This is part two of our Renbeer A&B podcast if you haven't seen part one that's already been up you can go check that out right now so we're just gonna go ahead and start into it three two one. Press the bell icon on the YouTube app and never miss another update from All India Bakhton. You were supposed to do the Kishore Kumar biopic. Is that happening? Kishore Kumar. It was happening but there's a certain that there's one character's family or one person's family didn't allow us to use that person and that was the main conflict of Kishore Kumar's life so I hope it happens you know doing biopic is very tricky because even when you're doing the Sanjadat biopic there were so many people's families who called, don't write about us you know about his certain ex-girlfriend or certain wife you can't use all that unless you have permission so it's tricky to make biopic. So do you try changing it like FIFA or Pro Evolution? You should have. So we had to resort to that. Which actor have you met and that you immensely, which actor have you met that you've fanboyed immensely? Did you know that you had a pair? Yeah, I was having a share out of that. My favourite. My favourite picture of that one is the Kunal Kohli. What is that? What is this Kunal Kohli photo? I went to Australia and they wanted to take a photo with Koala.  So I just stood like this. Same photo. You were sitting like this, Kunal Kohli. I had the same photo. Where was the Diniro thing? So he invited a few actors and but to be honest who wasn't like I mean the embarrassing moments when photographed but who was as equally or more embarrassing than me was Anil Kapoor. Like you have no idea what Anil Anil was doing. Anil Anil was pushing people and all you know like Virud is coming on, I'm coming, he's kicking and all. And he's like sitting like this, let's take a photo. So like we all were like just at our worst. Yeah but he was actually feeling like that Koala bear because he was wondering what is happening. He wasn't saying anything.  You know we were asking about taxi driver. You know these intelligent questions. Everyone had some trivia to ask him about and all. And all he did was hmm and he just looked the other way. So my impression of Robert Diniro is not so great anymore. But it's okay. If we dance in IFA, we'll do it correctly. At the end of our level, we'll take Vir. That's the purpose of IFA. Like I love IFA because I'll tell you which Hollywood actors will fall to their own level. We'll do it. It'll be fun. We'll write it down in a sari. Martin Scorsese was called the best... Martin Scorsese was called the best scene of the year. Yeah, you're talking to me? Best Jody. There's a story about Jake Dillon and all. I was told. International style icon. That's a word I don't understand. What is international style icon? I have one couple of those babies though. I don't remember which awards show but there was one where Amitabh Bachchan, he got a lifetime achievement last year. But you have to invite him this year also. So it's like now how? Star of the Millennium. Star of the Millennium. Millennium? Straight. Salman got one for best social media. With Sohail came to take... Salman, what social media?  Is it like a thing? I mean I used to go crazy when I was winning best actor awards. It's kind of cool.   What does that thing like though then? Because it sort of... And again not to go back to the cliched questions that you said about it. When you had your 3-4... You know what I mean? If Rekhaji called you a day before. Yeah. Is that a thing? See the thing is like that day when I was dressed as a girl, when I won critic's best actor, and then our act was over because the last four main awards was hosted by Karan Johar. And so me and Shahrukh sir were backstage and I was getting ready to go back home. So I said let's go. My award is over. They gave me critic's best actor. So when they called me back and said no no no you could be winning this award. Then that excitement was amazing. To go back and also win the best popular actor award. Then next year when I won for Barfi, and when I got the award which was at around 2.30 at night, there was nobody in the audience. There were like 5 people sitting there. And then that really got me like people don't really respect this. There is no kind of respectability. I don't know if people don't respect or not but I think there's a point at about 2.30 in the morning where people are like how much do I respect? Because I'll still never forget that the one that you and Shahrukh hosted. Javedam Ke Laan Shahwara Aunty was abusing us on stage. Yeah and I remember. Hey, get rid of these people. Bhoni Kapoor came to give the last award and I still remember it's one of the most snarky things that I'll announce and say. He's like good evening, but now he says good morning. Like he just says this openly. You've done all that. I haven't danced in weddings but I've danced in award shows. I enjoy hosting because when we work together and I've only worked with you guys, it's fun.  But I think dancing is a little boring for me on award shows. Now in a new house, you moved out of the house finally. Do you have the same problem as his wife who doesn't come home? My cook left day for a month. I don't have anybody to make a meal at night. So my mom is sending me dabbas from my house. But it's great. I have a good system at home. I have 2 people who work for me. I have 2 dogs. An English master, a French master. And it's like having 2 grandparents living at home because it's a lot of work. You know, to take care of them. Their walks, their food. They're always falling sick. I don't think it's the best breed to have in this country, but I got gifted the dogs. So I really have to take care of them. But it's great. I do nothing. I made myself a nice cinema room. I'm watching movies. I'm chilling. People don't believe this about me, but 90% of the time I don't have a thought in my head. Even when I'm sitting on set or I'm sitting at home, I'm a blank person. Without that, also.  I'm so juvenile. I was wondering who was going to do that. You did not disappoint. In my head, I was like, Do you know how much trouble I've felt over to jump in? I remember I did a GQ interview on my first day. And I spoke about smoking pot in school. I was a big pot smoker. Lawyers were calling my dad and he can't speak like that in this country and he's going to go to jail. So the lawyers then call you and say, What are you doing? What are you doing in this country? Please take dad's phone. Wow, my dad's tweets, man. What do I say about it? Yeah, my mom. What is the answer that you've rattled now as part of the template that you made on dad's tweets? There is a template but let me not say the template. The thing is, what I feel about his tweets is that, A, he's extremely honest. He's exactly like you actually. You know what you feel? There is always like some humor, disguise which is a bit layered because people don't get it. He's also very passionate about certain things like politics or like any topical thing that's happening and he says it. I on the other hand, I'm quite opposite of him.  If they ask me to talk about any political thing or anything controversial, I'll give the most hypocritical answer just to kind of just you know, well left kind of a way. So now, how do I criticize him for it? I mean he falls into trouble. He's right to say it. Every Punjabi uncle, it's so cool. Every Punjabi uncle. So my mom is giving him a hard time you know and really giving him a hard time. Like he really has to go and sleep in the sitting room kind of a hard time.  That's the easiest to fix this. Even without the bottle also, he's like this. Guys, he's actually very honest. But Twitter's like that, right? Once you start because I mean I don't matter even if you're Rishi Kapoor, I'm guessing retweets are addictive. It's true, retweets. It's crazy. Have you been pitched any web series type thingies because we're writing one for M1 Prime. So it's a nice endorsement. I've already asked him he won't do anything on the web right now. Dammit. I need 2-3 more flops. Yes. I need 2-3 more. 2-3 more Besharam. Besharam to the side. I'm coming when it's done. I'm coming when it's done. Nice. Besharam to Calcutta Velvet. Yes. Let's get ready. Calcutta Velvet.  No. You don't know how much. I know I have enough like even if I have Calcutta Velvet or Besharam too, I'm fine. You're okay. I'm okay. But you don't look at your money. I don't. I'm not to fond of material things like earlier on to buy a sports car and all this great, but right now I don't care. I don't want a sports car. I don't want a plane. You know, as long as I get to do... I mean, you have a football team, Ranbir. Yeah. Like your own football team. You call them and like it. I'm going to point out, okay? Two things here. Shahrukh not invited us to play FIFA. Ranbir never invited to football game. I'm sensing a pattern, guys. Yeah. I'm sensing a pattern. But you guys never mentioned that I was there that day when you spoke about this FIFA thing which... Yeah, you were there. You were there. You were there. We were drinking in his house till 7 in the morning when we clicked that picture with Terminator. Yes, we did. With the Terminator. We did. And it was so much fun because those three nights we just sat and we heard his stories. Yeah. And... I have to say, Ranbir becomes very subservient around. Oh, it was beautiful. It was like... That was the first time I saw that dynamic when Shahrukh is drinking. Ranbir is like, Sir, drink. Drink, sir. Drink, sir. Sir, sir. And he's mentioning us after the Shahrukh party. Oh, you guys were so nice to Shahrukh. Yeah. He was like, Yeah.  