ah, he was good till into 2020 or till end of 2.0. He really got turned on 3.0 He was all over the place since Archeon a little bit of corn Archeon Now we're in a quite different world going forward. So, you know, yeah kind of what what do we think is Best reflective of the ideal from a health standpoint for the game with these god level characters It's a good question. Tom. Do you have do you have a take? Um I think that Archeon's probably the most balanced Hmm I think that you'll see Nagash the least Because Because like he's only going to be good in night haunt Hmm everything else. He's just not that stellar Like maybe a skew build of flesh eater boards, right? And then maybe a skew build of soul blight, but even then he has no good synergies there That's what we just demonstrated, right? And so ultimately there's just not a lot of Like You're just not going to see him Unless you bump up against the night haunt army And then I think he's going to be an every night haunt army moving forward competitively. Sure I uh, here's what I'll say Tyler. I think Archeon's probably the ideal I think we're actually over weighted on Cragnos right now. Like he his His utility is so strong. Like it's such a powerful ability. He's just pulsing out to everybody Yeah, I think Archeon works really well in his own force. I mean part of the problem is Cragnos doesn't have his own army He has nowhere to go Right. And so he has to he has to be lucrative enough in his abilities to appeal to all the The destruction, right? It's this weird place like Archeon is this standout because he actually has his own force Right like slaves to darkness are his army Nagash doesn't technically have an army Um, did he lose? You know both Nagash, I mean Cragnos really doesn't have an army You could argue like bone reapers were made in Nagash Nagash's image or aesthetic or something, right? But he's not actually part of any one of them. Do we have, um Yeah, I mean, I guess the problem is is that any of the armies that he used to gain the keywords for It doesn't matter because his Warsaw now trumps the fact that they eliminated all that text From that, yeah, thank you Yeah Yeah, so I mean, uh Archeon ideally I think is the right answer Because he is has a fully functioning role in his original force He's a nice splash that has benefit but doesn't dominate any of the other armies The reality is is that both Cragnos and Nagash are supplanting what's native in those other armies And warping the meta of those armies around him Yeah, to varying degrees, right? Cragnos, obviously it's much more widespread much more sweeping and his ability is just so good in john and in Uh ogres, I don't see yeah Like I see his presence in ogres like Nagash's presence in night haunt Like if you're going to run that army, you're going to run him Sure, just because three to six charging with your monster trucks is really strong turns out Well, yeah, like and all the mortal wounds, right all the little wounds he himself does a bunch of the charge He's now got mightiest makes rightiest So he's more objective capture in your in your monster truck of ob-sec army, right? So Yeah, he like he plays into that really really well Really really well. Yeah So, I mean, I think ogres are the right move for him. Yeah Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, I think that's archaeon. I wish we had more discussion about the the grand marshal of the apocalypse, but you know He's fine. He is what he is it's fine So there you go uh, okay points Gentlemen, let's talk points All right, so here's our point sheet Here they are they're all here And we're not going to look at this for more than like three seconds Because what we're going to go to instead Is this point sheet right here? It shows the changes Uh, this is put together. I apologize. I do not remember if we put this together They shared it out on twitter. Let me find them real quick while we're talking. So while I'm looking Uh, I'm going to ask you tyler to start us off because we're not going to go Scroll by scroll here, but on this first page. Okay, so this is the first half City's dog fire slayers eidneth corridor and lumeneth seraphon fec night hawn obr soul blight gloom spite ogres oryx and sons of badmont What grabbed your attention? Yeah, so let's start with salamanders. I mean, it's nice to see that they went up a little bit I think they probably could use plus 30 they got plus 20 120 to 140 so Ed ridge on recently ridge took out Which event he took out josh's event? boys with his seraphon And he had three packs. He had a bestilladon that would be 60 basties went up 15 so 75 point increase And so yeah, that'll have a little bit of impact not a lot, but that's decent Jonathan straw by the way as we put this together. So thank you, Jonathan. Okay. Yes Yeah So, yeah You know They got a little bit of an uptick. I think seraphon players will fill it a little bit Arguably could have been a little bit more on the salamanders Yeah, we'll start with that one. Okay Tom uh Fire slayer changes were to a bunch of foot heroes and no one's ever played sure I think the volkite could have came down a little bit volkite berserkers That would have been a meaningful change You can't fix the army That army is unfixable now Because it is a army of almost holy 32 mil base models with one inch reach So like it's it's because of coherency the army's done I've seen it do pretty well. I mean, obviously, it's still a lot of people are not playing it, but Yeah, I don't I think it's still in the middle in the middle middle. Yeah, it it's me. Yeah, it feels like a Little army But it's still very capable of winning games What I'm saying is people have winning games because you compile a bunch of meat onto objectives But yeah, it's it's hard to shift. But at the end of the day, I mean The real challenge is it's it has all the limitations that it's always had Low mobility low bodies now These are the changes and it It's limited on reach and and and the amulet save moved the the mag father Back off the table of competitive like of of a good competitive option because he's not survivable Okay So, uh, so the fire changes were And in general, like that's what we see down this whole column, right? Like most of the changes are just They're they're not moving the needle on anything that's function Like let me say this a lot of these the points aren't the issue There are larger wider sweeping issues with these with these armies that the points just can't address Like I look at the ko list and i'm like Okay So like skywardens at 105 that's where they should be Points wise comparatively, but there's problems that those units have like fundamentally Because they are 32 mil Units that will reinforce from three to six models Like you can't build there's not enough reinforcement points to actually like make real units there Let alone the fact that you can't even get above 10 anymore Which is where you need to be to uh to actually get aether gold in the army and so like There's just functionally like it's a misunderstanding of how that army's supposed to play um And then things like the ender master with ender harder.  So I mean And then the the ender master derivable suit went down. Okay. Well, I mean that's a that's a model that I use That's the only one on that entire list that actually gets used And I think that that is the story of this This change is that a couple there's I could probably pick this the seven units here Where the point increases were meaningful and then almost all of the decreases were just nonsensical Or they're not nonsensical. They are they are unimpactable Yeah, okay. I think you're I think you hit on exactly where I want to go, Tom Let me bring this up a level. Let's let's get this into the meta level. Okay. Yeah, which is this points First of all, we should have never moved to five point increments. That's comical I'm just gonna I'm not that's right. I'm not gonna let that die This stupidest thing one two Points are the worst way possible to fix something Okay, because many many many many many many things Will never get played because they fundamentally have either a bad scroll or have no role And that's it Yeah, there is no points you can reasonably put them at Where they will be selected Like sure you move all these units down to 20 points or something.  That's obviously nonsense, right? There's no reasonable points value where you can paper over You got a giant pothole in the middle of the street. There's a sinkhole in the middle of the street I can't go out there points are just wallpaper. I can't go out there and literally just roll some wallpaper over the street and expect cars to drive over it Okay, they're gonna fall in the hole It's not enough strength to support what you need to actually do That's point like that avatar of kane Sure. Oh disagree with you there, buddy But sure I I yeah, you could pick any pick the cygore wherever you want to completely If you want a completely unambiguous example, all right, right three Points need to stop like this way we look at the change Is mathematically correct And functionally wrong okay because What I mean by that is 10 points On a hero. I'm going to take one of Literally means nothing Nothing just Literally nothing Right, it only changes what lists are possible. It doesn't actually change only around the very edges once in a while Right, you guys have quibbled a little about this over the years. I mean I'm a list building standpoint. I'm probably more in tom's camp on this fence. Yeah, here's my argument Like every every 10 points matters to me in the list Every point matters. Okay. Here's my argument tyler. I'll challenge 80 of the warhammer players in the world Yeah to a 2000 point match. I'll bring 1850 I'll win bold statement That's quite a statement because it's the truth. All right. Like don't pick me pick somebody who thinks even better Do you do you think bill susan could beat you with 1800 points? Against your 2000 point army. You're absolutely right. He could I'd give him a good game. Okay, and he could you could you could randomize his army I am Because the points don't actually matter That much it's not that accurate of a guide Often the last 100 points of your list are irrelevant Hence hence like where in my 1500 point list, I had 75 points floating for my luminous list. Okay And yeah the but again the problem is is that Regardless of what you think about my third points if you think all 2000 points super matter every time Sure, there's not people out there winning tournaments with 1940 point lists angling for triumphs.  