protocols should just be secure, right? I mean Kubernetes probably did a great example of this, where there's this concept of everything, should use MTLS. I know, in production that's not exactly how that always operates, but there's inherent security that's at least encouraged from there. But MCP we're at this kind of infant stage where that's not even really in the forefront. It's just like, oh, use it. It's amazing, blah, blah, blah.

Chris: 24:34

But you know, when we're talking about enterprise scale and we literally just were looking at something where, you know, an LLM prompt was being used to extract data from things like this, you know what's to say. This couldn't happen on an agent that has these kind of temporary credentials as well, right? So on an agent that has these kind of temporary credentials as well, right? So it's a, it's a great step forward. I just wish that someone could take a step back at you know kind of the bigger picture type thing and implement security, which I should probably do a little more research on, on whether or not Anthropix looked at this, cause I know they were kind of the ones that brought this to market. But yeah, that's my two cents there. Yeah, that's fair, all right, next up, we'll make this a quick one.

Chris: 25:16

We just thought this was kind of funny.

Chris: 25:19

So the Zscaler CEO, jay Chaudhry, has basically made a comment recently in the public eye talking about how, you know, zscaler is obviously very well known in the you know sassy space, sse space, um, ztna type thing, um, so they have a very uh large customer base across the planet, um, and he'd made a comment about how they were using these kind of trillions or billions of uh customer logs to train their internal AI models et cetera. Right, so that immediately kind of saw major criticisms come in and request for kind of more information because people thought they were, you know, having their data being used to train internal models without specifically I'm assuming giving what's the word consent to do so. Right, and then we saw they immediately came out and clarified that customer data is not used in our AI training, right, so I imagine the log data that they're getting, they probably are putting into something, just as probably Cisco, many, many big vendors out there Everyone's doing that, right, putting into something just as probably Cisco, many, many big vendors out there everyone's doing that Right.

Chris: 26:33

But you know, they just forgot to leave out that part where they they say they scrubbed the data of any kind of PII or anything like that. So these, I feel like you know, the vendors should be able to use the customer data that they're, that they're, I should say, anonymized customer data, to kind of make the products better, et cetera. They just need to kind of be careful around these scenarios, and we can see here that you know, when the CEO comes out and says something and doesn't clarify, they're immediately going to get slapped on the hand. So yeah, I just thought this one was was kind of funny. How do you feel, tim?

Tim: 27:08

I mean, yeah, Right. So so do you remember when you have to opt in to stuff like that?

Tim: 27:14

Like you know, yeah, I want you know, like the little checkbox, I want my data to be sent to improve the customer experience on all these apps and stuff. My assumption is that that's just part of the licensing. Yeah, that's just part of the licensing now for these. I'm sure Cisco's the same. Like you said, everybody who's taking the data is using it for something, so there's got to be some legal cover for that. But I do think it's funny that the CEO got on an earnings call and was talking about how all these customers are helping us train our wonderful AI and the next day they had to issue some emergency thing saying whoa, whoa thing saying whoa, wait, we're not using customer data. We're scrubbing everything. And it's not, you know, it's all anonymized metadata. So, yeah, open mouth, insert foot there.

Chris: 28:04

Yeah, we all do it sometimes. I just realized I went out of order here so I was. That was supposed to be one of Tim's articles, but that's fine, I'll roll into the next one and then we'll. We'll have Tim round it out with our with our last one, um. So this one is um.

Chris: 28:22

I must say this one kind of is sad to see, um, a bit of a bummer Um. So apparently Avaya um is, if you're familiar with Avaya is typically a unified communications vendor doing a lot of you know, telecommunications handsets, you know conferencing-type products, things like that. They've apparently told or offered, quote-unquote everyone at company a voluntary exit package to essentially leave the company and it sounds like they're, you know, gearing up for something, whether that be hopefully not something like you know bankruptcy or something, but I would imagine they're probably going to get scooped up by another vendor of some sort and just kind of folded into a larger portfolio. I say this one's sad because this is Avaya, is a kind of a company that I think of that like they just stuck to UC, right, they were just focused on unified communications. They never really ventured too far out. They probably had other products and you know they didn't stray too far from that. I mean, who knows, maybe they had stuff that absolutely failed and fell on its face that I just don't know about.