Yeah. I'll put a question back to work. So if you don't want to act in the web series, you want to produce with the money you have for Amazon. Just know my cup of tea, man. Guys, seriously tell me, what is the reach of web series? Is it a platform which has been accepted in this country? I'll give you an example. Okay. This was many years ago. But the average ticket price of a movie is 200 bucks. The average sketch does 5-6 million comfortably. Okay. And if it's a good series, it can go up to 7-8 million. Yeah. So a good show can be as big as a 200 crore film. Yeah, but that usually doesn't happen. That's like saying that we have a billion people who are like 3% go, you make so much money. I don't think is there engagement like to watch? In fact, engagement is spectacular. Unlike film or whatever, it's such an interactive platform. But then, okay, okay. So this whole internet thing has boomed in the last 3-4 years. But there is no big web series in our country right now, right? There is no, you are unaware of it. So it is. It's there. It's in the same way that like a Bollywood has its own audience. This also has its own audience. Hindi film industry. But yeah, the Hindi film industry has its own audience. Yeah. The Indian Hindi-English web industry also has its own audience. See, I'll always be a... We're catching them young. Yeah. I'll always be the hater of it because it's going to take away people from my theater. You know, stuff like this. It's because you're giving them entertainment at home. So that just doesn't give them something to go out and watch a movie. But I wonder how are you watching experiences different? It is, but when you make films like say Tamasha or say it's not an event film, right? It's not the big summer movie. It's not there. But then couldn't you argue that this stuff that also helps a movie like Tamasha and films by now these online platforms often give these films a second and a third and a fourth life. Maybe, maybe, yeah. They do that, right? Which is not happening earlier. I wonder what the data is on this. Like what someone like say House of Cards. I'm sure it helps Kevin Spacey's movies and vice versa, something like that. So I'm sure there is some cross-engagement but maybe in a more developed...  No pressure. No pressure, man. This is like Raju Hirani and Amar Khan coming together.  I'm just saying. Okay? We don't get a lot of opportunities to make fantasy films in this country. And the formula is all there. It's you. It's Ayaan. Yeah, that's it. Let's do more. Rohan, what was the Sanjeeva Bansali thing that you were mentioning? No, so that was the thing. You work with him a fair amount and he can be...  What is it like in that situation though? Do you just buckle down and go, okay, it's a genius. In that... That's what I did because I was an assistant on black and everything I knew about filmmaking or acting came from him. So he became my... in the true sense my godfather. I followed him, I looked up to him and when we were doing Sabariya like he was God for me. He was creating me and you know, so it was like God worship and he was playing God. It was his assistant directors, these huge sets. It was Sanjeeva Bansali after Hamdil, Devdas and black. So he was like... Yeah, he was the guy. There was... But it was dark. You know, it was very dark. I mean, he really grinded us and he really gave us a hard time. But that also kind of... I mean, I come from a sheltered background. I've never been like abused or shouted at. He was abusing me. He was hitting me. He was like making me clean the floors. So I think that experience really grounded me. He was hitting me? That brings me to another question and I promise I'm not just saying this to be controversial or whatever. A larger philosophical question about filmmaking said the same thing about David O'Rasil. Where that directing was hitting me. Which brought me to another question is do we then use this concept of he's a genius or she's a genius to excuse not good behaviour? No, no, listen. Like, I believe that humility is an art is the greatest virtue. Sure. So it's something which I believe that's of course was my first filmmaker. But if I don't like a person, if I believe that a person is not a good human being, I don't want to give myself to him. Sure. Especially in the field of art. You know, you have to kind of surrender and you have to give yourself. And I wouldn't want to work with someone who's not good. Not saying that Sanjay Dela Bansali is that. But if I don't like a person, I don't want to work with him. You mentioned in Vogue the one you mentioned. Yeah, you mentioned in Vogue and that's why I bring it up is and this is again because considering you say you're super reticent, this is one of the most frank things I've ever heard an Indian actor talk about where you're like, you know what, sometimes I think I have a drinking problem. And it just, what happened sort of in the after, was that just like, I don't know, was that the hangover talking, is that something that you do? No, no, no. I have a drinking problem because drinking is fun. Sure, of course. Which is true. It's actually true. Objectively true. Even if you aren't working. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. I'm in a visual medium so I have to look at it. So I can't drink while I'm working. But because of Jaggajasus and the period it took, the time, there were a lot of free days and in my free days I realized because A, I'm alone now. I'm sitting at home. I drink. And then it hit me. Okay, listen, I have a drinking problem in my family. So I can't, I can't work with it. Yeah. Because there's something very positive about that. Yeah. Because there's a lot of young people who are probably struggling with that and don't know that. And it's very refreshing to hear a successful person come out and go, these are my demons. I have to deal with them. Yeah, you have to. Because honestly, like I'm seeing my, in my own family, you know, there are so many health problems, so many things that they have to deal with because of drinking. Right.  You're going to age faster. You're going to get, like, unhealthy. You're going to get fat. You're going to look bad. And it's good to like, you know, discover this very early in your life. Of course. So how do you put yourself back from that drink then? I think because of the people I surround myself with. Like I said, I don't have yes people. I have people who, who tell me, you know, how it is. How much rivalry is there in the industry? Rivalry? There must be a lot of rivalry. Like you look at, like basically, I ask, basically, like, that's even your character. And there'll be audition for this. Stiding in the crowd of the blade in my mouth, asking for a drink. Of course, you know, jealousy is a very basic human emotion and more so actors are insecure. But having said that, when I see Ranveer in Bajirao Mastani or when I see Varun in Badrinath's Duleniya or Su Shant in Dhoni or whatever performances stand out, you do feel a bit jealous but also you feel inspired then you like go back home ke kal to main partner now you know now I have to work harder I think if that sense the competition is a bit heated up I don't wish him to do badly or somebody else to do badly What is the most annoying thing a journalist has ever done? Given that we have couple in the room Most annoying thing What is this?   No Seriously So there's a hand which comes Yeah literally In the first hand So clearly you did open your own hamper I didn't get this No we don't get this I'll give you mine So you must have got a Gariblow hamper Yes What do I get? You'll get something else Nothing what we get You'll get it You'll get it Sorry Sorry Sorry we need a phone Manju made it This is Shakuntala Do you play FIFA?  I like cover it and put it on social media I can't do that with Shahrukh We have an idea for this I'll sell promotion Yeah Please don't promote me Interesting Let's wrap it up Let's wrap it up Let's wrap it up other people Alright Thank you very much for doing this Ranbir FIFA FIFA very sweet Actual football team also Actual football team also will be nice Yeah Are you guys good in FIFA? You're just saying FIFA I'm happy We're okay He's pretty good We're okay What team do you play with? Madrid You? India I'm a patriotism Archical patriotism Really? Yeah You? United or Barça? You? United You are a fan of Barça Barça boy Yeah Whoever the other guy picks Madrid you pick Barça Yeah Thank you very much for doing this Thanks All the best for Jagadar Sothit And see you guys next time I will tell you what Rick are you there? Rick I am I'm here Oh you're frozen I'm here Hello Hold on Can you hear me? I can I think you're frozen now Hold on Okay You're good now Yeah you're all We're good now You're all kind of I can hear you So I think you're fine Yeah What that obviously That was fine Obviously it was just a Comedy podcast That really made me want to Actually just talk to him Cause he seems to want To talk about the craft Is what he is Yeah He's like begging To talk about the craft And so Ren Bier If you are watching Please come on our channel Obviously I know AIB Their comedy That's what they do Whatever They're there to be funny And all that kind of stuff And that's their thing If you want to talk about Craft Just come on the channel Man We would