Okay Like obviously the points are an indelicate measure of a general representation of raw power Obviously Okay My point is that it yeah, we're kind of I think talking about different strata here like the more the more basic point is that Points on the margin can matter sure once in a while and you move something 10 points It'll turn a 2005 point list like somebody said they went and calc and currently crag nose plus the frost lord on stone horn Plus three monster trucks is 2005 points apparently Right. Yeah, it's okay. Right. Cool. One of those guys like the frost lord of stone horn drops five points Maybe that's a meaningful thing Simply because it accidentally allowed a list in I'm not going to say it's you know Every time irrelevant sure on the margins once in a while it can like take a list That was invalid into valid territory. Fine. Yes. Okay. Yes Like let me just say that this like the changes to night haunt Uh made one of my lists valid Sure Like that I've been looking at for a while and I'm like I just need five more points In this change here because the black coach did it for you. Yes, or and right more right more and black coach So it gave me 40 points. Yeah, um, which is like that. I mean that's a meaningful swing Now Nagash is there so that whole list is off the table because I'm gonna take the gosh, but Yeah, let me return to my point too though because I really want to drill this in The difference between this being mathematically correct and functionally wrong What I mean there is if sentinels go to 170 Okay How many points did the sentinel list actually go up? I think jack said his Yeah 100 points. Yeah, it takes five units of them, right? So like again, we need to think about this in different ways Singleton heroes or singleton monsters or something like that moving 10 points is largely irrelevant Because it's 10 points and 2000 points A base unit moving 20 points that you're going to replicate five times is 100 points. It's not 20 points Yeah, right, right, right It could be a big deal again, like if you took Uh I don't like you mentioned bull kites and that not happening. I mean whatever whatever with bull kites, right? but my point is like if bull kites are or Hearthguard berserkers or something like that that especially in an army like that you're going to tend to take a lot of Maybe you don't take bull kites anymore, but you get what it let's assume bull kites scroll was actually worth anything, right? That that going down or up 10 points can actually math out to be quite a bit of movement in the list Because you do get to a point here Like if you move a list 100 points in one direction or another Despite my previous argument like that does you're adding you move the needle, right? right And so how many so how many units? Are actually on this sheet that are going to be taken in multiple multiples Uh, most of the things that like a lot of the things that went up okay Iron grade multiple bloodsockers. Yes sentinels sentinels right sentinels salamanders Technically, maybe skywardens. Sure. I'll give you that black knights No black knights That was for comedy But but can we talk about grip ghouls? Sure grip ghouls going down to 85 when we were talking about the the morgan like the horde mass body push. Yeah. Yeah Well, we'll get to the second page, which I think you'll actually we'll see an impactful example of this, right? Yeah um So my point is I think when we when we do this we need to couch out like What does the average army actually contain? What did this actually mean to the list? You know, right? You were never taking more than one avalanor the stone heart king So it's not that I don't appreciate the 20 points or whatever, right? Sure But but avalanor at 415 didn't suddenly like if he was unplayable He didn't suddenly become playable at 395. Let's not kid ourselves. Right. Right. No You need at least a 10 swing in points in order for something to to meet a meaning culture Right, which is the fourth part of this which is like there's a there's a percentage representation here right Which is how much did it move meaningfully against its base cost? and What this ultimately should filter through in everybody's mind Is that points are the worst way for all the problems we've just mentioned Points are the worst most indelicate. This is trying to nail a nail into your drywall with a sledge hammer Yeah, right like sure you might get that nail in there right You might also just bust your drywall too It's just an indelicate tool the right tool is the worst role changes Because ultimately there's so many problems where they don't have Where the thing does not fundamentally it's either a bad scroll or no role Yeah, that's it. Yeah, like what percentage of these points here are Standing in front of bad war scrolls. Are we talking about a high percentage a lot A lot battlemage on griffin brad scroll red scroll dreadlord on black dragon bad scroll sork on black dragon bad scroll We can argue about whether the avatar of kain is certainly Basically the rune sun and the doom seeker at least i'll give you those two brock We're probably regular alerith Light of a tharion like by the way bad scroll or no role. I'm gonna count either of these right sure right Light of a tharion. Let's let's up on that one. This model has a ward of five plus playable Yeah, that's it because I feel I still feel to 20 is a little it's gonna be too high for most limit players Sure, but when it has a it's still it's just that's yes because we cracked the code on these heroes when we made them for stormcast and they're like Six to eight wounds Sig vault stormcast i'll do this correctly. They're like six to eight wounds around 300 points with a good armor save and a floral cord Done that's the model Yep Now that's jack him up 80 points and give him a four up ward or something and then then you might see him To be fair light of all tharion can get a five up from lumen as spells sure But you can't rely on a spell for that like it has to be on their scroll Especially for something that's like Seeming to be I want to be an independent operator, right? Yes Not you know, maybe he has still has a problem of like having no actual role because he's not hammery enough to hammer or whatever Blah blah blah blah blah, okay Whatever all right um I like gorg run to so let me talk about now the individual things that I think we're not that aren't right None of the shooting units here that shoot mortal wounds went up enough Yeah, I mean 20 points that will increase is enough Yeah, ryan real quick. I know ryan's leaving. I didn't say that's a standard for heroes I said that's a standard for those like super elite heroes If you're trying to make an elite singleton named ba dude like bastion carthalus or your andrasta or sigbold, that's the level That's what i'm saying not all heroes. No god.  They have a ward in the survival. Yeah, right.  I would have put him at like 175. I think is what we said originally but fine I don't think they're like the big awful thing in the meta because they're not they're not doing mortal wounds But bloodstalkers should still be up higher if we're not going to kill the if we're not going to kill the hero face shooting Which is what we should do Yeah Well morathi will get an updated war scroll at some point and when she does she'll lose her command ability Then this is then i'm fine with this point's value, right? That's what needs to happen like right hero face shootings go hard uh and and like But until then you gotta figure in the points for these guys Like bloodstalkers still too cheap salamander hunting packs still too cheap sentinels still too cheap Sorry to say. Oh, yeah Part of the problem with the sentinels though is that they didn't actually fix the line of sight Like the other issues that the sentinels have completely agreed I'm assuming if we're not going to do the change we should do Which is fix the war scrolls and fix the the associated abilities. They're making these things broken, right? That's what we should do Accepted point right Okay So if that's the case If we're not going to do that we've just shown time and time again We're resistant to that then you better jack the points on this stuff way up That's your only other tool That's the like you said i'm not allowed to use a screwdriver I'm not allowed to use anything else. You left me a hammer in the toolbox with it I'm going to hammer in the morning and hammer in the evening Can we just take a moment to appreciate the fact that the dank hold troll Dog boss is down to 240 and he started at like 300 sure Yes, I know sentinels don't hero face shoots sentinels have a whole mix of other problems If they're not going to fix their line of sight shooting 30 inch loft lambit light nonsense Like you can pick the thing each of these have Some associated thing that makes them a nightmare That's that's the the thing I walked through earlier, right? More to wound shooting is bad more to wound shooting at long ranges worse more to wound shooting at double tapping or Without line of sight or or or with re-roll hits or whatever is poison right all those units cross over into poison in some way right, right They should just be up higher Like if we're going to have them with this level of functionality then they need to be expensive as Yeah, that's it Yeah, makes sense So you wanted to talk about piggies. Yeah, piggies didn't go up enough Uh, the right answer again was to roll back this time. You wouldn't have changed the scroll. Just delete Strike through your previous FAQ reset the rend on the jagged Uh Gorak Down to neg one where it should be so we have three distinct roles and three distinct units that to do those three distinct roles In the army and then basically you could move them up slightly. Maybe this is the right points cost Maybe you could even put them at 160 or something But we yeah, we discussed I think you have to have at least a 20 point separation between brutes and these Okay, right now it's very hard to pick brutes over these guys Yeah, brutes are still stuck at 160. Yeah, so Like it's not a hard choice for the most part Yeah No, I'd say it's a point well taken. Yeah, looking at this list, you know in terms of the the rubric you mentioned a little bit ago Yeah, there's a lot of junk here and it's not going to be impacted by point changes I want to take a minute to answer a couple quick questions Adam said if you had to make a new shooting centric army, how would you balance it? Uh, I would make it so they want to get into combat to be effective and have them actually be able to survive in that place Like have them be short range shooting and have lots of advantages when they're shooting up close And give them the durability to actually play in that a little bit in some way Uh Tyler s how would you fix non elite heroes like a loon boss? I don't know that they need a huge amount of fixing if you mean like the loon boss on mangler squig I think it's fine.  