Chris: 29:34

But, um, you know, I was. I definitely my first jobs, uh, in the tech industry were working at call centers, and I was. I was on a via handset many, many times in my life. Um, so this one's just kind of, uh, just kind of sad to see that we potentially could lose a giant like this. But what about you, tim? Did you have any at your call center? Were you using Avaya handsets or were you using something else? Let's see.

Tim: 30:00

I'm trying to remember actually. So I was for a couple of years I worked at Cox Communications call center in Chesapeake, virginia, as a tier two high-speed internet rep. So I don't remember if it was avaya or not. It might have been. It's been so long now that I don't remember. But I mean, yeah, avaya is like one of those uh, you know household names, if you will, for anybody who's been in the industry for for a good bit of time. And of course they've fallen off. You know, they never really got, they never really got into the as a service business and that's probably what ended up killing them because, like all collab, these days it's pretty much delivered as a service, right, so it's it is.

Tim: 30:41

I mean, it is what it is, right. So it's kind of like it feels a little bit like novell or something you know, getting getting the axe.

Chris: 30:48

It's probably due for it at this time, but but you know it's just kind of a bummer. But yeah, so if you're a Gen Z listener, we used to have these things that sat on the desk with us. That were actual telephones. You'd pick up the handset and press numbers on it. It was crazy.

Tim: 31:04

Very archaic. Yeah, or you'd turn the dial on the phone.

Chris: 31:13

That was Avaya's fault. They never released a retro rotary type phone.

Tim: 31:18

Rotary, that was a rotary phone.

Chris: 31:20

That would have brought them back into the limelight.

Tim: 31:23

Yep, it's not too late, guys, it's not too late. All right, last one, and this one isn't going to be long at all. It's just one of those things you're like okay, because it's so obvious. So this one's from Reuters. Openai has sharply raised its projected cash burn through 2029 to $115 billion, as it quote unquote, ramps up spending to power the artificial intelligence between behind popular chatbot, uh, chatgpt. So this forecast is 80 billion dollars higher than the company had previously expected. Um, what do you? I?

Tim: 32:02

I just, I keep seeing I keep thinking of the sam altman means which I see all the time. It's like come on, bro agi is so close. Just another $80 billion. What do you want to say there? Purportedly they're quote-unquote trying to control sorting costs by developing their own data centers, chips and facilities to power the technology. So I'm curious does this mean they're getting away from Microsoft hosting? Basically at this point, is that, is it the honeymoon fully over? Um, I don't know.

Chris: 32:34

I mean, we're putting all this money into building data centers, right that's? Uh. It would only make sense that that they would probably cut out the middleman, um, to pay for some of it. But yeah, it's only 80 billion dollars more than what was originally projected. I don't know how you can be that off, but, um, you know I'll cut them some slack eventually. This thing is going to be profitable, guys. It's going to be. It just has to.

Tim: 32:58

Yeah that's the thing, though. It has to, and, but everybody's like, oh, it has to, the roi is coming. The roi is coming. I wonder if the roi isn't, like you know, one of those long con things where you you're playing the game, where you're waiting for all the people with actual expertise to like, leave the workforce and the people that are left have to rely on ai because that's what they know, and then you've got a captive audience like that's the only roi I can actually figure, I can actually see on any kind of horizon for this whole thing.

Chris: 33:29

Right thing is too man it's like it's hard to gauge because obviously me and you work within the tech sector, so we're probably a little bit more tapped in than you know kind of the normal day-to-day consumer of this stuff. And, um, you know, I mean I'm I'm friends with a lot of people that you know work. You know non-tech, normal type jobs and some of them are artists. Um, you know non-tech, normal type jobs and some of them are artists. You know things like that.