love to talk to you For an hour Just about Process And acting And All that kind of stuff Yeah And if there's any stupid Babies writing in the Comments of here You know what's wrong With Rick today There's nothing wrong With me And I Mean no offense With this But I was Mostly bored Throughout the interview Yeah Obviously that was Mostly just A lot of fun But nothingness Obviously Is what they were talking about There were some interesting points Though Which was really interesting What he was talking about Sanjay Leela Bansali Which was I didn't know he was like This guy that was known Like I guess Quinton's kind of known As that kind of guy too Right He's kind of known as like He's pretty intense On set Yeah A lot of times Yeah But I mean We also have a union here So if a director ever hits you It's Yeah It's not gonna Work too well for you But yeah I would have loved to talk to him Like more in depth about his Process Of Like You know He's gone to Play real people Obviously Sanjay Dutt And apparently He was At least at this time In the works Like Kishore Kumar Which would be amazing I would love that film And then The differences obviously Between Playing a real person And When you should go with You know Actually Trying to imitate the artist As opposed to what he did With Sanjay Dutt And kind of They did kind of more of a loose Representation Of Dutt's character And all that kind of stuff Obviously Because he seems like He's Even though he says He has nothing going on You could tell He's very thoughtful In his process I'd imagine He knows what he Wants to do And he takes it seriously Yeah, and he seemed to be More talkative When he was getting into Questions That actually kind of Mattered But A lot of the time He'd be in Like we never got to hear The PS On what his standard format Is to reply To Writing to somebody Who's script He doesn't like Because As he writes He's got to the PS One of the other guys Jumped on what he said And made a joke And they laughed And they never brought it Back to his PS Yeah Yeah Not as good as the I'd rather see someone talk I'd rather see someone Talking to him about craft Not as good as the Shahrukh Khan one The Shahrukh Khan one I remember liking a lot more Yeah And it may be because They definitely carried Themselves differently With Ranbir than I did With SRK Yeah, maybe it's the senior Thing that they were talking About With Ranbir Maybe it's obviously Because he's probably closer To their age maybe Yeah I did find it Interesting though And then I forgot What I was saying And you call me old Hold on It was It's there It's somewhere What was it God I don't know why I can't remember what I was going to say That's funny Regardless Whatever I was going to say I don't actually remember I would love to actually Sit down And chat with him And this is not Like a precursor I'm not about to interview Ranbir I wish we were I really do wish We were about to interview Ranbir But yeah Because he seems like Such a thoughtful person In what In his process And Obviously bidding to talk About having An epic family That he has Getting Like the amount of Mega stars And his family And talented people Is extraordinary Something I've never seen before We thought we said Now that we've learned You know, Raj Kapoor The original one Then What is his name? Man Singh You know his name Yeah, that's pretty Raj Pretty Raj His son Rishi And like Just like A mountain of talent And like the pressure That brings on you It's just In my opinion He would be Such an interesting person To talk to Very similar to Jim That we talked to He seems like He's like A quiet person But he's very thoughtful In his answers I'd imagine Yeah, well My AirPods are dying Oh well What are you going to do? Anyways Let us know What the next video That we should react to Whether it's Another interview Or Another rend beer thing If you know rend beer Please send me his phone number So I can Don't actually I'm actually just Going to text him But if anybody Does know Because that's happened before So it's like He's getting in contact With somebody And somebody's like Hey, he's my cousin Or Whatever Rend beer Come on We will talk to you About art Please


Well, welcome back to SuperCloud for our episode, four of our series identifying the next generation cloud. This topic is on generative AI, how cloud technology, next gen cloud is evolving with generative AI. And guest here is Ori Goshen as the co-founder and co-CEO of AI 21 Labs. Cube alumni was on six months ago, and you know, six months, things change in AI. Ori, thank you for coming back on theCUBE for SuperCloud 4. Thank you for having me. You know, we had a really great chat six months ago on the startup showcase. You guys were highlighted with your partnership with AWS. I'll say one of the big hyperscalers in this now multi-cloud world. Your interview really resonated with folks, certainly in our audience, and we took out a bunch of highlights from that. Many were really around, what's now obvious, but six months ago, lots changed. You know, people are realizing the value of this wave, that the humans are in control, the creative classes emerging, and the infrastructure and tooling is needed. So a lot of those comments resonated. We're back at the table six months later. I have to, first question I have to ask you is, you know, with respect to the generative AI hype, there's a lot of reality matching the hype, and which you don't really see in these super hype markets where you got a lot of hype and then you get value matching pretty quickly. So much has changed in the six months. Just go back six months when you were last on theCUBE. What's changed? Yeah, a lot. And actually I think the whole, this whole space probably changed multiple times. But I think if we kind of zoom out for a second, I think, you know, nine months ago, six months ago, whether we were still at kind of sporadic exploration, people were trying to figure out what can be achieved with this technology. And there was some initial momentum behind testing and understanding the capacities and the limitations. I think this is just shifted towards massive experimentation. So there's almost no company, no enterprise on earth that is not looking in how this impacts the business and, you know, thinking at the board level. I think it really reached that kind of attention and visibility. And, you know, that drove a lot of interest and I think we're, you know, we're now still at the phase where most enterprises are still experimenting with the technology, doing some POCs, testing, and to kind of understand the capacities and the limitations. And the next six months, we'll probably see more and more production deployments, like gradually going to production and implementing some of these use cases and testing them in, you know, a scale kind of setup. And then we'll have probably another six months of enterprises understanding, well, really measuring the ROI on these use cases they've tested, like what's the impact on the business, is it really economical? And from what I'm seeing, and you know, I'm speaking here very much intuitively, I think some of the use cases will be maybe flashy and kind of really cool, but not necessarily prove themselves as in terms of ROI and others will be just traumatic ROI more and more than people have expected or anticipated before. So that's kind of the perspective I'm seeing from the last six months, kind of a year from now where we're heading. It's great, I love chatting with you, because you know, we were talking to everyone as much as possible in the same kind of trend we see just to validate your point is there's a lot of development going on and I want to get into that open source aspect of in a minute, but you're right, I think this is an important point. In every new market like this is a lot of experimentation and there's a lot of flashy demos, great, I mean, good products. I mean, if you have data, you can create a good app. The question then is what's the scale look like, right? And this comes back down to every early market. This is the same pattern.  And then the question was, I don't never scale. You got to be technical debt. This is pretty easy to work that down. Once you get a success point, this is the development playbook now. Okay, identify some use cases, less ambiguity the better and for the low hanging fruit. But it's okay to have a flashy demo if you got some working data, right? Then the next question is, what's the scale look like? And it's not so much tech stack. It's, or it could be cloud because we've got GPUs and need in TPUs, whatever, but it's what data is available. So take us through your thoughts on that sequence from flash in the pan demo, great demo, prove it, now produce a production ready scalable app. What does that look like? Yeah, I think there's several aspects. People are now struggling with kind of to describe these gap between a flashy demo and use case in production. And the gap, the aspects are, you know, there's the whole issue of security and how do you manage data in this regime where if you're trying to customize these models, then some of that data is becoming available through these models, actually could be extracted through this model. So how do you manage the whole security and data governance? I think this is a big theme. Another theme is costs, whatever works in a small space or small demo, what happens if you, you know, scale it deployed for your customers or for even your internal employees and, you know, it may not be economical at all. And another consideration is, or another aspect is reliability. I think this is the biggest one and hardest one to crack. And it goes back to what this technology is.  