I love them. They're some of the most adorable models ever But you know, there's fundamental challenges there and then assistant ref which I absolutely agree with Said most disappointing thing about the balance scroll is that heart render didn't change its redden value I agree. Nor did the silver nests trees change again. I feel like they really missed a trick there all right Uh, yeah, that's sort of my thing there, but I mean, you know, um The kripgels like things that I thought were actually interesting Were like the kripgels going down 10. I agree with you. Tom is actually could could be an interesting thing in that army um I mean glutton's going down 10 is insulting. I again, their issue is fundamental coherency That's all you need to do to change to make them like pseudo interesting Yeah, but whatever um I thought right nor dropping to 145 was interesting because I Yeah, I thought I felt like he was a deal at 165. Yeah, totally right north drop is it's actually pretty surprising That's that's odd. Yeah They just need to fix his attack number. He needs to have like eight attacks or something Um, he's just he's not doing enough work. Sure. Yeah so Okay, yeah, just it felt like a pretty incoherent process in terms of this points update Like when I look at this 10s and neg 5s on most of this is just completely doing nothing Yeah I mean Garda steel soul going I mean that was the oddest one Yeah, let's jump to that page. So let's look at page two. Here we go Like I mean the boc stuff is exactly what I'm talking about, right? Like oh you move the dragon ogre shag off down 30 points Cool, like okay now if you're right, you know beasts are saved now Like those are big moves on bulgur is going down 25 points dragon ogre is going down 25 points And like I'm sure there's somebody right now who's thinking about Uh, you know like a dragon ogre spam army Okay, right Uh, I think domus was literally building that at one. Yeah, sure, but I mean like the It's just like again the fundamentals are bad there Right, so you can't even with big points moves like that. It's not going to do anything So right like bulgur still have all the same fundamental issues at 130. They had at 155 130 is certainly a more reasonable number for them, but it's not like suddenly they're going to be different Yeah My favorite change on this page was the move of chaos chariots from one of five Fine, I like chaos chariots. I think they're pretty good I enjoy them. So I just read that and I'm like, so tell me the logic here. Sure. What was that five points to do it? Yeah, uh, there he is like domus is in the chat. He said it's built and painted that army's ready to go What's up domus? How you doing brother? nice Uh, some of some of these feel quite clear like I love the castle so lord coming up 20 more than 35 You know, it definitely feels like he should be one not enough but good right direction. Yeah, it's it's a yeah. Yeah I don't know. I just I do find it interesting that I mean some of these It'll quite clear to me what they should be and then many of them don't And so like it I mean it does maybe it is harder than it seems But it does get into just and again your worst goal in your role points Like I that's probably often what it is like with the chaos or sort of like I look at the thing And be like 115 is absurd for what that thing's doing Relative to the baseline sort of the ecosystem and so and to kind of quickly get a sense of like 135 145 feels about right for what it for what it is but yeah So here's what I'll say let's take the cast sorcerer. He's a good example Yeah I'm going to wave a magic wand. You ready tyler The cast sorcerer lords now 175 points Yeah Okay, does he still show up in a lot of armies? Probably does Yeah Yeah, because that re-roll saves is a really big deal because auto re-roll saves Plus one save now, but yeah auto plus one save. Sorry. Thank you and auto or and demonic power is spelled Right, right are both super good And and do something Okay Uh Yes, dear it is But that's fine I like where these uh these zangor numbers are going. Yeah, like the interesting changes to me here are First of all, I love corgis coal going down 15. That's hilarious to me that like I love corgis coal I want him to I love his his silly ability to pile in eight inches is like one of the coolest things in the world So just make that do cheap enough that people just sort of accidentally splash him in armies for fun All right, I mean we talked about corn being in a rough place Again with doing what happened to corn. It's not like some points changes of this minimal amount like scolariper is going down 10 Radmars going down 10. It's not that's not moving the needle folks Um zangor is going down 20 and the shaman going down 25 is actually interesting I suppose I don't know if it's enough um But it's interesting. Uh, it could be it's not but uh But they have my attention. Sure You know again zangor's problem is they do need a new scroll. It's not nonsense Um to compensate for their sort of base size challenges, but they're They could be fun. Um The slanesh changes are just comical at best um What you don't like blitzbarb at 170 blitzbarb. We that's coming in a second. Don't worry, tom.  I wouldn't take them. Um This the only one in that whole list from slanesh. It's interesting to me is simranesh twin souls Which I do think could have a valid role in the slanesh army being like a relatively fast interesting unit. That's multi damage Um, and they were obviously overcosted like 165 is getting down to a point where you you could see them Like is there optional battle line? They actually have multi damage. They actually still have a reroll to hits built into their war's role in the current roles So given they can only use it either on turn two and four or turns one three and five Depending on a completely forced and stupid mechanic, but it's there you know I mean But plague claw plague claw and plague priest on furnace doesn't matter You're never gonna have more than one plague priest on a furnace and 10 points is irrelevant to escaven list But night runners going down 10 to 75 We are getting into ridiculous territory now Like where you're getting down to spamming ridiculous night runners Like this is in dangerously low point territory Where people like smorgans are like Yes Yes Where you're just there that's 75 or 10, right? Yeah 75 or 10. Yeah So you're telling me That I can have 100 of them you 200 of them for 1500 points, correct It's but they all get a pregame move by the way So you can just flood They all have a range of that flood the zone Yes So anyways, that's funny Uh Things in the storm cast I was happy to see a ventus go down I think a ventus was strong I think he was slightly overcosted at 310. That feels good. I cannot believe gardus went down That is shocking to me. Gardus was such a steal at 160 Yeah, putting him at 100 feel like him going down is insane. It's insane Only that Again, that's me like when I saw that it's like What That's like the leading indicator. I don't know I'm going on about this It just that was the leading indicator of like a lack of coherency around this page Like what like if we're starting to drop in gardus, we just seem to are truly throwing darts Anyway, I know they get that uh, they hear that a lot, but anyway, yeah gardus chad soul. I agree.  I Don't tell anyone but I'd pay 200 for him So like him being 150 Yeah, it's great I'm a buyer Yeah Let's test games with him and what he does. I mean, he does what you would expect. You have just a five up order in your entire army Yeah, that's that's amazing turns out Yeah, I'm just as cool. Uh, I'm a little surprised he went down, but yeah, he's he's quite awesome Uh, the So enough we got a little bit of the drop didn't get the current off I've been a little bit on the current off, but again, I think so with our example where it's going to make a difference writing lists with some other players over the last 24 hours It's actually opening up more space for interesting lists, you know, if you're running some of these big trees I think it here's what I'll say I don't buy it I don't buy it Fair enough Like sure Maybe it opens up a list that was slightly over before sure Like your engine dirty and stuff like that Like it has no fundamental impact on the army. Sylvaneth can put on the table and their fundamental competitiveness If you got half a percentage point of win rate out of this I'd be shocked Yeah I yeah, it's not much, but I I would I'd happily bet a half a percent sure like Okay, you know like is that that's that's not what they need right now is being the point, right? Yeah, they're yeah a little they probably could use a little bit more help I don't know. They're they're a fascinating army I just started picking them up again and getting some test games in with yeah And kind of getting filled for how they are actually trying out the mortal wind bomb the mortal wind um I mean they they feel like an army that yeah in the hands of experienced players can punch You can punch well above your weight class But I mean that gets back to other variables like, you know A lot of players are capable of taking about anything and doing you know getting quite a good quite a bit of gas Out of the tank with those armies. So like yeah, math mallow was tearing up the scene Of with with Sylvaneth this year and but most players were not doing that well Sure. Oh, anyway, like I I get all that but the chaos warshrine stands out as the one that I really like like they They got it. I think exactly correct like plus 30 points is exactly what really good That's correct You got it That's how much that thing should be right, yeah Okay, there is a war scroll that's missing from this Well, there's probably a couple, but yeah, like let's um Archeon went up 30 fine. Who cares go trek up 50. Yes, correct Again, I actually quite like that. He was he was particularly too stupid you will suddenly not see him in any list He wasn't super competitive before That's not the issue Yeah, he was simply too cheap for what he accomplished being in When a lot of people talk about this they talk about it like oh if it's not showing up in competitive list It's not a problem wrong wrong wrong wrong You're wrong that is an incorrect measure Okay, like that can be a bellwether Sure, but that is not the measure of this Go trek was simply too good for what he did at his points And was horrible for casual players This is closer to his correct point value That is all That is the point Being part of a 50 list Or not does not suddenly is not that is not the gait mechanism for whether or not you deserve points adjustments. It's ridiculous It's ridiculous Yeah, I mean, that's a that's part of that we thought that's part of the challenge with a lot of these conversations Yeah, is that we're we're just operating a different magisteria. We're operating in different realms often with these discussions right And and and you know, and if you felt like I'm sure at times in our in the show We haven't always been consistent and trying to you know making clear what are our initial sort of assumptions and values You know, like where are we starting? Oh, Tyler? Don't worry. I've been a hundred percent consistent every moment of every day I'm sure you have consistency in 10 cities over here Can we talk about the 15 point adjustment to Nagash? Is your goal to slowly get farther from your mic, Tom? Is that what it is? I'm just falling asleep and so I'm sliding back Like can we talk about the 15 point adjustment to Nagash? Like what is the approximate two 1.75 percent change 10 points accomplishing?  