AI Doomsday Predictions Lack Real-World Reality | Bryan Cantrill

Bryan Cantrill (0:00)

I just think that people would benefit from, like, working in a factory, going to a mine, looking at a mine, go into, like, the actual industrial economy that people are talking about. It doesn't work the way you think it does. Just doesn't. And we got an entire generation that, like, doesn't have calloused hands. And you'll find, like, there's a bunch of stuff that's just not connected that you wouldn't connect.

People need to spend more time reading Richard's Scary. You know what I mean? Where you're just like, learn how the world works, and then you can learn what the actual perils of automation might be and might not be, and where all those very significant gaps are.

SPEAKER_2 (0:41)

All right, we are back. We are live in the studio with Bryan Cantrill, who is co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, and a long-time systems engineer across a bunch of different companies. Bryan, welcome.

Bryan Cantrill (0:53)

Hey, thanks. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_2 (0:55)

Absolutely. So tell us about Oxide.

Bryan Cantrill (0:57)

Yeah, so we are a computer company. It says it right on the tin. That was very deliberate. You know, when we started the company in 2019, we wanted to make very clear to any VCs that there would be no pivots to software, that we were doing hardware and software co-designed. So we make a design and make a rack-scale machine. So a machine that is designed for cloud computing. So my co-founder and I were together at a cloud computing pioneer, Joanne. I spent 14 years prior to that at Sun Microsystems, which I have to explain is a computer company. I've heard of it. Okay. You've got the Dan Aykroyd thing. I just never know what I've got to go explain. So Sun was a computer company consumed by Oracle. I went to this cloud computing pioneer, and we were building out public cloud computing, making that software available for people to run on-prem. And we were bought by Samsung in 2016 because Samsung needed to be able to compete with Apple with cloud computing, and there wasn't a product they can go buy to run cloud computing on-premises. So they bought Joyant.

We went out to an explosive level of scale with Samsung, and everything broke. And as we were wondering, how do the hyperscalers do this, you realize, because we were doing it on Dell and Super Micro and Force 10 switches, and you realize that, like, oh, the hyperscalers don't do it this way, dummy. The hyperscalers are not Dell customers. They're not HPE customers. They're not Super Micro customers. They've actually designed their own machines. So they've designed their own rack-scale machines.

And we realized that's what we need to go do. We need to go actually do hard-run software together, do what the hyperscalers have built for themselves, make that as a product that could actually be shipped into the enterprise, with the big belief being that on-prem computing deserved modernity, that you should be able to run, you should be able to own cloud computing. You shouldn't be forced to merely just rent it.

SPEAKER_2 (2:51)

So like, what are the challenges with like regular on-prem computing?

Bryan Cantrill (2:55)

Oh God, it's such a... The challenges are so myriad that anyone that's deployed Dell or HPE or Supermicro and tried to get it to work, especially as a last infrastructure, it's like, where do you even start? It is a cobbled together mess. It's a kit car. It's not designed to operate coherently.

And it starts with racking, stacking, cabling, the software on top of that. It is, you're dealing with multiple different vendors. Any standup on that commodity gear is almost tautologically a snowflake. So when anything goes wrong with that, every vendor is pointing at one another. And so there are, again, it's hard to know where to begin with the problems. And that's why people move to the cloud, because there are so many problems. I can just go to the public cloud. It's like, this is so much easier. I can just go to this hotel. Everything is taken care of for me, but then the economics become debilitating. And the public cloud is great, but when you get to a certain size and scale, it doesn't make economic sense. And so that's what we sought out to do. Raise money in 2019, very hard to raise money. Even mentioning hardware in 2019

We had plenty of VC firms that told us that they were only interested in funding SaaS, period. You're like, okay. So if NVIDIA or AMD came through here today, you wouldn't fund them, okay?

And, but we fortunately found some terrific investors and we're able to capitalize the company, introduce our product in the market in 2023 And it's been off to the races. It's been fun. We've got the, we very much have the, how fast can you build a problem right now? It's a good problem to have.