So, and they will, you know, these are statistical by nature. So they will make mistakes and they will hallucinate. So how do you overcome this challenge and how do you provide the level of transparency and the explainability and also kind of make sure that the real results and the outputs you're giving in, you know, mission critical environments are true because this could lead to, obviously, and this could have some serious consequences. So I think now that people are experimenting this technology and gradually deploying them and experimenting with actual usage, they start to face these challenges. And I think there's a path to move forward, but these are real challenges that will take some time to crack. Well, great, let's get into the conversation. Great riff there. For the folks watching, Ori is the co-founder and co-CEO of AI21 Labs. They've raised a total of $283 million, valuing the company over $1.4 billion. They came out of stealth in October, 2020 with the first AI writing tool, WordTune. They have a flagship product, AI21 Studio, pay-as-you-go developer platform for building custom text-based applications. Doing a great job. And again, six months ago, we featured them on our startup showcase with AWS, obviously one of the big clouds and super cloud players. In that conversation, you talked about a lot of things that want to shape into this conversation and this discussion. One was the role of open source. In our previous conversation, you highlighted that using existing foundation models, whether open source or proprietary, is what people are doing. How do you see the role of open source communities evolving in the development and democratization of the generative AI wave? I think open source is a super significant role in this space. I mean, more of the, I think a lot of the research and progress we're seeing right now in the accelerated phase of progress is due to the open source community. I do want to highlight that there's, there are several new ones when you speak about open source. Having the weights of the models released and open sourced and there are different types of licenses is one thing. I think if we really want to attribute full open source, you'd expect the researchers or the organizations to release the code for training and the data. So I think that's a full open source version. And there are some cases, I think there are some organizations that go to take that path of full open source, but most common practice we're seeing is actually that partial open source where they just release the weights. And the weights, you can think about these as binaries, like you can't, it's not like code. You cannot do a lot of things with it, but you can find you need, you can continue training the models and you can use them. So I'm not saying it's, I'm not saying it's unuseful, but still kind of, I think it's good to calibrate of what open source means. It means different things in this context. So, but broadly speaking, I think it had tremendous effect on the research and the pace of research we're seeing right now. And I also think in a couple of years from now, we won't be speaking about large language models. We'll be speaking about AI systems that encapsulate those and perhaps even use a portfolio of large language models. And then I think the open source we may have even a more significant role because you'd be able to, again, use these specialized models for different purposes, for different cases. And I guess that we'll see more energy and activity on the open source that will allow us to just proliferate it. So I'm a big believer in that direction. I do think there's a lot of value in the proprietary models just the way it's being trained and evaluated. And again, in the context of an AI system, I think it's really important to own that model piece or at least for some of the capabilities you want to own the model piece so you can have the performance guarantees that you need to make a reliable system. So- I think you're onto something that I want to just unpack a little bit as you brought it up. I like how you said AI system because one, it's AI in the word system. I've always been, you know, me I've been ranting about systems thinking as a skill set, you know, we've seen the evolution of iteration and design thinking, you know, cloud first. I think a data first or AI first thought process has to have a systems construct. And so, because AI is a system, it's got consequences when you make changes. It's an operating system. In a way, you're bringing up a good point about this nuance around open source and what's not open source. I mean, open source was built generationally on the old computing model of proprietary software and available hardware. Okay, I remember the days back in the PC revolution, software ran on hardware and hardware have an operating system, but they had chips. Chips were proprietary. Intel was probably the most proprietary product on the planet at that point, but no one really cared about Intel. They did great processors. In a way, we're seeing something similar with AI. If you overlay this super cloud concept around AI and say, for this thought exercise, what if open source wasn't old school? It was new school, meaning the data is open sourced and these other models can be proprietary if they're a hard and top or a system that works that makes the system work. You know what I'm saying? So, I mean, it's kind of a riff here, but I want to get your thoughts because this is a generational potential shift in what the operating model will look like for AI, which will impact the applications and ultimately the end value. Yeah, I think that there's a computational paradigm shift here because of these stochastic statistical systems that we call large language models or generative models. So I think one way to look at it is from an architectural point of view is that we have these models. We're trying to encode all the knowledge or maximum amount of knowledge inside of them and try to make the models better and more performant. I think that's one approach and it has its merits, but I think probably what we'll see if I had to estimate is actually a more decompositional approach where we won't have this one model to rule them all, we'll have a set of smaller models or combination of big ones and small ones, which is a portfolio and a very sophisticated orchestration layer that operates these models. And that orchestration layer is considering the statistical nature of the model, understanding that these could produce errors and how do we treat them, how do we deal with them, how do we minimize them would be part of the orchestration layer job. So I think this kind of describes what it means to have an AI system instead of a model. And I think you're right. I think the analogy where we will have we will have proprietary models, but open source systems could happen and it could be also a combination where we'll have open source models, proprietary models and open source systems that will be the main stream and be adopted by most of the developers. And we can also speculate that if data is the intellectual property and you talk a lot about this in the market, I've watched some of your interviews around how this AI systems can scale intellectual capabilities, knowledge workers, really a big creative class development could come out of this. And so you're seeing companies who have proprietary data, that's their own whether that's protected, that's now intellectual capital and property. So, okay, security and sharing that. So it brings up the question of integration of models. If you have a system, you obviously maybe have some proprietary and open. The fusion of a model from a finance department, maybe or sales or technology or machine log files could be part of a blended model. So the future of foundation models are really the discussion here. So the AI landscape is evolving. You're seeing specialized models and certainly enterprises will have those. So will people with a distinct advantage. You're going to have public models, open and proprietary. This is an emphasis on this power law.  The rise of smaller models is out there now. So, and then you got the integration questions. And if the cloud is API based and you brought this up in our last conversation, API is the lingua franco for the cloud. Are models going to be API based? Is there an, is our vector database is going to work together? What about embeddings? These are new questions. What's the integration and how do models work together? How do you construct an AI system if you have the benefits of all these potential models? It could be foundational or there could be NLP systems. Right. Yeah, I think it's a great architectural question. This is actually one of the areas we invest and we spend a lot of our research. And it fundamentally goes to why we started the company and the fundamental reason was that we believe in a kind of a neurosymbolic hybrid mode where some of the computational jobs are should be done symbolically. I mean, there's no need to kind of conduct operational, logical operations and neuraly, right? That it's not the neural strength. And you would, there are certain things you wouldn't want to apply strict rules. It's too brittle. So the question is how do you, how you married the two and how you mixed both of them. And that kind of, it also goes back to your integration question. How do you, how do we mix and match? How do you use different models for different purposes? And I think we'll see some really cool progress on that front in the next couple of months. So stay tuned. Is that on your side or just generally in the industry or both? I guess both. Okay, all right, cool. You know what I'm sharing. We're going to get the secrets out there too early. We'll definitely be following up on that. I definitely want to do more about this AI system. I think that is really a great vision. And I think that's the reality. We're going to move to a new operating model. It's very clear to the super cloud conversations we're having. And it's going to be completely different in our opinion. We don't yet know what it looks like, but it's going to just evolve. And once it pops into interview, everyone's going to jump on that bandwagon. The question I want to ask you that's kind of on everyone's mind is the infrastructure and scalability side. And you talked about it a little bit earlier in this conversation around scale.  