Yeah, I can't believe Kairos isn't on this list That's number one He's my he's he's who I absolutely expected to see and did not see I'm surprised long strikes weren't on this list I'm surprised fulminators weren't on this list Yeah, you know, I there are fulminators Well for an internal balance standpoint, obviously they should have been like some or concussers desilators Yeah, sure, or the other one's going down or something whatever you go down. Yeah I think like I would be more comfortable saying that fulminators as time passes Will be more reflective of evicators and sequiturs than long strikes Meaning that long strikes probably didn't need to tick up but not necessarily fulminators. I know is a weird thing to say Uh, but anyway, we could get into the details of why I think that's the case, but I'm surprised they weren't here regardless of the truth of that So, yeah, I mean overall to me the points were the the disappointing part of this Uh, there was a couple good ones in here. I think that directionally Stuff like sentinels and and all those things went the right direction. They just didn't go far enough. Sure Right, and I think a lot of the points down often don't matter. I think 25 of the points down here at most at most I'll be generous matter Sure, I would agree with that Yeah, there's Most of these are just deck chairs on the titanic sure corn, uh, we talked on the wishlist show corn demon prints with what's the grounds Again at least from a an internal balance standpoint, you've got to increase the points on that thing Yeah, it's saying that he's the same cost as like the slanesh one. That's comical Yeah Okay, cool beans Uh, and then yes 170 point units. Let's look at our comparison here Gore grunches 170 sentinels 170 bliss bar barters 170 completely logical These are all definitely 170 point units And you know, I generally chafe against enter army comparison Because it's not really fair and I've talked about all the reasons why it's not fair to compare points across armies in the past You know an all melee army who has no shooting or no magic or whatever Should get you good melee units cheaper than an army that you should have had iron crates I'd rather than say somebody else made this meme. I totally stole this from twitter Got it, but I loved it so much so very very much So whoever you were that made this meme you're my hero Um, yeah could have been iron drakes too sure because they're also 170 like it's yes Well, and they're shooting like we're talking about shooting units, right? um but What are our final thoughts going forward? How do we want to see this? Let's let's talk the future okay Just to get it out get ripas Uh, pull one out for get ripas staying at one whatever the hell they are right now and not going down points Sure Like it's just a number of things like that that seemed There was a lot of that that seemed kind of obvious things that that should have been in here, but whatever What's the future should these be quarterly let's start with that question Yeah, I think so Okay, we got one vote. Yes, tom I just don't think I don't I don't think that I don't think that I'm gonna pull a g w Marketing line here. I don't think we have enough data for quarterly updates. Okay. All right because Like I don't think that we can actually Like I don't think that they can receive data Process it amongst testers and then test alternate things every three months Yep That's a challenge right because you got to consider there's a lot of work like they're not winging this Right. Hopefully like because ideally like you're talking about a three month turnaround where they implement the new points change Or ability change and then they have to begin measuring data from that point So it's not like they can roll out a change and then be start testing for the like in the future like they need to roll that out And then let's say that you're going to look at a month of events On the other side of those changes And then a month of testing Right. Yeah And then the internal processes to of a month turnaround to create these documents Yeah, you could you could have a lag time though tom where meaning that You could still more or less be operating on a six month time frame Within that regard so meaning okay. We had the balance data slate come out for 40k They're going to have this window. They've committed to quarterly changes, right 40k. They're on the books Okay, so we just had our first balance data slate So they're going to have three months here Is it likely that the next balance data slate is going to be reflective of just that three month window Or is it more likely that it's going to be kind of reflective of a longer time horizon meet me that I think they could The challenge you're going to have there though tyler and it's a very real one Is that like their their internal testing and their pool of testers is not large enough To like to get the stress test that you need to actually see the consequences of their data The consequences of the changes they need to get it out into the public so that we can get thousands of iterations in that month Hypothetic Now the problem is is that like if we're only evaluating events events are even a small portion of the actual stress That's going on and then how many people are actually giving feedback appropriately and yadda yadda yadda And so like I just I don't think that we can I don't think that in that month to two month window that we could actually like Reasonably expect to get the data that we need And then and then come up with solutions and push that to testers to test it before then hits the market again Like I just I think three months is way faster to turn around Like with development standpoint like You have to think about the processes that are going to lead to these changes and the processes themselves I just don't think you can get that done in three months I think part of my baseline sort of assumptions has been I would be curious to your guys views on to what degree you've seen what we just got as More reflective of incremental changes sort of within space of evolution versus, you know more Significant changes, let's say sort of where you think this falls on the spectrum. I think it tends to fall Firmly within the incremental evolutionary You know side of the spectrum And to what degree do I think that quarterly changes With that orientation would work I'm generally fairly comfortable with that but but I I'm taking your points And there and the other so there's some asterisks that go along with this one of which is I don't know like I have a clear sense of let's take suns Sometimes we're dominating early on, you know, and then we've seen this downward trend for various reasons So we have we have these natural quote-unquote adjustments that take place, right? New variables get entered people adjust blah blah blah, you know, how do we have a to what degree can we predict that? Having more time for that will Lead to better results versus having less time for that to take place will lead to more likely worse results Because you might overreact Do that short which I kind of feel as well a little bit what you're saying there, tom Is that you know, you might get a misleading it? I'll shut up But is that along the lines what you're saying you think Take suns like would you have expected that? Yeah, go ahead No, the answer is like with suns. I don't know what the solution is there that's short of a book rewrite Sure, and the question is what is this six plus that? What is the aim of destiny change to them? What is heroic recovery to them? You know, what are these various things do? I don't know what the answer is To collect that data properly you'd have to now operate in this new space Right, does it have a meaningful impact? Okay. Well, then we're not going to be able to collect that data And then make another change like yes, you could sort of like flip flop where you're not touching those things But ultimately then you've got to consider that there are also books coming out in there It's not a static environment We're going to have a new ghp that's going to completely alter theoretically the the state of play Right in the middle scenarios and the realm that we're in and yada yada yada potentially and so to me look I don't Like you could you could sort of Try to have different elements only being touched like here really touch this stuff here really touch this stuff And then do it quarterly maybe you could make that work Okay, but it's still going to be challenging because That's still a big load of work of people trying to operate to understand the space and it's not like those things are so easily separable There's often knock on consequences Sure game rules are a big tangled web So, you know, we can sort of say oh, we won't touch these things again Right touch different things next time, but let's not pretend like these things aren't intermingled In right pension, right It's not like like Having a five up save in combat didn't matter at all in 2019 Mm-hmm It didn't matter because everybody who Most of the people running around winning had like a five up save they would hit you and just explode you and kill you So the fact they had a low armor save didn't matter at all right and the The the reality is though. It's very important now now. It's the most important thing in the world Any unit with basically a five up save is almost dead in the water Almost to a man now mm You know assuming they're not some ultra powerful shooting unit Okay, because that the underlying stuff changes as well that nothing to do they never they never made a rule It was somehow changing that it was just everything else changed around them, right? right I mean the right answer here and I'll stand behind this Is Six month increments with better work on the initial books like put in the extra development work on the initial books That's the platonic ideal Right, that's where we'd want to live Yeah Where we'd want to live is higher quality on the initial product. So less need to change so often On the back end. Yeah on the back end And the six month updates are the incremental things we need right like that's Right, isn't that the right answer? Yeah, okay. So that's Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah. Yeah, and you know and and 3.0 books generally in my view We're on a positive trend For the most parts. I mean, you know like again at the we can quibble about a lot of different point values We didn't talk about you know the long laundry list of stormcast war scrolls They're not getting played right now because they're under they're overcasted But yeah, like you can you can make some adjustments to those things But yeah, generally these books are have been great so far in my view. Yeah I will say this if we were going to do quarterly. I'm not sure I'd really want points touched every quarter If we're going to do incremental Quarterly adjustments if this ends up being the path if we are if we do end up quarterly I'm not sure I'd really want points touched because I just think points is it's a bad Way to fix things for all the reasons we talked about it's not doing enough. It's not doing a lot of work Mmm, don't do it do it every six months do one in the winter and one in the ghp Or whatever ghp time frame And focus your quarterly incremental updates on on rules issues Yep Right, so if we if we can't live in the the platonic ideal if that's impossible Then where I want to live is in a world where I'm not we're not bouncing points around lists every three months Because that's just sounds awful Oh my list Because oftentimes you're planning for tournaments Three months in advance Right, right. I started planning for a night haunt back in september. Right. I mean You know even six months with with bouncing points around can be problematic But every three months like jeezal Pete's man You oftentimes most people I think kind of say yeah, I'm going to go to these tournaments about three months away What a terrible thing you've got like your 1990 point list the points changes come out Let's say three weeks beforehand enough that certainly the tournament's going to use them Sure And your list is now 2060 you know like Yeah, okay That's just man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've appreciated the discussion on points I definitely feel like I've had my mind changed and so open to a more a better perspective on this Yeah, I like what you're selling On the points what I'd much rather see them do here if we're going to do these quarterly adjustments Is give those nudges To things either through new war scrolls like they did here with the three main people Or something like that Right or touch a couple core rules that are that are being problematic like if we if we got another one in three months and the fix The stuff that was there There was no more points adjustments in in I don't know into march or something. I don't know whatever like, you know, whatever it would be And it wasn't like points adjustments, but instead they fixed coherency Right And maybe addressed a couple other small issues like that in the core stuff Okay Cool good stuff. Flow that through to the app and I'm a happy camper Mm-hmm, right Great Yeah, makes sense I just I fear the bouncy world because if they start quarterly adjusting things too The