Databricks CEO on AI Pacing, Cyber Risk, and the Enterprise

Ali Ghodsi (0:00)

As a business leader, there's a tragedy of the commons. If you want to stop, if you want to go slower, why don't you go slower? Like, I'm competing, I want to win.

Martin Casado (0:07)

There's almost two camps. There's one camp which believes that this actually is an engineering problem, and there's others which actually believe you have to slow it down.

Ali Ghodsi (0:16)

Humans don't respond fast enough to the attacks that are happening. You need to automate all of those. And most organizations are actually not supposed to doing that. Is RSI and recursive self-improvement that the labs are doing leading us there? That's the big question.

Sarah Wang (0:29)

Something Elon said, this is some elaborate 4D chess, because on the one hand, you're saying all of humanity will die. On the other hand, you're saying, hey, what do you want for your IPO allocation?

Martin Casado (0:38)

For the first time ever, a company at scale last week said that they're moving from the frontier models to GLM. Do you think that that's a trend or do you think that's just like a one-off anecdote?

SPEAKER_4 (0:50)

AI may already be smart enough for the enterprise. The problem is that it doesn't understand your company.

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi joins a16z's Martin Casado and Sarah Wang to discuss what's actually holding back AI adoption and why the answer may have less to do with building smarter models and more to do with giving them the right context. They also debate the push-to-pace frontier AI, recursive self-improvement and where the risks are real today.

Ali argues that super intelligence remains far from what we currently see, while cybersecurity is an immediate problem as agents make attacks faster and harder for human security teams to keep up with. And they get into what Databricks has learned using AI internally, from building an organizational ontology, to managing token costs and choosing different models for different jobs.

Sarah Wang (1:41)

Thank you for being here, Ali.

Ali Ghodsi (1:43)

Super excited.

Sarah Wang (1:44)

So we obviously want to get to Databricks, but there is a broader conversation going on right now about AI. And Dario's weighed in, Jakob's weighed in, Elon's weighed in. But we want to hear what Ali Ghodsi thinks. In terms of, you know, if you called the topic, broadly speaking, pacing the frontier, et cetera, what is your strongest agreement with what's being out there? Where do you disagree? And maybe where is their nuance that's not being captured?

Ali Ghodsi (2:12)

Yeah, happy to cover it. And me and Martin argue a lot, so I'm sure that's not going to take long. We'll try and rate it in this time. Try to stay calm. But, well, I do think first and foremost that there, maybe we agree on this, that leaders have responsibility to not freak people out unnecessarily, unless there's really, really good reason. And I think, you know, there's always different people in society that are at different places, you know, in their mind space.

So, you know, talking about these kind of existential risks and, you know, scenarios where all of humanity is going to be wiped out, I think, is irresponsible, like, it can tip a lot of people over, and it can cause a lot of mental health issues.

Martin Casado (2:51)

Unless you have something that's going to wipe people out.

Ali Ghodsi (2:54)

Yeah, as I said, yeah, if there is an actual reason for it, then, you know, that's a different story. But I think that right now, the existential risk is close to zero.

So why freak everybody out? It's not actually needed. There are risks, we'll get into it, that's probably where we disagree. But first and foremost, I think that leaders should not freak everyone out. And I mean, you know, if there's like technical nuances in how we're doing AI research and so on, well, researchers can discuss that. You don't need to every time go on TV and or blast on Twitter to millions of people that, hey, you know, I think there's like this percentage, 10% risk that all humanity is going to be wiped out. I don't think that's like helpful for a lot of people. Actually, I think causes a lot of harm for a lot of folks who get stressed out and actually are not in the nuances of all of this stuff and what it means. So that I don't think we should do. I don't think it's fruitful. It doesn't really help anyone.

Martin Casado (3:46)

I think this is very, very true for the general public.

Ali Ghodsi (3:51)

Yeah.

Martin Casado (3:51)

Like my sister, it was great. It was a school teacher in rural Arizona on Sunday, texted me and said, said, Martin, should I prepare the cabin for, she's kind of a prepper anyways, but should I prepare the cabin for the apocalypse? You know, I've got water set up. Like when are you showing up? I'm like, hold on.