But the bigger question is, as the apps start growing, what's the big knobs to turn for managing scale, not just from a cost perspective, just from just growth. GPUs are obviously the hot conversation. Google's got TPUs. You know, hardware and the silicon is going to be very important.  You know, what advances or changes do you anticipate being crucial for sustaining the AI boom? Sure, I think maybe a couple of trends. So first you will have, so what we see in, you know, in like, I don't know, 99% of enterprise use cases are not about open-ended, you know, general purpose chat systems. It's not about that. It's about fairly narrow types of tasks that are interested, that the enterprise is interested in. And it's also typically deeply integrated within an application or a workflow that the enterprise, that the enterprise is interested in. And if that's the mode of operation, then I think, again, instead of going to, going after the large, very large models that are capable of doing many, many things and are extremely flexible, I think a more pragmatic, practical approach would be to have these specialized systems, right? That are really good at particular tasks. And taking that approach would allow you to, A, you know, run this on much more compact on basically smaller chips that are much cheaper to serve. And B, some of these chips are actually far more available than the, you know, large systems, the large and fairly new systems. So that, I think will create the advantage of both having the lower costs and the higher availability. And that's something that is definitely something a lot of companies face right now, the lack of availability of compute resources. So that's why I think it's this architectural decision is really important for getting your application or the idea from a small scale to a large scale. Great point. And that, you know, in this market, where there's demand and there's a growing market, the entrepreneurs will be creative and the big provider will figure it out. That's called innovation. Great point. The question I want to get into now is you've mentioned the human piece of it before, human loop, gonna be humans in the loop. And I think that resonated well. Also, a point you made in our last conversation I want to get your thoughts on is you mentioned that every industry is going to be disrupted from industrial to medical, every vertical is going to have, see, generally that's clearly the case. Almost every event we go to, it's like the same line. Every industry is going to be disrupted. Okay, great. You were right. Can you provide some examples or predictions of how Genevieve AI might revolutionize these non-tech sectors? Because I think what's happening is the non-techie industries are leaning in heavily. And even some regulated industries, because, by the way, regulated industries have all that labeling done because of compliance. So it's kind of like interesting point, right? You're right. The ambiguity is not really there. So it really doesn't really care. There's not going to hallucinate if it's got some policy and some fixed data. So we're seeing regulated industries leaning in more. So what's your thoughts? You're in the middle of it. What examples in the non-tech areas? What are some revolutionary things happening? Yeah, I actually think that the more traditional industries will benefit and will actually be surprising, but they'll be the ones who are massively adopting it first and yeah, just maybe to give you a couple of examples. So think about the pharmaceutical industry. We've been working with a few players on drug discovery use cases where using these language systems, now a company like a pharmaceutical company and really accelerate the drug discovery process because it typically has research of millions of documents, studies and things that were put for years. And when you use quite primitive search tools yes, you can extract info and find clues for interesting connections, but if you have a very strong generative system that's sort of retrieval based, then suddenly you can gain new insight, things, connections you haven't imagined like as a human being you haven't thought of before. So you suddenly start to make new discoveries and I think that's, it sounds small but that types of new insights and you can think about it also as a type of and hypothesis generator. This would totally disrupt the pharmaceutical industry. So I think it is just has a big impact and regulated industries, I think there will be impacted as well pretty extensively just because now they have so many cumbersome processes in place, like to make a decision or make an action, you sometimes need an army of people to make sure all the constraints are satisfied and you're working by the rules and everything but if you can accelerate that, if you can have machine augmenting humans and providing them the information that they need quicker and help them with some of the reasoning, I'm not saying it's going to give you the bottom line the end conclusion, but I think some of the reasoning could be offloaded to these types of systems. So I think this will enable these types of regulated organizations and it will enable their employees to focus on their jobs and have the assistive system to help them with figuring out all sorts of regulation issues. So I think both of these examples kind of show how this is actually going to impact almost any industry we know of. It's really interesting and some of these industries like pharmaceutical healthcare, where you have these experts at the top of the pyramid and skill set, you know, and is always had to be, you know, and were they almost like savant brilliant, right? And they were masters at their trade or grand masters in chess, for instance, in chess it's well documented. You know, D grand master in chess, there's only a very few people that were at that level, but when you introduce computers, humans plus computers, the number of grand masters increased, okay? And because the humans had augmentation with the machines and you add AI and it's well documented. Believe me, the chess world is highly docked vocal about the relationship between computers, man versus a computer, computer versus computer, humans and computers versus humans and humans plus computers plus. So if the trend is clear, humans at the top will be more knowledgeable. So in chess, the grand master in the league category, the computer AI assistants made someone who was almost a grand master or grand master because it gave him extra capabilities to think. So it created- It's like a thought partner. Yeah, it's a partner. And so this intellectual scaling step function is happening with AI. I want to get your thoughts on, you've talked about this, you've hinted on the last time you're on theCUBE, this idea of AI can scale intellect, which is data, which is in people's heads as well. So what's your thoughts on this? Yeah, I think, I mean, thinking about knowledge worker broadly, like every, you know, knowledge worker in every industry. So our jobs could be reduced to be described in a very kind of compact way is that we're consuming information. We're producing or synthesizing insights and during that process, we're conducting reasoning. And that's the main job that we're actually doing. So I think in all of these three parts that I mentioned, the AI assistants will just provide a very dramatic boost. Like from consuming information, this would be much more faster and productive than it's been done today. Like finding the right information and even doing compositional stuff. Like, you know, I want to compare between two different things and tell me all about it. And then, you know, when you click on a button, we'll get it. And then the reasoning piece is also interesting because we can start offloading problems to the system, not just of a way of surfacing relevant information, but we can actually combine the relevant information with problems we're facing and we'll use these systems to help us solve these problems or at least suggest a way to solve these problems. And then when thinking about writing and communication, of course these systems are really good at drafting and generating and ideating and all these types of capabilities will, again, augment us. So I think that, you know, day-to-day jobs, this will have a tremendous effect on our working