other problem is you could get it like increment can build speed What if next time bulgur come down 10? And then after that they're still not good enough. Okay, now they come down another 10 now We're down to 110 points and then the book comes out So now you have so so finally maybe they hit a number where people feel like spamming them is fun People go out and buy a ton of bulgur And then the book comes out And they make bulgur actually hit like they should or be like as good as they should right and bulgur are suddenly 200 points What what have we been doing this year? Right, right When like that's not what beasts need What beasts need is an update to the herdstone. So it starts at a bigger radius or something like that, right? That's the kind of stuff they should be doing like put out a new herdstone stone war scroll. That's not garbage Yeah, definitely Yeah, I believe that 40k data slate they were not making point adjustments to a lot of different factions You know, they I think they had a more constrained set of factions. Yeah, it was on the two bad boys At back in jukari back in jukari. Yeah, but that so yeah They just overall the that balance data slate as you started from the top and you know, we went through like It would have been it feels like it would have been better to have these Here's a new rule for gets for, you know, these lower tier factions And point adjustments for or and or war scroll changes yada yada yada for the top tier to bring things more in line with the middle Yeah, that that generally feels like a better approach than sort of this shot What felt like a shotgun approach to these point adjustments that are largely not going to have much of an impact So, yeah yep You know, I mean the um I I worry about the flux syndrome of like things being in constant change and how people react and you will lose like People don't like that. There's a there's a good category of folks who if they feel like the game if the ground underneath them is really unsteady They will just get off the train Yeah, and I always fear that now at the same time You also can lose people if you don't make any tangible changes to the thing that they love Both sides are risks. That's why I You know, that's that's why I really do appreciate the work harder More development work higher quality initial project product six month cycle of incremental adjustments That's like should be what we're aiming at Yeah, yeah, that's reasonable man So, yeah, okay. There we go. Cool. Well gentlemen, we did it We fixed it.  They they this is a good first shot across the bow There are things in here. I like very much There are more things I could see to do I will be very and I'm not going to judge them too harshly on the first one Like your first one. There was some good stuff in here. They had some smart changes to some things I like what was done A lot of stuff. I think there's certainly a lot more that can be done and I am keen to Uh, see where this goes in the future So we'll we'll see we'll see how it plays out Tyler Tom Thank you guys. Good stuff tonight Yeah, totally. Merry Christmas everybody. Merry Christmas everyone. Happy holidays. I hope everybody has time Away from work or something gets to relax a little here or there spend time with your family with Kith and kin next to a warm fire drinking eggnog or something if you want to that disgusting Warm soup, uh, it's gross Um, or cold soup or I don't even know how you drink eggnog. It's disgusting either way. Okay, so, uh The I hope everybody has a wonderful time. I hope everybody has a wonderful holiday Or at least if you don't celebrate anything here, then a wonderful last couple weeks of december Uh, we'll be back next week, of course as always. Don't forget to hit like If you didn't Gursey said was this the winter FAQ or the balance update both they ended up rolling both of them together They did update some of the FAQs This was the shooting match. So happy holidays. Merry Christmas. Don't forget to hit like subscribe if you haven't already Click all those important buttons. But as always We'll see you next wednesday


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. The era of AI everything continues to excite. But unlike the internet era, where any company announcing a dot com, anything immediately rose in value, the AI gods appear to be more selective. NVIDIA beat its top line whisper number by more than $300 million and the company's value is rapidly approaching $1 trillion. Marvell narrowly beat expectations today, but cited future bandwidth demand driven by AI and the need to connect multiple accelerators like GPUs in data center size clusters. And that stock is up more than 20% today as well. Broadcom is up nearly 10% on sympathy with the realization that the connect centricity trend beyond the CPU is what Broadcom does really well. Meanwhile, other players like Snowflake, which also narrowly beat earnings Wednesday and touted AI as a tailwind got hammered as customers dialed down consumption, similar to the trends that we've seen in cloud momentum. But again, Snowflake's up today with the tech momentum. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we look at the infrastructure of AI, examining the action at the silicon layer specifically around NVIDIA's momentum. And since much of the AI is about data, we'll look at the spending data on two top data platforms, Snowflake and Databricks, to see what the survey data says. And to do so, we have a special Breaking Analysis panel where we're changing our normal trend. We're here with John Furrier, who's in studio and our good friend, David Floyer. John, awesome to see you. Thanks for coming. You're in town this week for Red Hat Summit. David, good to see you. We were talking earlier about your life. You said, what'd you say? We said, how are you enjoying your retirement? What'd you say? Busy than ever. Yeah, well, and I'm glad you're still on top of the trends here. Let's get started. Two years ago, Floyer and I published this. Basically it was a roadmap of NVIDIA's plan to take a massive chunk out of Intel's general purpose data center dominance. And our positive outlook on the companies, prospects specifically were related to its software expertise and the end-to-end capabilities, not just the GPUs, but the tens of thousands of other components and the networking and the intelligent NICs and that whole stack. And guys, if you look at NVIDIA's results, that vision appears to be coming to fruition and NVIDIA's valuation is now around eight and a half or nine times that of Intel. And John, you called ChatGPT the web browser moment and Jensen calls it the iPhone moment. Either way, NVIDIA blew away its numbers, $670 million revenue beat. Its second half supply is going to be significantly better. It's really hard to get product today. But David, let me start with you. We were pretty much right on two years ago and NVIDIA's value, as I said, is way, way surpassed Intel's and has been a massive catalyst for not only NVIDIA but the entire industry. I agree. And what's driving it is parallel computing. The necessity to bring many, many, many more CPU cycles, simpler CPU cycles into the game. And NVIDIA have led with their GPU. And when you look across the whole of the, all the other companies, you see people like Tesla have invested very aggressively, they've invested far more in neural networks. You see Apple have invested heavily and again, neural networks. All of it parallelizing the hardware to bring much, much more CPU, simple CPU technology to bear. And people like Intel in particular, they have just fallen far, far behind. And I personally, I'm not believing that Intel is in a good place at all. And they'll survive long-term, but not... Yeah, you felt that way for a while, David. I mean, we're gonna come back and talk about the competition. But John, you've seen many movies. Yeah, what do you think? How was this one? Is it similar? Is it different? How is it different? Is this an incumbent trend? Is this a disruptive trend? Is it both? No, I think it's just a continuation of what David was saying. Nvidia was well-positioned from day one to GPUs. They invested in software stack and hardware. And they captured early imagination and growth of the crazy hyped up markets, first crypto and now AI. If you look at the crypto craze, they really pumped out a lot of stuff on the GPU. So good for them, check. Now that's kind of in a nuclear winter. Now the shift goes to AI. And then now it's all about cloud optimized GPUs. So we're starting to see that hyperscale next gen happening. And I think the issue with Nvidia is, do they maintain the margin and increase more competition? Because what's the expression that Jeff Bezos, your margin is my opportunity. I think there's gonna be a competitive battle. And I think Intel will have a nice server dominance still. You're seeing Xeon and classic customers, they're OEMs. But in terms of these emerging markets, you gotta have the connectivity at the chip level. It's cloud optimized silicon, I think is a real big game. And all the action will be at the physics. And AI is not just chat GPT. This physical layer is huge. And I think this is going to be a massive wave. It reminds me of the OSI model, the physical layers got taken care of first and then it kind of stopped the TCPIP. But I think everyone gets all hot and bothered by chat GPT because it shows the ubiquity of the magic. But really the action will be in the silicon cloud optimized. Jensen calls, he's saying the data center is going to be called the AI factory. And basically he's saying there's going to be a massive shift in spending toward AI powered or accelerated computing. And obviously that's self-serving but they're also very well positioned there. All right, theCUBE, as you know, John and David, we have an awesome community. And I recently had a conversation with a really deep AI expert who told me this.  