The Frontier with Brendan Foody
00:46:29 · Jonathan Frankle
[00:46:29] S0: I think I would have two. One is to like try to like live in almost the dialectic of containing both all the possibilities of AI and the perils and risks as we roll out this new technology that we still don't really understand fully, and contain both, like be able to keep this middle perspective that there are both incredible opportunities and some risks you need to be cognizant of. It's so easy to fall into one bucket or the other. Like this is dangerous, no AI, or this is incredible. We're gonna use AI for everything. No more workers, no more anything, just tokens to the moon. We have to live in this in-between where the internet changed the world, but also, you know, didn't change a lot of things. The other piece I always say to enterprises and to the world at large is be willing to experiment, like controlled sandboxes where you can experiment a little bit and try things. Let people bottom up try to use this technology. I think, in some sense, if we look back at the internet, like the internet was kind of built from first principles, or the web at least was built from first principles in a democratized way. Anyone can put a website online. That meant a lot of people did some really stupid things, some really bad things, and some really silly things. Like we ended up with like all the like Adobe Flash videos from the late 90s and early 2000s that you weren't even around when they existed, but were hilarious at the time. And you know, we got the beginning of memes. Open source software, software that anyone can see the code to and edit. Nobody's gonna make money off of that, nobody's gonna bother on that, changed the world. So the idea that within your business or within the world, like this technology is just available to you and you can try to create something, most things you try to create are gonna be either useless, kind of silly, or maybe even a little dumb and risky, but a handful are going to change your business or change the world. And creating the space for folks to do that, I think is really important. I mean, the best piece of advice I've gotten about computing is you never know who's going to change the world. And so you should try to give as many opportunities to as many people as possible. It's like, what would the world look like without Wikipedia? It's kind of hard to imagine.
00:48:21 · Jonathan Frankle
And that sounded like a really stupid idea where if I was someone's manager, I would tell them, don't bother. Like, why are you wasting your time on this like utopian, stupid project? I was wrong. And I tend to be wrong when I say these things to people on my team. So I try to give them some unstructured room to get a prototype out and prove me wrong. That led to LLMs at Mosaic and us getting acquired. That's led to a bunch of other really key things we built at Databricks where I said no initially, and I'm really glad the person didn't listen to me. So, you know, be open minded, I guess. Totally. Jonathan, an incredible conversation. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you for having me. I'm glad this worked out.