environment. And may free, maybe I think that's one of the predictions I heard that it may help us free a lot of time. I kind of think everybody from a competitive standpoint it may not, but at least we as humans will devote much of our thinking and energies towards the things we're really good at. Yeah, it'll make our minds, it'll help us have more free time to think and do things either creatively. I mean, no one really sits on the beach all day. I mean, people, we're human, we do things. So I mean, basically what you're saying, I mean, so maybe next time when we talk, I'll plug the two transcripts from this interview into AI 21 lab studios and I'll ask it to do the interview for me. What do you think about that one? Are we there yet? Yeah. I actually think we're not that far, I think, but now with the question is what type of, you know, results are you expecting? At the end of the day, you may end up with pretty boring interviews. I'll throw out an architectural diagram of the AI system we just rift on, including which best vector database to use in the system. See what comes up. Yeah, that'll be interesting. Well, Ari, I really appreciate you. We're good rift, good keynote conversation here around SuperCloud 4. I think it was important we hit those architectural things. In the last minute we have left, put a plug in for what you guys are doing right now. What's the coolest thing you're working on? How do people engage with you guys and become a customer? What are some of the onboarding best practices? How do I jump in? If someone wants to jump in and use AI 21 lab studio, what's the playbook? Put a commercial in, put a plug.  And one of the things we're making available there is our task specific systems that are optimized for specific tasks like summarization and grounded question answering and generating different types of content. And we have a solution architect team that works together with enterprises and it has a six weeks program where we build a solution together and provide deployed POC that people can actually touch and experiment and extract value. And then we take customers and go to production and again in the matter of weeks, not months. So we're very excited about this revolution and our mission currently is to take enterprises and help them in this journey and make them successful and gain value from the revolution we're experiencing. Ari, thank you so much. Ari Ghoshan, co-founder, co-CEO of AI 21 Labs here on SuperCloud General. Thanks for joining us, I appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Okay, we'll be right back for more SuperCloud 4 coverage after this short break.


Hey everyone, DroneTech here. So I have a little news for those of you who use my Discord server. I had been warned recently by a few of my members that there was a purge coming and I should get it back up and I kind of ignored them because I thought, why would anybody want to shut down this Discord server? It's pretty miltose. But they apparently found a reason. I got an email saying that my server and I were spraying misinformation. I have put in a ticket asking for a more specific reason why this has happened because, you know, I don't go out actively looking to spread misinformation but having dealt with this sort of thing before, I doubt that I'm gonna get any kind of actual information or specific answer for why this happened. But there is good news. A few of my awesome members, Antigone and Carnivore, started another server over on Gilded and you'll be able to find the link for that in the description or pinned comment. Lots of people are already moving over there and I hope to see you guys all go over there and at least give it a shot, meet the members, try out the community, it's a lot of fun and we'll just pick up where we left off. See you all over there.


voters have already heard the most about it and that we've been working on this for a while. In some ways we've been working on this for years. We, one of the really sustained initiatives that we've worked on during my almost decade now as a mayor is to try to really systematize and expand our investments in public infrastructure. We had a number, you know, we have in some ways wonderful legacy of public infrastructure here in Burlington but some of it is quite old and some of it had been underinvested chronically for some time when I came into office. And in 2016, we took a plan to voters that we call the kind of 10 year sustainable infrastructure plan. It was an initial kind of $50 million plan and it always envisioned a second major bond about now. In fact, we had initially planned for it to be in 2020 but conveyed that for a year when the pandemic kind of upended all of our plans. And so as a result, this past year, this 20, this the construction season we finished last fall was somewhat less active than we had been in every year since 2016. We did not get as much new sidewalk in the ground. We slowed down some in our overhaul of our parks and our reinvestment in our city buildings. And we feel urgency not to lose another season. So we did go to voters in December with a $40 million plan and 57% of the voters more than 57% of voters supported that but that didn't reach the two thirds threshold that our charter requires the two thirds super majority for bonding. Did you have that as well? We do not actually. I was interested when I learned that about Burlington. Yeah. So there's a number, there are many ways in which the Burlington charter is unique and really creates high standards. I appreciate that. We've met this standard before and I'm hoping that the proposal we are bringing forward this time which is substantially sharpened and tightened up in a number of ways which I could go through. And actually if I do have the ability to share screen here I can put up this chart. I think I do. Are you seeing that? Yeah, I can see this. Okay. So it starts with local match for grants is the first row. Is that what you're saying? Yep. Okay. So this is our revised plan and maybe I'll make it a little bit larger so people hopefully that's pretty visible. That's great. This is a, so about 40% of the December plan has been removed. That's this really kind of two areas, two big reasons we're able to make that change. One of the things that we heard from voters is that our proposal for setting aside $10 million to address the very serious issues that were more all auditorium didn't have enough detail and it didn't have enough specificity about exactly how we were going to deploy that money. And people, and I understand that with this and really many ways agree with it I didn't want to commit that $10 million until we know what is going to happen with this very uncertain situation with the Burlington High School. There's a big question mark hanging out there over the community about how much the new high school was going to cost. We had already approved a $70 million dollar valid item a couple of years ago, but that was before the PCBs were discovered at the high school and before there was a really a need to shift entirely to a new structure which is what we're headed towards now. So with that question marketed out there we had kind of talked with voters about this that we would spend as little of that 10 million as possible until we did know definitively what was going to happen with the high school but that was not fully satisfying to people. This really kind of locks that in and it limits the spending on Memorial Auditorium. It's the last row there if you can see it to $1 million. That's gonna allow us to keep the building standing basically will allow us to keep the heat on and keep building from deteriorating dramatically structurally if we were to let it go completely cold and stop operating a sprinkler system in the building. And we will use that time. We are actively working again. We had stopped our work on Memorial Auditorium during the teeth of the pandemic but we have a team working on this again now. And so we're gonna use this time to figure that out. The other way in which this item has been reduced is largely, you can see it primarily in the streets and bridges line there where we went from having almost $4 million plan to about half that 2 million. That we are now what that is a reflection of in part in addition to hearing voters that they're concerned about the price tag here. We also have greater clarity now than we did back in November, December about how the infrastructure, federal infrastructure bill is going to work. We are increasingly confident that some of the bridge projects at least that we had planned for the next few years and we have several including, I think we are planning on spending some money on the one between our cities a little bit. But- Very exciting. But it's primarily some other smaller bridges. We're not pretty confident that there will be some federal support for that. So that item has been reduced. We have taken similarly some money out of the transportation safety improvements because we're more confident that there will be federal funding for some of those investments. The I guess top line message that I wanna get back to that I hope people are clear on as they're going and voting this time is that the heart of this proposal now is critical money. Like you, it sounds like in public safety infrastructure we have three very old fire engines that it's time to replace. We also, if we're going to succeed at securing some of these federal funds need to provide a local match. And so it would