But if he really wants to democratize AI, he needs to lower prices. We need more competition. We'll see new GPUs from AMD. We'll use Intel, we said we use Intel GPUs even though they're suboptimal because we need other sources. So with that as a backdrop, I want to look at some of the silicon competition to Nvidia, we can riff on this and some of the other firms will possibly be getting an AI boost. I mean, it's interesting when you think about, you know, that comment, Nvidia, you mentioned margins, their margins are in the high 60s and they have Intel like margins, right? You remember Intel's monopoly is sort of following that same track and supply is low so they can charge for it. David, we talked about Nvidia, AMD is going to have a solution for sure. Intel, we mentioned, what about ARM? You mentioned earlier, Tesla and Apple, they do their own GPU designs with ARM and you and I talked about this before when we thought Nvidia was going to be able to acquire ARM, you felt like that eventually Nvidia would or maybe should adopt a more ARM like architecture, they have an ARM like architecture but really drive that. But we talked about maybe the DNA of Nvidia wouldn't allow that, what's your take on that now? Well, they have gone very hard on CPUs and they fitted the problems to CPUs extremely well. The QDA software is brilliant, they have both the hardware and the software. When you look across the market, I'm always interested in what the personal computing is doing, the consumer computing is doing and Apple have led there for a whole number of years with AI. They put in neural networks, they're very, very expert in doing that. So I think neural networks will take a significant role and I think Nvidia will go in that direction as well. They'll use both the GPUs and they'll put in more neural networks. If you're looking at people like Tesla, they've invested very heavily again in neural networks. They do not want to use GPUs in particular, particularly for inference work and both their central work and they're distributed in the cars are very, very strong on neural networks. But the main key of this is bringing the cost per cycle of a CPU down, being, bringing much, much more compute power to problems, to AI problems in specifically. And it's not just chat GPT, it's all the other parts of AI that will continue to drive the whole market towards, in my opinion, towards a dramatic amount of automation. Automation, for me, is the end product of what all of this is about, ability to automate things which we just couldn't do before. All right, hold that thought because we're going to come back to that topic of automation. Alex, bring out that last slide again because I want to get John's input here because the other competition here, John, is you got the hyperscale is AWS is, we know designing its own chips. Google and Microsoft have announced AI, products, GPU class products. Alibaba went with risk five recently and we know China looms large. There's a lot of activity in China. What are your thoughts on the hyperscalers participating in this market? Well, I think they're going to be a factor. In fact, David Floyer wrote some research a couple of years ago. I remember the hyperscaler talking about the physics aspects and Amazon's investment in the physics. James Hamilton, who used to run all that now Peter DeSantis does, they've been doing this for a long, long time and they're not new to AI. And Microsoft came out with that big announcement which was very scripted, who was very much to capture the minds, hearts and minds of the press and the world. They did that which had GBT. They paid $10 billion for it but they don't really have a lot of silicon experience. They have data center experience on running a large scale infrastructure from MSN background and going forward and we kind of know that history but Amazon Web Services has more silicon experience and has been working to optimize that squeezing every ounce of productivity out of the equipment. I mean every small improvement on the physics will yield. So I think that's a big factor. We'll see if they can turn that into a service. I know for a fact AWS is now aggressively putting generative AI out there and they're messaging. They're trying to re-educate the world as they have been doing AI for a long time. So I think there's a consumer vibe here but I think Amazon's well positioned. And again I think another level of competition and companies are forming from the crypto bubble bursting. There are literally the crypto mining companies that have essentially data center quality, hyper scale quality GPU farms. So you're going to see that as potential new entrant that might come out of the left field. But again it's going to come back down to who wins in these hype cycles. The hosting providers or the web buying boxes, hosting them, paying for bandwidth, Exodus communications and others like that. So here you'll see hyper scales play well and then up starts to fill the gap where there's needs. But I think there's going to be a surge back to data centers. You can get some GPUs, you can rack and stack some GPUs and make that an on-premises value. You don't really have to over provision the GPUs if you know what you need, you can just do it. So I think there'll be a pop on on-premise and a mix of hyperscalers for the elasticity. Thanks, David. Do you think the example of Anna Perna with AWS and John, it'd be interesting in your opinion here too because AWS started with Intel. Wasn't happy with the performance and I'm certain it wasn't happy with the price because it had to pay Intel class margins but then they still use Intel extensively. Don't get me wrong, they're a big partner of AWS but they started, they went from Intel and then they brought in AMD. That didn't do what they wanted. That didn't satisfy them. So they started partnering with Anna Perna then they bought the company, then the ARM based designs, they brought that in house. Do you think they can do sort of a similar approach with respect to competing with NVIDIA to lower their cost, lower the cost per query, lower the cost of energy is another big thing or is it Andy Jassy's, there's no compression algorithm for experience. And NVIDIA's been at this for 15 years since they sat around the Denny's trying to figure out the future. What do you think, David? Well, the Anna Perna acquisition was the best, was it 300 million they ever spent? That was just amazing value. And yes, they have improved, they've separated out the control and put all of that on ARM and offloaded that from the processors, the Intel processors. So they have done that part of it extremely well. They need to do, they do have also some capabilities in AI. I think they are going to buy a lot of NVIDIA stuff. That's clearly the market leader. They will try and improve their own, but they will buy NVIDIA as well, as will all the other people in the marketplace, in the hypermarket places. I don't think Microsoft is yet up to speed to be able to produce such chips. I mean, the quality of the NVIDIA chips, the size of them, the degree of integration, the ARM technology that they're using and the TSMC that they're using is state of the art. And I don't think that, in my opinion, AWS will be able to avoid buying from NVIDIA as well. Well, and Jensen stressed in the call, he does many times that they've got like 35,000 components on their system beyond just the GPU. But John, there's also a lot of startups in this game and so could AWS potentially, like it did with Annapurna, pick up one of those startups and then change the game like it did with using ARM? Maybe instead of going with a classical GPU force approach, they can maybe use some kind of neural network. I'm not sure, Dave. I think, you know, Dave is pretty much nailed. It's hard to replicate. The barest entry is hard. I mean, the old expression, better be lucky than good sometimes. And the Annapurna acquisition, I think was so much value that doesn't happen very often. I think of companies like YouTube, you know, oh my God, they paid a half a billion dollars for YouTube. They did $41 billion as an example of one of the best act with VMware get bought by EMC. You know, those only happen in a generation. Is there a potentially startup out there? Maybe. Can they get the magic formula? It's hard. So I think Amazon will continue to buy NVIDIA, like David said, but also try to build it. They have to. I mean, if you're at Amazon, you're not going to sit around, wait for, be a habit dependency because, you know, they're going to be at the beck and call of NVIDIA in terms of pricing. One other thing, Alex, if you bring up that's logo slide again, I was catching up on my Warren Buffett last weekend. You know, he sits there for six hours with Charlie Munger, Munger drinking Coke and eating peanut brittle. And one of the things he said, they asked him, why did you sell TSM? And he said it was a great stock. I like the great company. I love the company, but he's just concerned about the geopolitics. I mean, and we get China on this slide. We know China is really, you know, trying to get self-sufficiency. I mean, to the extent that China were to take over Taiwan, that is a huge risk.  All right, let's shift gears and look at Snowflake quarter and talk about where it fits in AI. The reason we say Snowflake, you know, catches a cold is because they narrowly beat, but we're very, really cautious about the outlook, citing more tepid consumption patterns relative to the past, like the cloud guys, you know, see, but they're still really strong, by the way, and customers, you know, but they're optimizing. They're doing things like reducing retention policies, which lowers storage costs and that means lowers revenue. It makes queries run faster. So that means less compute and that means less revenue. But the other thing is CFO, Mike Scarpelli, the poor guy was hacking all through the earnings call. He's really sick. But the thing I want to talk about is Snowflake's play to be the iPhone of data apps or maybe it's better to say the app store, if you will. They want to be the best platform to build data apps, better than hyperscalers, better than Databricks, better than anyone. And they've made some acquisitions like Aplica, and which is a large language model, and now Neva, which to me kind of supports the vision of Snowpark, bringing together search and generative AI and NLP. You know, John, I know you're high on Databricks, by the way, doing very, very well. We're going to show that in a moment. And David, you're not as optimistic on Snowflake and it kind of brings us to real-time data. David, to start with you, what's your position on this? Well, I've said for many years that the key for companies is to do what Uber did when they introduced their software, which is to reduce the number of people in 10 years by 10 times, 10 in 10. That's my belief of what companies need to be able to do to fend off newcomers coming in with new architectures of designing companies around AI and around the ability to have very, very few people because of automation. And that automation will be distributed all around to the edges where necessary. In other places, it'll be centralized. But that automation is what is key. And to provide automation, you have to have the transactional data coming straight to you. And you have to have the analytic data there as well as much as you can. They have to share the same databases. They have to minimize the amount of time, elapsed time between everything to be able to drive in real-time the automation. So it's real-time automation and the systems that will provide that that I think in the long term will win. Now, in the short term, it does, in my opinion, Snowflake will do very well. But in the long term, I don't think their architecture it will support what I've just been saying. You have to have a much more direct from where the data sources are to the applications running very, very close to where those data sources are. And I don't see that cloud approach. It'll provide some goodness in that setup but won't be the center of it. But John, the data bricks, I want to sort of follow up on that because basically I'm inferring from David, you're saying the cloud, the remote cloud, that's not the place to do real-time inferencing at the edge, for example. But we want to maybe come back to that, John. You know, the Hadoop crowd largely was subsumed by data bricks, right? Spark in the cloud killed Hadoop. And data bricks do it very, very well. We'll show some data in a moment. And you're really high on data bricks. I know you've interviewed Aligotzi many times and you're sort of close to that Silicon Valley vibe. What's your take on all this? Well, David's right. I mean, I think there's two things going on here in the data infrastructure world. One is we went from 2010 Hadoop to Spark and then the stuff that we've been covering and reporting on where data bricks and Snowflake have taken advantage of the big data wave that actually played out. I think AI is going to absolutely change that into, I have a radical view on this. I think my thesis is that the infrastructure opportunities to change, the platform will shift. And I think that's going to put data bricks and Snowflake both on their heels relative to can they use their market power to either