Chris: 33:54

And I will say, when it comes to generative AI and kind of the promises, they fucking hate it, like they despise the shit and they want it to be eradicated in every sense of what they do. So, like you know, I'm kind of I'm kind of straddling it a bit where, like I like using it for kind of enhancing what I'm doing and making it more structured and helping me get over small hurdles, but like some people absolutely despise this shit, man. So it's really hard to kind of gauge when, either you know it, it skyrockets and becomes profitable or like people just get so sick of it and like just completely turn away from it and you know, I don't know if we go into another depression or what happens, but like fuck man, you gotta do something, because the the money can't last forever, right?

Tim: 34:45

so at some point you either find yeah, you find the golden ticket item that ai enables. That wasn't around before AI, or the whole bubble, or the VC hype bubble pops, which really, I think, is what's really happening at the end of it. We have VCs that hype something so that it'll get sold to more VC. You know, like it's just like a. You know it's like it's dildos all the way down. You know, I don't know what to say. So I don't know and I agree, I was talking to someone who was I talking to today about the whole People are also using the whole thing wrong too.

Tim: 35:19

Right, like, instead of going to the cloud and saying, you know, build me a website or something, what they, you know, do what AI is really good at, take a bunch of data, take, like ai is really good at, take a bunch of data. Take, like a bunch of documents and like books and whatever, and like, feed that to your ai assuming it doesn't already have it because god knows but uh, and then tell it like, okay, give me the insights out of it that, like are useful, so that I'll have to go read 400 000 pages of documents, right, and then I'll use that and I'll make something from, yeah, that thing that you gave me. Yeah, I will say.

Chris: 35:54

Just last comment I'll make is um, I did, I was given to, I was given early access by uh, through an, through an invite of one of our, one of our mutual friends, Nick. Um, I'm not even going to try to say Nick's last name, he's from.

Tim: 36:07

Georgia.

Chris: 36:08

Um, not the Georgia in America, the Georgia in Europe, and his last name is very complicated so I won't try to say that. But yeah, it gave me an invite code to Perplexity AI's browser, which is called Comet, and it basically it's basically just like a, almost a wrapper on your existing browser that you want to use and it has the AI agent built in and will kind of scrub everything. You did the minimal testing that I've done so far. I wanted to find a use case for it. I did actually, you know, I was literally just going to vendor documentation websites, went to went to Fortinet's, went to Cisco's, went to a few others, and I was basically just like pulled up the agent while on the docs page and it's like help me configure the dot one X, you know, on something simple, help me configure, you know, uh, an Amazon, uh, transit gateway, et cetera.

Chris: 36:57

Um, the results I got pretty good, not gonna lie. Um, and if that, if, if anything, if we get out of this something that immediately scrubs vendor documentation and gives you a how to, uh, you know, a mop, a method of procedure, then that's a win. That's the ROI. Is there, baby? We're here.

Tim: 37:17

That's right, we have arrived. It only took 10, $20 trillion.

Chris: 37:21

Yeah, dude 20 trillion, and I'm, you know, slightly happier, but you know, all right. Uh, with that we should probably go ahead and wrap up and if, if you made it to this point in the episode, you must have enjoyed something. So we sincerely thank you for listening. If you can, please do share this with a friend, tell somebody post about it on social media. What have you? Linkedin, twitter, blue Sky, etc. I must say all the good stuff I said about LinkedIn like 6-7 months ago as it being probably the best social media platform, it's immediately made me regret, saying that it's all gone to shit. Man, it's so bad now. So you know, post it wherever you want. We're still on the hunt for what is the best social media platform. It seems to change all the time. But, yeah, you can find us on all the socials, at Cables to Clouds and with that, we'll see you in two weeks with a great episode on something we don't even know what it is yet, but it'll be exciting, it'll be lovely, we're so excited.

Tim: 38:25

We'll talk to you next time.

Chris: 38:26

I'm ready See you guys to see this.