really be kind of, I think problematic thinking we wouldn't really be saving money if we are giving up some of these opportunities to go out and secure federal support to cover some of these infrastructure pieces. That's a substantial chunk of this bond as well about $4 million of it, almost 20%. And then the rest of it is really, I think what most voters would agree is sort of core infrastructure spending on sidewalks where we have a big, big hole that we're climbing out of. We had underinvested in sidewalks for a long time. We've been doing much better for the last five years and people want to see us continue to make that progress. We need this. The other, in addition to sort of understanding that this is really core infrastructure and public safety investment, another thing that I hope people really grapple with is the cost, I think they're funny, you know, a year of $23 million, almost $24 million number. And that sounds enormous. The impact on the average Burlington household property tax paying household will be about $7 a month for when this is at its peak, when this bond is fully drawn down. And then a, I think a final really important point for the people who still say, yes, we understand this is important but we're worried about the high school. I understand those concerns and with this reduction in spending as well as some of the other policies and constraints on city spending that are in place. His voters can vote for this and they can be confident that there is substantial additional capacity within the responsible borrowing limits that the city has set formally through a debt policy that's sort of been vetted and essentially, you know, it has been accepted in a positive way by our credit rating agencies. There is a lot of untapped capacity here for an expanded high school plan. And we are, we are reserving well more than 50% of this, the overall combined capacity which is something we've done here, mayor in Burlington and we've sort of set a combined borrowing capacity between the city and the school district. We are reserving well more than half of that borrowing capacity for the school district. So, you know, it's, it's challenging to meet all of these needs, but we're working closely and in a coordinated way over sustained period of time to try to ensure that both entities, you know, that we do both, we really, we need to be a city that has outstanding schools infrastructure but that also has sidewalks that elderly residents don't trip and fall and hurt themselves on that, that has, that we can continue to have the very strong public safety response that Burlingtonians expect. I think this is a plan to achieve that. Yeah, so it sounds like you have a scaled back bond vote here to meet priority infrastructure and public safety needs and position you to accept federal funding, more free money. For those of folks watching live as a reminder, we do accept calls at<PHONE_NUMBER>. That was a very succinct summary of it, mayor. I mean, maybe we should have let you summarize the, what we're after here, but hopefully some viewers appreciate all the detail. People want to know more, of course, we have a lot more up on the city website there for all three of these bond items, people can go to the city website and see full PowerPoint presentations, see frequently asked question documents are being posted in the next few days if they have not already. So there's a lot of information there. And I think you said that there is additional bond item on the ballot, or sorry, ballot item. Well, yes, there's two other financial ballot items and then for the city, the school district also has their, their budget will be about question number one. I'll talk about that a little bit here in a moment. And then we do have a, we have a non-financial ballot item that's a charter change that we could, you know, if we have time we can talk about too. But the, let's go to the other, there is another one that is a bond. It is a TIF bond, something that both of our cities have really been major users, I would say major, you know, the way in which Burlington-Wanuski have used the TIF program over the last 20 years has really transformed both of our cities. The Burlington waterfront is very different than it was in the 1980s and- As is our downtown. And as is your downtown, exactly. So essentially what we want to do, that's a helpful history to remember in that the kind of transformational efforts that have taken place on the Burlington waterfront and the Wanuski downtown and the St. Albans downtown have only been possible with the TIF program. We have the same opportunity for the Burlington downtown in the Main Street quarter. We are putting before voters the opportunity to vote yes on a essentially a $30 million plan to upgrade all six blocks of Main Street from Memorial Auditorium to the train station. And it is really a transformational plan that takes this sort of hodgepodge of different urban designs that has come up over the decades where we really, you know, we have on some blocks an enormous amount of our 99 foot right away devoted to diagonal parking and just one traveling in each direction that can take up as much on some blocks as 73 feet of our right away. By shifting that going to parallel parking, we are able to retain the great majority of the parking and get in other important public elements into the street, into the streetscape. The transform Main Street will have wide sidewalks for pedestrians. It will have wide sidewalks for outdoor eating in front of eating establishments.  This will allow us to have much healthier trees along Main Street. We'll have protected bike lanes on both sides, adding one of the last really critical elements of our dedicated bike lane network that we've been building out over the last six or seven years. And there will also be stormwater, green infrastructure elements of this design that will dramatically improve our ability to retain stormwater during big storm events, protect Lake Champlain from harmful runoff and create a much better place for our Main Street. They'll be beautiful. We planted rain gardens that have that, both stormwater function as well as really enhancing the streetscape. We've been working on this too for many years. The city created the TIF districts in part to pursue a Main Street renovation although they didn't have exactly the vision that we did now for what it would be 10 years ago. Voters weighed in on the first piece of this plan, a number of years ago and approved it. And we, as a result, and I'm trying to a little bit bring up some images as we talk here. I think we'd add to this presentation if I can pull that off. The first people will remember that we did a major overhaul of St. Paul Street, the lower two blocks of St. Paul Street a couple of years ago. This is a similar overhaul, but even more transformative on Main Street. On an important corridor. A key corridor. And again, because of the nature of the TIF program, people can vote yes on this and be confident that there will be no impact on their property tax rate. That's right. The TIF is an investment tool where the revenue generated from the growth and development actually pays off the debt over time. So we had a very successful use of that tool, as you mentioned earlier. Are your TIF districts in good shape now financially? Yeah, we're on track to close ours out in 2024, which is very exciting. And after the debt is paid off, then new revenue comes into the city, which is another great aspect of the program. Yeah, we are on track for the Waterfront TIF district to be paid off as well in, I think, 2025. And that will start to change maybe some of the... There is some controversy around the TIF program. There is some sense, you know, and I think there's a healthy and fair debate over what the impact of the TIF program is on the Education Fund, on the rest of the municipal budget. What will be exciting, and when it sounds like in just a couple of years, and then one year after that in Burlington, is for the first time, these TIF districts will be kind of expiring, and there will be this traumatic infusion of new revenues into the Ed Fund and into the municipal budgets. And that's, you know, the program hasn't been old enough in some ways, especially as Burlington has extended its TIF program a couple of times. I'm responsible for one of those extensions, but my predecessors as well. So there's been a delay in the completion of these TIF districts. But it'll be, my chart start to change. I think it'll be a really welcome thing that will be newsworthy when that happens. And we're getting close to that. Definitely. I do have these images, Mayor Lada. I'll just pull on that. Let's see. This is, let's see, are you seeing a view of Main Street from- Yeah, absolutely. With the trees and the wide sidewalks and everything. Protected bike lanes, it looks like. Yep, there's protected bike lanes on both sides, dedicated in each direction in this vision. And what I don't have set up here, but maybe people who know Main Street well can picture, you can see City Hall in the background here. This is the block just west of that with the old armory on the right side, the comedy club and the Nordic, North Star Sports on the other side of the street there. And if you can picture that block in your mind's eye, it's almost all asphalt right now between the sidewalks. It is diagonal parking with huge backup lanes on both sides of the street. This gives a sense of just how much more, how many other functions we could achieve in this valuable public right-of-way. It's the only right-of-way, sorry, I think there's one other, but it's our, most of our right-of-ways are between 45 and 60 feet wide. This is 99 feet wide, and it really does create the opportunity for placemaking. One little detail that you can see here that I really hope we are able to implement is if you see on the left side of the image there, there's, if you look carefully, just above the individual wheelchair there, you can see people sitting on what is envisioned as one of those swings, like down on the, those distinctive swings down on the Burlington waterfront would be carried. There'd be one of these every corner coming all the way up Main Street, kind of linking in a pretty unique Burlington way, the beloved waterfront with beloved church street. And I think it's gonna be a really, I think it's gonna be a, I know other communities who have taken on projects like this, one in particular that I visited that has resonated with some people when I mentioned it to them, Greenville, South Carolina, did a Main Street renovation 30 years ago, and it totally changed the city. We were starting from a better place than that Main Street was at the time, but I think this can have a similar transformative effect and really be something that impacts the city for many years to come. Well, it's really multimodal use, which adjusts to changing trends and transportation and also climate impacts. Exactly. So that's true. Let's hear about item three. That's the one, I do wanna just reinforce. It is important that people understand that they can vote yes on that one and again, be confident that we know no direct impact on their property taxes. And in fact, I think if you take the long view, it will help us with the property tax burden when this public investment goes in the ground and it inspires a broadening, widening of the tax base. The final item is we are for the first time and we're doing something that I have only done with great restraint, only I think this is the third time in the 10 years that we have come forward and we are requesting a increase in the general city tax rate. This is the tax rate to help basically fund the main property tax rate that we used to fund city operations. And what we are facing here is, the reason we feel that we need to take this step and that 10 members of the city council agreed with me that we need to take the step even though we know the Perlentonians already pay a lot in property taxes and we always looked to all other options before taking this step is that we have some structural challenges that we are facing in the budget right now that I don't see any other way to address other than requesting this increase. The big issue that is really driving this, there's sort of three challenges that we are dealing with in this budget. I'd be interested to hear Mayor Lara if you feel like you're looking at similar challenges. First of all, we have a lot of non-propery tax revenue sources, many of which took a major hit during the pandemic, some of which have been slow to recover and there's still a fair amount of uncertainty about them. In particular, we have very substantial waterfront revenues that did not come back last summer and there's uncertainty about next summer. The biggest issue is that we are facing, as I think the entire economy is facing, as the entire world is facing for the first time in a long time, very serious inflation. We have a couple of years of inflation that in the last two years had been inflationary period and we are in the middle of negotiating collective bargaining contracts with our employees who have had to experience that inflation and we need to do right by our employees and work with them through that collective bargaining system. And then we also come in, we did learn like I think most communities, we did learn some things, see some things differently during the pandemic have made some new equity commitments using federal funds initially in the current year budget but these are equity commitments that we intend to extend over and we wanna be building into our kind of structural budget if you will and make them into long-term commitments. In particular, these are new equity commitments in a number of areas and the largest area, our biggest change has been a pretty substantial increase in our investment in racial equity and racial justice initiatives. So those are the three challenges, the three solutions that we've worked through and it makes sense that we think our way through this challenge and the city council essentially blessed on Monday is one, we are using some of our ARPA funds to create substantial revenue replacement reserves. So we are budgeting, assuming the revenues are gonna come back to pre-pandemic times over the next couple of years. If they don't, we will use ARPA funds to fill in the gaps until they do, which was one of the explicit things ARPA funds could be used for. Our second kind of major strategy is we are also going to use these federal funds to phase in some of these new equity commitments. Again, consistent with the legislation where we are trying to help communities that were clearly impacted by the pandemic, where we are helping with economic recovery efforts, where we're addressing some of the inequities of the pandemic using these federal funds in this way is to phase them in. I think it's something we've done many times before with something that a lot of people remember. Just a few years back, we were working to increase the size of our police department. We got federal grants that allowed us to initially expand the size of the department. And then over several years, we took on more and more of the local cost. Essentially, we're proposing to do something different, similar with this budget. And then finally, the final piece of that is there's still about a $2 million, a little more than $2 million gap projected in the upcoming budget. And we are proposing a four cent tax increase tax rate increase to address that. Two points I want people to hear, I hope people hear me out on as they consider that.  One, we are fortunate to be able, this doesn't happen very often, but because we just went through this painful reappraisal process here in Burlington and because of what is going on with the health of the Ed Fund in part because of other, I think, pandemic related new revenues, the school district will actually be bringing forward, they have brought forward a valid item that will result in a seven percent tax decrease on the school, the Ed Fund side of the property tax bills. So that means since the schools make up about 70%, the Ed Fund makes up about 70% of the tax bill that Brawn-Antonians get, that even though they can vote yes on the municipal bill, on the municipal increase this year and still see their tax bill go down. The other piece I do try to remind people, urge people to see the kind of long view here and understand that for a decade, it has been a real priority of my administration to recognize, to work with the fact that Burlington is a property tax burden community to keep our property rate increases below the rate of inflation. And if you look at that 10 year record, we have done that. We have been well, even with this increase, if you compare the increases in the consumer price index to the increases in the tax rate over that period, the inflation has been considerably higher. So that's been the metric that we've been focused on and been fortunate in the past, people have supported that logic. I hope they will do so again this time. That's great to hear. Do you have an estimate for the dollar amount tax impact or is that complicated by the shifting with the Ed Fund side of things? Well, I should have it for the average home. I mean, it works out to a little bit more than a 6%. So whatever your property tax bill is this year, municipal side would go up about 6%. But the Ed Fund side is protected to go down 7%. So, and again, given the Ed Fund side is well more than half of it. Overall decrease. There would be an overall decrease. It's very exciting. We are at 6.01. So I think we are done on the television side of things but still live on YouTube. Is there anything else you wanted to share? I think I would just reiterate that I know these are important issues for voters. There will be numerous other opportunities over the next five weeks to speak to me, to I and other members of the C team will be going to all of our MPA meetings. I have my coffees on Wednesday mornings, continue to have them. I think we're gonna try to keep having them in person through this period. So on Wednesday mornings at the Bagel Cafe, people can come and speak to me, directly ask questions about these or other city matters. And again, if you go to BurlingtonDT.gov, there will be lots of additional information about each of these items there. And I appreciate Burlington voters considering these and seriously considering supporting all three items. Well, thank you, Mayor Weinberger. And thank you viewers for tuning in to town meeting TVs on going coverage of local community candidates budget and ballot items. You can find this in more forums at www.ch17.tv. Don't forget to vote on or before the first Tuesday in March, town meeting day, March 1st, 2022. Early voting by mail is available by contacting your town clerk's office. Polls will also be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on town meeting day. Thank you for watching.