acquire or take new territory or take the right high ground in what AI will force with automation. David mentioned a few things, transactional data. I think the notion of databases will go away completely. I think it'll be invisible. I think with automation and AI, developers will program data and they need access to data because the speed of insights will come down to not physics. Yeah, latency will be there, it'll be table stakes, moving packets from point A to point B. Time to insights will be what data is available to prompt and tune with automation. So this whole prompt engineering chat GPT concept that people are now learning in the mainstream is essentially a call to a data set. So if you don't have data available or data as code and manage all that compliance, you might be on the wrong side of the insights which is going to be where the value is. So I think there's going to be an absolute platform reshift on what will be available for data. And I think this idea of databases will just be automated. Like data will be stored, it'll be managed for AI not the other way around. And where data is stored will be dictated by the developers and the applications per David's point about transactional data. So I think there's going to be a complete script flip happening. And to me, I like Databricks because they're more open source. So the question is, does proprietary win or open source? So, you know, Snowflakes like the iPhone and Databricks is like Android, I guess would be my weird example. But I think, you know, right today those guys are Databricks is going to do well because they're open source and they do well with the cloud. Snowflakes does great because they got a great cloud data cloud positioning but it's basically a data warehouse. So I think there'll be a shift where they could be toppled over faster than what they did to data warehousing and cloud era. So to me, it took what, six, seven years? I think it could happen in two years. It's less than two years. And I'm higher on Snowflake because I don't see it as a data warehouse. I do see it as a data platform. They call it a data cloud. And I think for example, to your point about open source, they support, you know iceberg table formats. And if you might say, well, that's a checkbox item. But if you actually look at that, here's my thinking. Is if they can make building applications easier than anybody else, better than the cloud, et cetera and they can make queries run on from iceberg tables and they can do them faster and more cheaply than anybody else then they can increasingly do that with other open source platform. So that's going to be kind of interesting to watch. If I can interject one thing, I was just watching a CNBC that talked about the VCs and all these hot takes around AI. Most of them are just anecdotal, you know recycled pattern matching from other waves. But I think when you talk to the smart VCs the trend that's going on right now that a lot of the smartest people that I know are looking at is developer traction. If developer communities pick up a tool it could be just a simple tool. It's going to be a platform. And there's consensus around making that faster and increasing productivity. Those technologies get adopted very fast. It's almost like a crowdsourcing of developers. And so I'm called B to D, business to developers. If developers pick up a tool and it works well and it solves the problem, there's mass adoption that shifts the entire market. These are the kind of things that you're going to see and I think with data, no one's actually built tools for programmers and app developers to manage data. It's always managed by somebody else, a database administrator, someone in IT. So the data placement and the data management is handled by non-developers. That potentially is a wildcard data. And I think that to me is where if you see something happen in open source where developers get traction, the app market could change significantly and that's where the refactoring could be. That's what David's point was saying is that that value shift could happen very quickly. And that's David, that's Snowflake's big bet with Snowpark that that is going to be the developer platform. So they've got, obviously they have a challenge to attract developers. I think they're going to try to redefine the concept of developers. But you had another point that you wanted to make but please go back. Yeah, yes, if I may. I think in the short-term that you're right, but if you're going to automate, the impact of data to inform people goes down. So automation is getting rid of all of the people and automating every aspect of that. Now you need data in order to run the transactional system and it needs a lot of data from all sources in order to optimize. But it is an optimization as opposed to an essential requirement. It'll get as much data as it can to be able to run in real time. And real time is different in different industries. In Uber, it's not sub-second, you've got seconds, but it's still pretty fast that it has to be able to do things. Other things will be actually real time to preserve the consistency. And if you look at the best ways of providing consistency, databases have been and always will be the best way of doing that. The difference is that they will be distributed. They'll be distributed round. They'll be in the center and they'll be all around the places where the data comes from. And you will want that database because that's the most efficient way to program. The idea of the NoSQL databases where the programmer looked after it, that died years ago. And I don't believe that's going to be resurrected. You need databases. Are they the same databases? No, and there'll be a loss of opportunity for new databases. But the fundamentals of a database and a single database, which does your transaction and your end user, I still think will be here for the next 20, 30 years. I mean, I don't see any way that you can avoid having that technology, which is so much, gives so much, takes so much off the plate of the developers. And going to the developers, I mean, the developers will use, there's so much opportunity to provide developers with tools. I totally agree. And there'll be two types of development. There'll be the central development that runs the automation. And then there'll be the massive amount of data coming from everything that will be there and will provide data for improving the AI and improving things over time. But I personally believe that the database will stay. It'll be a distributed database. And that will be how automation is put into place in reality. And if companies don't do it in the next 10 years, they will be out of business in my opinion. I still think my BI market's huge. And I think that's really where there can be a lot of money. And I think that a lot of that data is still going to get into the data platform and it's going to be analyzed. But you're right. I mean, it's not going to be, Snowflake wants everything to be in Snowflake. That's a prerequisite so it can govern it. And that's its value proposition. And they're not going to be doing distributed queries unless something new comes along. And to both your point, I mean, that's what Bob Mugley is working on is this new type of database. So all right, let's bring up the next slide, which looks at some of the ETR data on Snowflake and just get into that a little bit. I'll set up the slide. If you guys have comments, that's cool. If not, we've got a couple of data slides here. What this shows is a progression over time of the net score granularity for Snowflake. And net score is a measure of spending momentum, spending velocity. That's that blue line. And you can see how it's come down. Back in January 22, Snowflake peaked up in the 80 plus percent. They were like 83, 84, 85% of net score, which is incredible. And, but you can see it's come down substantially. That yellow line is called pervasiveness. That's the presence in the survey. So it's like the survey mind share or market share inside the survey, not in the specific market. The bright green, that's new ads. The forest green is spending 6% or more. The gray is flat spending. And you can see that's the big trend, right? It's gone up. People said, all right, the budget is flat. The settlement set on the earnings call. The CFO is in the business, which I gotta laugh at because I guarantee the CFO is in the business. Mike Scarpelli is all over their business. They got that covered. If you go back to that slide, Alex, please, the pinkish area, that's spending less. And the red is churn. And I really want to make this point. It's not like they're losing customers. This is very similar to the cloud guys. This is very sticky. So the churn is virtually non-existent. But that shift toward the fat middle of flat spend and some of the big customers spending less because of optimization has brought this down a little bit. I don't know if you guys have any comments on this. I got some. Actually, let's bring up the next slide too and then you guys can comment. The next slide really talks to, it compares Snowflake and Databricks over time. And we added Streamlet as well, which is like a Python tool chain for data scientists, which is an acquisition that Snowflake made. But you can see what the progression has been for the last several quarters. Snowflake, as we said, has come way down. Databricks and Snowflake terms of momentum, we're starting to converge, but look at the move that Databricks has made to the right. That's the presence and the overlap of customers is also significant. I forget the exact numbers, but there's a very large number or percentage of Snowflake and Databricks customers. The rap guys is always, a lot of people say, it's going to be easier for Databricks to get into Snowflake's territory. That's what they're trying to do with their lake house. And others say, well, I think it might be easier for Snowflake to get into the data science world. And time will tell. But John, do you have any thoughts on all this data? Well, I think the sharing data slide, but the sharing data is accurate. There's not a lot of sharing. It's a market slowdown on spending, given the economic headwinds. But also when you have these big market movements, like AI right now that's hyped up, it tends to freeze the buyer market. People tend to pause. Most cycles I've lived through has had that kind of like, let's wait and see. Plus the headwinds, we've seen the refactoring, I'm not refactoring, cost optimization. I don't think it's such, Snowflake's going away, they got a great business model. And they were way ahead of Databricks. Databricks, however, has gotten traction in the open source community. And their products have been getting more robust. They've been adding more announcements. They also rode the AI way by interesting Dolly, kind of a joke on Dolly. So it's an AI product. And they're smart. And so I think they're just taking territory naturally because they have a fit with the market and Amazon. They got good traction with AWS and other clouds. I think I was going multi-cloud with their approach. So again, Databricks and Snowflake, both different approaches, similar products, but just different approaches. And again, I don't, I think Open's going to win, but that's my opinion. But I think the slide's natural. I think Databricks has got traction. David, I want to ask you, so on the earnings call, Ramo Lenshaw, who I really like, he's a sharp analyst, he asked the exact question that I would have asked had they let me ask the question. So is that shift in data retention policies? And Snowflake cited one large customer shifted from retaining five years down to three years. Ramo asked, is that a potentially a long-term trend? I've seen this, I saw on Twitter the other day, I don't know, some developer maybe with some Databricks snark. There was like this big ocean liner. And it said, this is all your Snowflake data.  And this is how much data you actually use. You know, the implication being we're spending all this money on Snowflake, but we're actually not using it that much. So I thought Ramo's question was a good one. And it was either, I think Slutman's answer was, no, this is a short-term trend or it's a trend that will end. He didn't say it's short-term. He said, this is a trend that will end. We've seen it before. Now you and I have talked about this for a long, long time. You know, it's easier to just leave all the data in there. If you have a budget constraint, now you got to go, you know, recapture wasted space. What are your thoughts on two things, this data overall, and then specifically that question that Ramo asked? Well, I think he was asking much more on the short term. And I think exactly as you said, there will be a reduction of data if you run out of money to hold it, et cetera. Yeah, but what about long-term? What about long-term? Do you agree with Slutman that it will come back? Well, I'm just kidding. Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. So the most valuable data is the data that's freshest. You know, the value of data goes down dramatically as it ages. So just keeping data for data's sake is not particularly valuable. And the best way of doing it is to extract the value of the data as quickly as you can. So when you look, for example, at Tesla, in the car, they extract all of the value of the data. And then they hold it for 10 minutes, just in case there's an accident and they need to keep that data. But after that, it's thrown away. And if you think about it, the thought of having to capture all of that data is it would be mind-blowing. I mean, it's just be so astronomical. So they throw it away, but they've captured the raw part of that data. So for me, when you're doing automation of any sort, most of that data is going to be thrown away and you've got to extract the data very close to the source of the data. And then that will reduce the amount of data. So I'm not a fan of the thought that the data is growing so rapidly and there's going to be large, large sources of it. It is at the moment because that's the way that data has been stored. It had to be stored, but I think they're going to be far more efficient ways when you come to automation of just keeping the data for a certain length of time. And then you've extracted the data and the amount of data that will be stored will go down over time. That's, I'm sorry, it won't go down. It won't go up the exponential curve that's doing it. Well, we'll see, we'll see. Because I think my bet would be that you're right that there'll be maybe a larger proportion of the data that we would have normally kept is going to be ephemeral. But I think it's going to be so much data created that actually the amount of data is actually going to go up exponentially in that way. It's not going to go up at the same rate as it's going up at the moment. I think we'll see. I think the curve is going to bend even steeper. We disagree on that, but you're smarter than I am. So we'll see. Well, no, no. The need for the data, I think what I see as point is the need to store all the data in some use cases is not needed, like the Tesla's a great example. Yeah, but it's easy. Yeah, but we're in a whole new industry now. This is going to, again, this is the radical view. If you have a data language like OpenAI, which is massive amounts of large language model and with the foundational model stacks, I believe there's going to be hyper data scalars for lack of a better description. There will be some companies will emerge who will be the cloud like scale for data. And those might be brokers that might be a new service. But at some point someone has to have that for foundational models. Because what we're seeing with the foundational models, the big get bigger and big get richer, right?  There's only three hyper scalars. So I think there's a model where an application, I don't want to have to create a data infrastructure. I'm going to be using my data for real time or whatever the use case is, I'll throw it away and then have my domain data, which is proprietary and more value, maybe the fresh data as David says, and I'll program that into a large language model, which I could either own or have someone else do for me. So I think that might be an interesting scenario. Now I'm not saying that exists today. I'm just saying that the debate going on right now is who there is value in large data sets for AI. Historical data, patterns, all kinds of stuff, training. And if you look at the foundational model stacks right now, you have financial model ops, spin ops, FM ops underneath the foundational models and the tooling sits on top of it. So the middle layer is the training and ingestion, then the foundation model is developed, then you have the tooling that drives the app. So that's a completely different animal than we're seeing in anything out there today.  Like a legit data cloud, not like a snowflake or data bricks. I have no idea if that's going to happen, but I could see that value. Why is that not legit data cloud? You're saying because it doesn't incorporate the real time. No, Jay is teasing out a great point. I don't want to pay for storage if I don't need it. But if someone else does it for me, they can build the CapEx and I'll use it as I go and they almost donate it until like an open source model. I see, okay. I want to end with speaking of layers, I want to talk about the future of data apps and automation. And this is a slide that George Gilbert created in here. I'm going to take another stab at this, actually prior to snowflake summit and data bricks summit, we're going to be unpacking those two companies again. But basically the premise here is that applications are moving from a process centric world to a data centric. And the point being that increasingly instead of data residing in silos within sort of the data really being attached to the business process, flip that the business and the process is going to be embedded in the data. So just sort of different, you know, look in the model. And this model here is it's got the apps underneath the enterprise apps underneath. It's got this data layer and we use Uber as an example. You've got riders and drivers and destinations and ETAs. You've got maybe products that you're delivering, et cetera. And those are all data elements or data products that have coherence through a semantic layer and then move up the stack and that's the apps. And this world is a different world. It probably requires new databases. If you look at what Uber's doing, they're using Google Spanner and they've built a layer on top of that to basically not have to make the trade-offs that they had to make prior to 2016. And David, you have been making a point all through this session about automation. That that is the key driver of value creation. So pick it up from there and explain what you mean. So yes, I mean, Uber is a really classic example. You look at the number of people in Uber compared with their revenue. It is the revenue per person is out of this world. This is unlike any other company in existence. So that's amazing that they have done that and they have automated completely. They've taken all of the data from the cars, from the people, about the streets, what's what the road conditions are and they're able to use that to optimize and run the whole company. David, let me interrupt you. Uber, I'm just Googled it, Uber generated $971,000 per employee in 2022 compared to about 600,000 in 2021. That is astounding.  Absolutely. I mean, it's millions of people. So that's the way they've got done automation and that's the model that everybody will have to follow if they're going to keep their current company solvent. Because in my view, the usage of these AI tools, the usage of the real-time data will bring in competitors and startups, which will have just a much, much easier way of getting to that scenario rather than have to migrate from their current systems to that scenario. So that's to me, the real, real threat long-term. If they don't do that 10 in 10, 10s of the people in 10 years, they will be really exposed to a lot of startups coming in. And if you think about Elon Musk, I mean, he has come into the car industry and he has revolutionized the cost of doing things there and he's produced software cars as opposed to hardware cars. And he's done the same with SpaceX. So again, you look at his ability to drive productivity in those two industries that will have to be done by everybody for them, in my opinion, to survive. And that does mean to say that there's a lot of other data other than the real-time data, but that's the one that's valuable. That's the one you have to capture. That's the one you make your decisions on in real-time, which is what Uber has done. Well, and the last question I asked on that previous slide was could be a disruptor or can the companies capitalize? I mean, we're at Dell Tech World this week. You were at Red Hat Summit, which is always owned by IBM. Both of those companies are gonna be able to take advantage of AI. Snowflake's gonna be able to take advantage of AI. So is ServiceNow, so is Oracle, Salesforce, et cetera. But it feels like, John, that there's gonna be some new model, like keyword search, which you were very heavily involved in in the early days, which people maybe poo-poo or overlook and then becomes a dominant play. I'll give you the last word. I mean, I think what David's saying is a whole new paradigm shift's happening, platform, replatforming, refactoring. Startups gonna come out, unicorns will be born in this wave. And it comes back down to simplifying things, making it easier and reducing steps it takes to do stuff. And the web, I think, showed that the best it came out was laughed at early on, things were missing out, but those incremental improvements from what was the nascent market that was then went mainstream. And when it mainstreamed, when it went mainstream, those startups that worked on it captured the value and the rents. So I think AI's gonna have a lot of that, but the big players are gonna be also involved and they'll be the benefactors of that value. So I think it's gonna be more like the web and the internet than the iPhone. Hey, John and David, thanks a lot for coming on Breaking Anals today. This was a great session. David Floyer is so good to see you. You've been such a good friend over the years and wishing you all the best as always. Thank you. All right, thanks also to Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hofe is our EIC over at siliconangle.com. And don't forget, check out all the videos at thecube.net. These episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast. Appreciate you subscribing. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. If you want to get in touch, email me directly, David.Valante at siliconangle.com. Pitch me, DM me at dvalante. Hit me up on LinkedIn, on our posts. If you got a good pitch, I'll definitely respond. If not, don't take offense. We've got a lot of them. Please do check out etr.ai. They've got some great survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Valante for our guests for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis.