I graduated college, and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, so I decided to take a road trip and just try to decide where I might live. I went to New York City. I was visiting my cousin there.  I said, sure, fine. So we went to see children of a lesser God, and I just, you know, I was just fascinated. I felt like I had to learn sign. I was addicted from the moment I saw it. So of course I decided to go to grad school at the University of Virginia. So I went to UVA, and at that program they did not teach sign language. They only followed the oral method of teaching deaf children, which precluded the use of sign language. And people told me, well, all deaf kids can learn to talk. They can lip read. They can hear a little bit, all this stuff, and I didn't know what I was doing, so I bought it.  I mean, he really was a smart kid, and I would go out with him and his mom, and we would play, we'd hang out. His mom would show up and say, hi, how are you? And the kid would try to talk. You know, he was trying to say, I saw a squirrel. I saw a squirrel, and he was just saying this over and over again, and then he gestured, I saw a squirrel, something that looked like an animal running around, and I was just so struck by that. I thought, I've got to learn sign, it makes more sense. So I decided my program was okay, it was good enough, I was learning, but I really needed to need to learn sign language. I was still so hungry for it, I still wanted that. So I'm looking around in the town where I'm living, and there were just a few deaf people who lived there, and there was this one older deaf guy who might actually have been the age I am now, but I'm calling him older, but he was willing to sign with me. His name was Jerry Grizzle. So I would go over to his house once a week on a regular basis, and just kind of spend some time with this guy. That's how I learned sign. Later, I was really hanging out a lot with deaf people and learned it more then. So I was looking for a school, well, I needed a student teaching experience for my program. An RIT, NTID had a position available, so I went, and that's where I really kind of threw myself into the deaf world. I went and hung out with deaf students at the bars, and played, and partied down, and really that's where most of my sign language learning occurred. And that was 1983. It was an internship, just a short three or four month time period. And then they offered me a job, which was great. So I accepted the position, and when I started, I just worked part-time. I was teaching English. I'm trying to remember exactly when bird brain got going on. And I can't remember exactly, but mostly it was just kind of hanging out and playing with a language. I got this job, and, but Jim Cohn, and this is his name sign, is a really good friend of mine, and he calls me up one day, and he said, I know this amazing poet, and his name is Peter Cook, and he's going to be performing soon, and I want you to voice for him. Are you willing to do it? And I was like, I don't know, I mean, I'm not sure. And Jim, ah, I'm not saying this right. Let me start again. I had this great friend when I first started out at NDID, and his name was Jim Cohn. One day he called me, and he said, hey, I want you to voice for this amazing deaf poet, will you do it? And the problem is, I'm not an interpreter. He said, I don't care, come on, come on, come on, just do it. And I said, well, I'm just not sure. And he said, well, okay, maybe I'll just find somebody else. There's a girl I know who I could ask. And then I realized I don't really want somebody else to do it. OK, fine. He got me that way. So I made the arrangements to go and meet Peter and all this. And I went to Peter Cook's house one day, knock on the door. The door is opened. I walked into his house, and he had TVs, not just one. Three TVs, football on one, football on another, and a commercial on the one in the middle. And then after the commercial was done, a football game came on. It was really funny, because really in retrospect, Peter's not really into sports. But anyway, Peter invited me in. And we sat down, and Peter just sort of spontaneously performed this thing for me. I was mesmerized. I thought, my god, this is so amazing. The amount of energy that he exuded, it was just incredible. And how he's able to do that, I don't know. And how would I ever voice that? I don't know. But anyway, it was just such an incredible experience. And we would meet from time to time, and we would play around with different ideas. And the synergy was incredible. I mean, we really got each other.  And it's been that way ever since. We never actually tried to create things together or decided to become a team. It just simply happened. We just connected, and we became friends. And then the two of us became what we called co-friends instead of co-founders. Well, in the beginning, Peter would come up with the signs. And then I would just watch him. And I'd say, do it again, do it again. Now, of course, this is before the days of having videos. So he had to perform things for me over and over again, which drove him crazy. It was very frustrating. It was very difficult. Because I'm trying to match his style and his timing and the movements and all these different elements. And how am I going to voice a vocal rendition to be in sync with him? Sometimes he would give me some words. And then we would talk about the words that he'd chosen. But really, what happened over the course of time was that it became the sort of process where I might suggest images to him. And he would suggest words to me. And our work became melded together in that particular way. There was nobody else to ask. There was nobody to ask advice from at that time. I mean, I'd never seen this process before anybody doing it. I would think really hard about how to voice these images that were coming my way. And I felt very strongly that these are pictures Peter's creating. And I'm not the artist he is. The art is him. And the pictures are him. That's the art form we're putting out there. So I had to figure out the way to find words that would somehow support what he was doing so that the hearing people would be able to understand it. I wanted the hearing people to watch him and not necessarily put the focus on my words and on me. I wanted them to take in what Peter was doing and the whole trajectory of the poem visually, not be distracted by my words. Well, in the beginning, the interpreters were really mad at me, and they just criticized the heck out of me. One of the things was like, well, when interpreters are trained, they voice every single thing they see. They have to. That's how they're trained. But I would just throw in a word here or there, just sort of a cue. Sometimes Peter would, if he was showing somebody cocking a gun or a rifle or whatever, I'd feel like I had to voice that. It was obvious. So I would stay silent for those parts. Or if there are trees rustling in the wind and a person is running through the woods and stealthily going around the trunks of the trees, I would just say there's a person in the woods. And then my voice would just fade out completely after having given a few cues so that the hearing audience would be able to just see this unfold, a person looking for me behind a tree. They can understand that. So in the beginning, interpreters really took issue with me and my method. And after a while, I think they accepted who I was. But boy, was it tough in the beginning. And also, a lot of deaf people were pretty upset with me. Peter and I were really good friends. And we were creating things together. And that's just who we were.  A lot of people were afraid that me or I as a hearing person would co-op the process or take over or whatever and oppress Peter and what have you. But I mean, honestly, we were just friends. We weren't even thinking about one of us being deaf and one of us being hearing. We were just having fun and being creative together and things were working out hunky-dory for us. I mean, if anyone was to watch Peter Cook and really know him very well, you'd realize you can't force that guy to do much of anything. And I think also a problem was that a lot of interpreters felt that I was presenting myself as an interpreter, but I'm not an interpreter. I never learned the interpreting process or that skill. I would not know how. I don't possess that alacrity. I'm really great as a vocal interpreter for Peter Cook. And we create these pieces together. And so I'm not trying to present myself as an interpreter or act in the capacity of an interpreter. I don't have that background. I just happen to know these pieces. I know what this person is doing. I understand what he's doing and trying to put it out there for hearing people and that's my goal. Well, I never pretended to be an interpreter. I didn't, you know, I can't do that. Interpreters are incredible. I can't do what they do. I never would be able to. I don't know, let's see. I'm trying to remember the first night I met Debbie Renne. I can't remember how or where or when. I just remember that immediately we had a great relationship just the same way I had with Peter. We had this really fast connection creatively. And Peter and Debbie had the same sort of creative synergy. Sometimes the three of us would have that and we became a team. And we would just play around. That's the only way I could say it. We were so creative together. It was wonderful. If Debbie didn't like the idea that I'd put out there, Peter would and if Peter didn't like my idea maybe Debbie would. Sometimes I would go to one. They didn't like it. I'd go to the other and then we would take off. Sometimes Peter and Debbie had something that I didn't care for but then they'd say, fine, then we'll take care of this. And they would come up with something together. It was a great team, very fun. Share what? So later the three of us were living in the same house and this house sort of became hot, I guess you could say because you had these two amazing deaf poets living there. And that meant that a lot of people came over became sort of a central location. I'd come home some time. I'd walk in the house, I'd go into the kitchen and of course the kitchen, right? That's deaf central anyway. That's where most deaf people hang out in the houses and the table was completely surrounded by deaf people jabbering away. And sometimes to be really honest with you, I'd walk in and go, holy cow, what am I doing here? They're so good. I mean, you've got Debbie and Peter and you know, I'm really great with ideas but not as a signer and all these deaf people would be in my kitchen and I felt like such a newbie. I wasn't that great of a signer yet. You know, sometimes I didn't know what was going on and I know a lot of people like, you know, Patrick Grable or whatever would be in there, people that I bowed down to with respect. They're so well known, Peter and Debbie, all these luminaries and I just felt like I should keep my mouth shut. So sometimes I just would look back and forth and watch everybody talking. It was so exciting. I just took it all in, you know, really. I learned so much. My sign language skill really improved just from being in that environment. All these ASL poets, watching how they worked, how they created and how they expressed themselves in that language, it helped me understand sign language in general better from being in that environment. In the beginning I voiced for both of them because they were my ideas as well. I created a poem with Debbie called Missing Children. Well, when this poem was done, you know, like it was time to perform it and I wanted my words to be in sync with it because it was my poem too. But Debbie wanted a female voice to represent her. She really felt that it would be better and I, of course, was fine with that. I mean, like, it's not that she didn't trust me, it was just that she wanted to be represented by a female voice. She felt that was a better portrayal of her art and so she asked Donna Cachitas to voice for her, which was fine with me. And Donna was great. I mean, Donna just did a superb job voicing for Debbie and I do remember this one time. Peter and I were performing at this really small coffee house called Jazz Berries. Debbie introduced us and she stood up on the stage. She pretended to be Peter and she completely imitated who he was, who was style, everything. And she did everything perfectly and Donna did the most amazing job voicing for her. It was just beautiful. And Debbie did a beautiful introduction too. It was just such an exciting time. There's so many shows and a lot of deaf people performed at the time too. Also, there were a lot of hearing artists, hearing poets. There was a series. Nope, really have to back up. Really, what happened was Jim Cohn invited Peter to be part of this hearing poetry series and he needed me to voice for him to sort of quote, interpret for him. But there were a lot of hearing poets there and so they needed interpreters for each hearing poet. So anybody deaf showed up, they would understand what was going on too. Deaf people would flock to these mostly to see Peter or Debbie but there were also hearing people who were coming to listen to the hearing poets. So it was really for everybody. They saw all kinds of interpreting. They had vocal renditions, they had interpreted. Hearing poets or the deaf people could see it so they were getting ASL, they were getting English. It was kind of a strange time in a way because there was so much of a mixture between these two groups. It was an interesting time for people to develop friendships between hearing and deaf. Peter became friends with people who didn't know any sign language whatsoever like Todd Beers. He was an incredibly creative hearing poet and he and Peter became friends. But the energy just kept building more and more. There was a good cross-fertilization of all this talent, it was just an amazing time. I never interpreted for any hearing poets. Nope, nope, I just watched and I enjoyed myself and I learned so much from the hearing poets. But you know, one interesting thing is that I don't consider the words that I put out to have been poetry at the time. I mean, my words were put out as a support to the images that Peter was portraying and often Peter and I would, you know, we'd be playing around and, you know, I would have this idea and I would give it to Peter and Peter would take this idea and he would chop it and dice it and slice it and put it in the blender and make something gorgeous out of it. We both go, yeah, and high-five each other. What an amazing piece of work. And then Peter'd say, well, Kenny, how are you gonna voice this? Ha, ha, ha, and I'd think, oh no. My own ideas are being used against me. But you asked me something the day before. What was it? No, I didn't interpret for hearing poets. I can't remember what else it was. Oh, the person who asked me that question is gone. Oh, there you are. Am I being clearer so far? Okay. I was never a poet. I was more of a performing artist, I would say. In high school, I had this great friend. His name was Joe Jalotti. And the two of us were always playing around with different voices, vocal renditions of things. And later in college, I had this other wonderful friend named Jodi Pred. And we came up with these performance art pieces all the time. One time we had a wedding ceremony. The whole thing was just a goof, just this created wedding ceremony. All the ideas in it were basically images. And Jodi would come up with the words, mostly. I did come up with some of the words for it, but mostly I came up with like different tableaus and things that I wanted. There was one image in the wedding where I had a friend who had really long blonde hair all the way past his shoulders. And he was dressed like Jesus. He even had a crown of thorns on and this long flowing robe. We had a cross assembled behind the wedding couple and my friend got up and was kind of hanging on the cross for the whole ceremony.   And then another friend came down the aisle. He was wearing a hard hat and he had like big construction clothes on and what have you. He gets to the end of the aisle, takes off all those clothes and underneath he has a long flowing robe the same as the guy who's playing Jesus. Takes off his hard hat. He punches the clock as if he's going on shift and Jesus on the first shift gives him the crown, comes down and the B shift Jesus came on and got on the cross. That was in the middle of the wedding. Anyway, yeah, might be considered sick but I'm kind of a sick person. But the point is that I was not a poet. I was an image kind of guy. And in the early 80s, when the deaf poets and the hearing poets were just starting this fusion, I was looking at this and I was listening to a lot of the words that were creating the images that the hearing poets were creating because that was beat poetry in a sense. All these different images put together and I saw the sign language poets doing images as well. And that's kind of started me on my path of being an image person even in sign language and what the words used to support them. Yeah, it's interesting ASL. Well, I'm not a great signer. I watch Ella and Peter and Patrick and Debbie and Valley and all of those amazing poets and their sign language is just gorgeous and that's something that I can't approximate. But what I can do is think in images even if I can't do them myself. I'm really great at thinking in images and making the linkages between them. And I'm also a great diagnostician. I'll watch Peter or Debbie and I'll say, oh, what if you just add this in that part or what if you do a little bit more of this or that? I can see that something isn't clear enough that they're putting out or... I mean, I guess I'm an ASL poet who doesn't really sign the poetry myself. I don't know. People call me an ASL poet but maybe that's not the right name for me. I don't know. I'm a person who creates and plays with deaf people's language and I have a synergy with them and chemistry with them. Maybe that means I'm an ASL poet or maybe I'm still a performing artist. I don't know what you'd call me at this point. Yeah, well, sometimes my ideas are things I just give to Peter and he takes them and fusses with them and then he creates this absolutely amazing thing. It's like a diamond in the rough, in a sense. I give him this big old hulking rock. Immediately he sees what lays within and he chips away and finds all the facets and uncovers the sparkling gem inside of it. Peter can find that. Bird's brain, society. It wasn't all poetry, actually. Sometimes it was stories, sometimes skits, just very brief skits but the entire focus of it was to play with language. It was to play specifically with ASL and there was no voice, no interpreter, nothing like that. If you wanted to go, you just went. It was in the basement underneath the dorms at RIT. There's really nothing in there. Just some benches, some chairs. People would take turns doing their thing and it was so fun, just really fun. I didn't label it as poetry. I didn't label it as anything. I was just going and watching deaf people do whatever this was and I did not always understand it. No, I mean, sometimes it just flew right by me but I enjoyed it anyway. I didn't really care. I mean, poetry itself, hearing poetry doesn't matter. I mean, I'm hearing and here I am in a hearing person and I go to listen to spoken language poetry. I don't always understand it but I don't care because I listen to it and let the images just come to mind and that's art. That's what the meaning of art is really. Artists create these beautiful canvases that they put on a wall and then a person might wander into the museum and look at it and they'll be reminded of something that happened when they were child just from watching or looking at that painting or maybe they look at the painting and they say, oh, there's an airplane. The artist didn't have an airplane in their mind at all but that's the nature of art. It's the interplay between the artist and the piece of art and the audience and the different perspectives that everybody brings to the table. I don't remember what you're talking about but oh yeah, bird brain. Nope, I did not understand it. Quite often I got it other times I didn't but I really didn't care. I just didn't care because I was having such a good time just taking it all in. I didn't think, I didn't think what we were doing was poetry or playing with the language. I just, I don't know, I was just having fun. I mean, I was trying to learn sign. I had this friend named Chuck Struppmann and later he became part of National Theater of the Deaf but we were really good friends and we used to horse around with language the same way that I did with Peter.  I met Peter, we came up with all these different ideas. We never wrote them down or we never recorded them in any way, shape, or form or used them in anything and we would just laugh. We'd say, whoa, that was amazing. Look at that, huh? And we completely forget it. So that was a time for me that was all about learning sign language and just seeing everything, not completely understanding what I was seeing, looking at ASL poetry, ASL stories, looking at ASLs itself, sometimes not understanding what it was but not caring, just enjoying being in this sea of language all the time. I was so lucky to be at that time and that place so fortunate that Peter and I connected in the way we did. I don't know why it happened, no idea, Debbie too, why, who knows? We just had this connection and the Bird Brain Society really grew. I mean, it's like Patrick's rendition of the hydrogen jukebox watching that jukebox explode. Jukebox, watching the jukebox explode. It was exactly the same thing. Bird's Brain Society grew, proliferated, more people joined and the whole poetry scene just exploded. Deaf poetry really took off and just created this amazing fusion of energy. Then we had the Deaf Poetry Conference and then Peter, well, it was Peter's idea. Let me go back a bit, Peter, okay. So Peter and Debbie and I, the three of us, we were performing for $15 one time. We were at a place here in Rochester called Writers and Books. What? What did they buy for $15? Well, they bought me and Peter and Debbie. Oh, I misunderstood. What did we buy with the $15 we got paid? Probably beer. I'm sure I probably bought beer with it. But anyway, the three of us were performing for our $15 for this event and it happened to be a Writers Conference that we were hired to perform for and a man in the audience came up to us afterwards and he said, my name is Gregory Colovakis and I'm from the New York State Council on the Arts and I wanna give you some money. And the three of us were like, oh my God, how great is that? Wow, sure, we'll take it. And he convinced us that we should write a grant. And Peter and I decided, okay, we'll figure this out and we did write a grant. This grant money was specifically for us to travel across New York State in different venues and do some performances. Debbie was not involved in this particular aspect. It was just Peter and me. So we traveled around and we performed and oh gosh, it was so fun. We really enjoyed it. We experienced so much. We saw a lot. We met wonderful people. That year ended and we decided that we should try again for a grant the following year. So we submitted again and then Peter had had this be in his mind for a while. He was just thinking, you know, we're so isolated. Here we are just in Rochester. There's not enough ASL poetry in Rochester. And we've got Patrick, we've got Debbie, we've got me Peter saying this, but that's not enough. And so he decided that he wanted to write a second grant and this grant would be specifically to establish a deaf poetry series. And honestly, there was nothing like this happening in the U.S. anywhere. So the New York State Council and the Arts gave us both grants that we applied for. So the two of us could do another 10 city tour. And we also had enough money that we could bring in people from out of town to come perform in Rochester. And that was incredibly inspiring to so many people. It was amazing. We had so many amazing deaf people come to perform and we had hearing poets come to these performances as well as deaf people. So the audiences were mixed. Let's see who we brought in. We brought in Malz, who was incredible. And we brought in two deaf folks from Quebec, Serge Brier and Johanna Boulanger, just incredible. And Terry Lean also. All these different names, these different people came to town, just a whole host to them.  And he's the one who got it going. We also wanted to encourage deaf people in the community. Come on, come, look at this. See all these different poets? It's not just us, it's not just Debbie or Patrick or us. There's all these different styles out there, different ideas, different ways to go about it, to put this infusion of energy, sort of like a big melting pot of all kinds of different deaf people's styles, poetry, storytelling, and we were all learning from each other. The Deaf Poetry Conference, let's see, was bridged up before that or after that. Peter and I were traveling around and we were performing, but sometimes Debbie would join these performances, sometimes not. Sometimes Debbie would perform on her own with Donna as her voice. And the four of us would often be together. And of course, into this mix, you have Jim Cohn as well. Jim is an incredibly accomplished poet. Just a wonderful, wonderful poet. And watching poetry being interpreted and listening to him was incredible. The five of us were really good friends and we thought, why don't we kind of bound some sort of performance group? So sometimes Debbie and Peter and I would perform, sometimes Donna would just perform. It would be different configurations within the group of us. Donna could interpret for Jim's poetry, of course. He was a hearing poet, needed an interpreter and Donna was so good at creating these images, just beautifully blended. So different combinations of us in this group of five and it didn't go for a very long time this group but it was really fun while I lasted. Well, bridge of, that's what we called the group that we came up with, bridge of, bridge of dot, dot, dot. The reason being that Peter loved, loved the English words lean too.  And Peter loved that concept of a lean too. And that's how it was expressed in English, those two words. And he thought, wow, let's come up with a name that's something like that. And I can't remember who actually came up with those actual words but he wanted something like that. So we had bridge of instead of lean too. Anyway, so this group, bridge of performed at the Clearwater Festival which is a yearly festival that occurs in New New York City and it's a gathering of storytellers, musicians, poets, performance artists all over. So we as a group went and performed there. We also went to the University of Vermont. We also performed in Binghamton, just a few venues but we were all busy. We had other projects going on individually so the group was short lived. What I was doing full time was teaching at NTID. Peter was a student at the time. Debbie was still a student at the time. Donna, oh, okay. I should say this again. So I taught full time NTID. I taught English. That was my day job. Peter was a student. Debbie was a student. Donna was an interpreter. And Jim, he was interesting. I don't really remember what his day job was back then. The reason he even came to Rochester is that he was looking for ASL poetry. He was in search of. He himself was a hearing poet and he loved the idea of playing with images and beat poetry constructs. He was an imagist and he really wanted to see what ASL poetry would look like. He thought, hmm, ASL is a picture language. I wonder what sign language poetry even means. So he decided to hitchhike all the way from Colorado where he was living at the time to Rochester. He knew that NTID was here and he got here and he saw sign language all over the place, of course. He was very excited and he applied and was accepted to the interpreter training program, not to become an interpreter. He never did become an interpreter. He simply wanted to learn sign language as fast as he could so he could hunt down what deaf poetry looked like. And so in his search to find it, he found Peter Cook and a hog tied him and roped him in for his scheme. And I don't know if Jim came up with the idea. It was his idea for the poetry conference, but I don't remember exactly what his job was at the time. He might have been a grad student at U of R at the time, I'm not sure. Oh, it was a really crazy time. Peter and Debbie and I were creating things together. But also, I felt kind of like, what's my place here? I mean, honestly, I didn't know who I was in all of this. You know, this conference with Ella and Valley and Peter and Debbie and Patrick, it was incredible, this amazing poetry conference with all these accomplished, well-known poets and me. You know, I guess I work with a couple of them, but like, who am I and what am I doing here?  I mean, should I join in the conversation? I don't know, I really wasn't sure what my role was in all of that. So I was a little scared and I didn't know what my role was. It's like life, right? You know, you kind of get in a car and sometimes the car's out of control and you have to just kind of follow along the road and a car doesn't have any brakes and hope everything goes for the best. And that's kind of what happened. I just decided to go with the flow. That's what happened. Just had to see where it would lead. When I look back at that conference, my memory is one of just abject fear. I was afraid I'd make mistakes when I voiced. I hope people liked the poems. I hoped that they liked what we created.  All this criticism I was afraid of, yes, I'm not an interpreter. I don't voice enough. I should voice more. The interpreters always felt that I should have voiced more than I was. And also, I just hadn't yet learned how to really voice well.  I was voicing for my friend, okay? So I knew the material. I'm voicing for poems that I helped create and work on. It's my own work. So that's helpful. But I still wasn't really that good at it. So I needed to learn more. You have to practice every day. You have to really get into it and dedicate yourself to it. So I was open to a lot of criticism and I think sometimes it was right. It was well-founded criticism. I did need to get better. I did need to choose better words sometimes. Sometimes I didn't voice enough. They were absolutely right. So people who had an issue with me were right and I had to learn. But at the conference, it was also so exciting because so many people came. I just saw so many people in the audience, deaf people who had that kind of aha moment. The lights went on in their eyes and went, oh, that's what this is. I actually saw that. And Peter was so overjoyed by it all. Debbie was so happy. Nervous too, of course. Everybody wanted to get accepted, right? There were these older poets, Vali, Ella and Patrick. They were older, more well-established. So Peter and Debbie were very scared. They were coming up with a new way of doing things. Their poetry wasn't the same. And I don't know if this is true or not. I don't know what these three older poets thought, but we were worried they were looking a scans at this new fangled way and whether they would accept it as ASL poetry. Debbie was sort of thinking in her naive way, please, please love me. Please like my things. Please, please like my talent. But I think these older poets, once they saw it and wrapped their head around it, oops, I think that these older, more established poets were really turned on by what they saw. Because the skill was so obvious. I mean, there was so much talent that they were seeing with Debbie and Peter. And the ideas were really strong. And also, Debbie and Peter were more free in a sense. Free form, you might say, with their poetry. They weren't constrained by rhyme or by any particular conventions. They were just trying to show image, and I think, and I'm not sure, I don't really know, but I think that the other three really liked what they saw and liked what Peter and Debbie were doing. But it didn't matter, really, because I mean, I think there was so much mutual respect, but Debbie and Peter were terrified. Will they respect me? Will they accept it? They really wanted their support and their validation from these three more well-established poets. Part of Debbie and Peter's style was very movement-based. They not only played with ASLs in language, but they were playing with their bodies and gestures and dance movements. There was a dance teacher at NTID back at that time named Steffa Z. Steffa was amazing. She had a big influence on Debbie and Peter. They took many of her classes and they learned so much about how to move, how to use their bodies, and it really improved the work that they were putting out in ASL poetry, I think. Peter and I created a poem called Charlie, and there's one part about this dog who's undergoing training in the Army.  Part of this training experience as he's thrown into a crate, the scientists are turning up the temperature hotter and hotter in the crate. So as the temperature, the thermostat goes up, the scene goes back and forth from just that temperature gauge being raised, the thermostat being raised, and the dog reacting and getting hotter and hotter. And Peter does this by dance movement, in a sense. It looks like a dance, this particular part of the body, in a sense, it looks like a dance, this particular part of the poem. And that you can trace specifically back to Steph's influence from the dance classes and the real head-to-toe body movement that she was teaching them. Now the older poets did not move that way, they didn't do it at all, and maybe they didn't like it, I don't know.  I thought they were like something that kids would play in a game by creating them. In the beginning, I did not like ABC stories or number stories, I just didn't.  I never saw a really sophisticated rendering of that kind of poem or story. So one day I was kind of complaining about it. I was in the kitchen in my house, I was kind of bitching and moaning while I was washing the dishes.  It's just something for kids, it's not really good, it's dumb, no, I didn't say that. I was washing the dishes, maybe I did actually say it that way to tell you the truth, maybe I did, but anyway, I'm washing these dishes, throwing them in the rack, Debbie's right there and I said, ABC stories, eh, nothing to them, kids can do it, they're worthless.  And she said, you, you are dissing my culture and my language and in a huff, she just runs out of the kitchen and closes the door. I keep washing the dishes and I'm like, what, what got her goat dishes flying here, dishes flying there? About 10 minutes later, nah, it wasn't 10 minutes later, it was a lot later, but anyway, Debbie comes back into the kitchen and she says, you can't say that about my culture and my language, watch this. And she just spontaneously performed veal boycott for me, all in one take.  And that was that, what could I say? Debbie and I came up with this other poem that was incredibly intense. We only performed it, I think twice, maybe three times altogether. And it came out of my experiences from having worked in a psych hospital when I was younger. There was this one patient, this huge guy, I mean, huge guy. And he was really insane. If you tried to talk to him, his responses would come out in kind of word salad, you might call it. He'd start talking about one thing and then it would lead to something completely unrelated and just cycled back and forth amongst things that were unrelated all the time. And I told Debbie about this guy and we started playing around with the idea. And we conflated World War II with nuclear war and the guy I'm talking about in the psych hospital, one time he thought, actually, that he was stuck in a concentration camp and he really thought that the Nazis were going to kill him. So he's this big guy, right? And he picked up a chair and I had a friend who was working in the room with me that time, who ran out of the room. He's being chased by this huge guy with the chair, made it out just in time and closed the door and locked it just as the chair was being smashed against the door on the other side. So I told this whole story to Debbie and the two of us created this poem that we called Willie and that came out of the experience I had. Just thinking about the world and thinking about those ideas. Well, it's interesting. It's the other poem that Debbie and I created together called Missing Children. She had a really quick and simple idea that was the impetus for it. It used to be that you would buy milk cartons and on the side of the carton, there'd be a picture of a missing child and underneath it, it would say, have you seen me? And then there was like a phone number or something to call. So Debbie had this short poem, maybe just a 15 second thing that was based off of milk cartons and she showed this to me and percolated in my mind for a while and I envisioned three different scenarios to add to it. One would take place in South Africa because there was a lot of unrest there because of the apartheid situation and the oppression of the white people upon the black people down there and then another scene would take place in Ireland because of the ongoing religious war between the Protestants and the Catholics that have been going on since time immemorial in Ireland and the last scene would be in Central America because there are so many wars in Central America going on at the same time and I looked at all these three different geographic locations and thought about the children who were born into war-torn areas and then attain their adulthood in countries that are still at war the whole time that they grow up. So oppression and war and unrest that was all going on in my mind. I remember I was in a bar and then I had this breakthrough idea and I went home and I told Debbie what my idea was and we conferred when our separate ways I thought of another idea and then I got ahold of her and said, wait, wait, wait, I've got this other idea we can add to it and then we just sat down and we really hashed it out and put it all together and it became the poem missing children. We did change one part the part about Ireland substituted for Israel. I think that the original idea was Israel. You know, it's always been under siege there's always been a lot of unrest there and then we changed it to Ireland and I can't remember why. I don't remember why we did it that way but Debbie is just so amazing in this. I mean, I hadn't seen it for a long time and then I just saw it recently and it got to me again even now it's just an amazingly poignant piece of work. Peter and I started out with these grants. Well, really it started back when Jim invited us to perform and then it kept happening kept going on maybe three or four times we were performing and it just seemed like it happened more and more often here in Rochester. One particular coffee house specifically but sometimes we go to other places and then once we got the grant that was what really got things going because we could bop around to these 10 different small towns not big cities, you know like we go to these small venues and each place that we performed there'd be tiny audiences really small audiences but maybe once in a while somebody in one of these audiences would come up after and say oh, you're just amazing can you give me your card? And I'm like, card. Well, I have a piece of paper I can write my phone number on and tear off the edge of it and give it to you and that's what we did in lieu of cards and maybe later we get this call and they'd say, hey you wanna come down to Pennsylvania? Sure.  Okay. Oh, wanna come to Canada? Sure. So Peter and I and Peter and I were going mostly locally or not too far afield but then once and while there'd be an outlier some place we'd get invited that was a little further away and then our geographic spread just kept getting bigger and bigger. It kind of happened on its own we didn't really pursue it. In the beginning everyone said, Peter Cook Peter Cook, the ASL poet and underneath it would say can he learn or his interpreter? Well, I'm not an interpreter and it's not only him we come up with stuff together and and and so we had to think of a way that we would avoid this misunderstanding and we realized we need to think of a name. I am not really good at coming up with names of things. It's probably the thing that I'm most inept at. I am colossally inept at coming up with names. I am talented in many other things but that is not one of them. So Stephizee, the dance teacher that I told you about before I think she's the one she called me one day and she said, oh, she was so excited. I have this great name for you guys. I said, what? She said, Flying Words Project and Peter just loved this idea. He was crazy about it. I'm so bad with names. I'm like, I don't know, sure I guess but Peter fell madly in love with it and got me on the train too and that became our name and it's been ever since. And Peter and I are so fortunate. I'm the luckiest of all. I get to travel around and you know, Peter lives in Chicago. I live in Rochester but we still get to travel and we see each other at least every month or two. We'll come separately. Two of them you were supposed to perform at. We'll fly there and then we'll fly back to our respective locales but I'm so fortunate because he's my best friend and we both really enjoy what we do and I get to see him and we get to do what we like to do together quite often. What's better than that?  We had to come up with ideas and we finally did. And we have so many lousy poems from the very beginning from the first year or two, just horrible, but we would come up with this stuff and then I think, oh my God, I've got to figure out how to voice this. What am I going to do? I've got a show in three days and I don't know the words that I'm going to affix to what we just created. So I'd think and think and I'd finally come up with some words and I'd say, Peter, come on. We've got to practice. There was no video back then. And it was really nice. Most of the time it was really willing if I could track the guy down, sometime I'd be looking for him all over the place. It wasn't like now where you have like cell phones or a way to find somebody instantaneously. I had to track this guy down. Where the hell's Peter Cook? I'd ask people and they would just kind of point, he went that away and I would find him and I'd say, please, you have to do it again and again and again for me again and again because it's really important to match up the timing. Words can put you in a situation where you're lagging way behind and then the hearing people aren't going to understand it and then the interpreter's going to criticize me and the deaf people will be blissfully unaware of this whole scenario, but I'll be miserable. So I really had to get the timing right and be in sync with him. So I'd have to ask him, please, do this again, do it again, do it again, and again, and again. Could you do the beginning again? Could you go just to this part or everything's good, but okay, keep going, keep going, let me keep going. So the practice was really just crucial at that time. Often the signs were beautiful, everything was perfect, but by performance time, I wasn't necessarily ready with the words on time. So now, currently, I mean, we have video, we have ways to do it. So we'll work on the ideas and we'll get them down on a videotape and we've got them documented so that I can rewind it, fast forward it. I can practice it on my own. I don't need him right there in front of me and I can get the voicing down really well. Back at that time, I had this great idea, but sometimes it would just go into the ether. We'd never have it, you know? So many ideas he and I came up with late at night. The next morning, they were just gone. What were we thinking? What was that idea? I sort of remember this one part. It had something to do with the sun coming up. Oh, rats, you know, we just didn't have it. Maybe the right sign, but they couldn't figure out how it hung on to the next sign or the idea. Finally, we bought ourselves a video camera and that helped so much with this whole creative process back then, because finally we could document it. We could go to bed at night, we could wake up in the morning, watch and go, oh yeah, yeah, that's what we had for last night. That's not so good, or maybe it was. Also, it meant that Peter could see it because for a few years, I would watch him and I would criticize what he was doing or give him feedback, but he couldn't see himself, so he was trusting me, but he could finally watch it himself, which helped so much. And so now, of course, you know, Peter's living in Chicago and I'm living here. And it's very difficult to practice, you know, in the same room, but about three or four years ago. Finally, computer technology advanced to the point where we could really get smooth feeds and we could talk to each other online. So now, we can see each other. Peter can see me, I can see him, he can practice, I can get the timing right, even though he's in Chicago and I'm here, it's just incredible that the technology's reached this point. We have created a couple of poems online, not that good. Because it's a really hard thing to do. Yes, virtual poetry, I guess. What we come up with wasn't that good that we did when we weren't in the same room, but we're getting better and I think it will get better. It's really difficult because you really do need to be together in close proximity. So just on a screen working together isn't the same as being in the same physical location. You know, being really absolutely together in the same place is very helpful to the creative process. We'll see what happens. Just personally, it's just a personal comment about Peter. One thing that I've really learned from him, well, he learned history and politics from me and he learned how to compress his ideas and be more concise. He's really good at that now. And I learned sign from him. My style, my signing style from hanging out with Peter for so many years, I feel like I learned how to sign and I also learned how to watch ASL poetry, how to really get those images. Oh, that sign language actually learned it better just from watching poetry. Another thing I learned from him, he is the most humble person. I mean, here's this colossally talented guy, but he does not have an ego about himself or his work. I mean, we've traveled all over and people come up and sometimes they criticize us. And I'm ready to just duke it out, man. I want to just take him out of the street and deck him. What are you talking about? Peter Cook's the most amazing. You know, I just want to like go to it. But he is just so great and he's so creative and he just very patiently respectfully listens to them and said, oh, so you don't like it. What do you suggest? Honestly, he'll say, just here, give me a suggestion on how you'd improve this. So watching him deal with it that way, I mean, he's not afraid of criticism at all. He wants to learn from everybody. No matter who that person is, even if there's somebody who doesn't know anything about sign language, he very seriously and respectfully considers what they say. And I learned that from him and I try. I mean, it makes me think about myself and how I approach things. That's a great thing to learn from somebody. You hang around with somebody who is a person like that, and it's bound to rub off and influence you. When Peter was younger, you know, he was always doing these limitations of rock and roll stars. He just wanted to be a, you know, a shredding guitar shredding rock and roll guy. And now he really is one. He's a rock star for deaf people. There's no music. There's no sound. But he is a rock star. He's so amazingly talented. He's a deaf rock star. That's Peter Cook.


In her 2019 NCAR Explorers series talk, Dr. Danika Lumberdiltsi will talk about what can plants tell us about air pollution. What I'm most excited to share in this talk is the fact the plants can develop visible symptoms from ground level ozone and so an invisible pollutant turns into a visible impact. I hope that people will come away from this talk with a better understanding of how ozone can reduce our crop fields and how it reduces carbon stored in our terrestrial ecosystems. So reducing our ozone pollution has a direct impact on human health, on ecosystem health, and also on climate change.


Hello and welcome to the super cloud for the fourth edition our quarterly segment. We do this every quarter We're gonna unpack the hottest trends in enterprise tech this fourth episode is about generative AI It's the hottest thing for the past year We've been talking about it going way back to November and every quarter. We're gonna unpack it. We have a great lineup We've got AWS. We've got Google. We got Salesforce Dell AI ethics with sass sass CTO AI 21 labs all the hottest startups enterprises and and guests here two days of packed coverage leaders in the enterprise And we're excited to kick it off. We're gonna do an intro. We're gonna do a little analysis I'm gonna get the program going. I'm here with Dave Vellante my co-host and Rob Streche with the Q research guys This is our fourth installment every quarter Dave. We started this out a year ago and I can't believe in a year We got three in this year four for the 12 months It's fun We bring a lot of content to the table and it's just been amazing to bring the people together in the community And the the caliber of talent that are weighing in and contributing to the program has been phenomenal So just want to say thanks to you guys for all the work you guys do and research Rob and welcome to the team Yeah, hey first of all place looks great I got I got the tie the tie memo to match the the background and yeah, this is the fourth super cloud You remember like last year we set up the concept of super cloud we brought in the community We brought in technical experts. Is this technically viable? We definitely confirmed it was we tightened up the definition And then since then we've been knocking down security. Obviously AI is front and center. We had great sessions on data There's just so much. I'm still unpacking from the first cloud Have a AWS keynoting. We got brought in south who's going to come on VP. We got AI 21 labs on as well We've also talked with hugging face in the past. We got founders and startups. They're focused on AI We've got analysts segments. We get CEO side with the enterprise leaders Microsoft Google Salesforce Palo Alto Networks Dell's new AI leader and just tons of content snowflake amplitude Walmart PwC Google public sector health care experts that every single industry is impacted. Yeah I think that's the that's the underlying thread is that this is changing how? organizations are really looking at their data and turning into Conversations with their customers using that data and having their customers actually engage with them through the AI It's really exciting stuff guys I want to start the kickoff and just get into the program as I mentioned some of the names We have we're gonna hear from the leaders the big themes that are jumping out from the from the pre interviews and what we're gonna hear And the program is clearly this three ideas going on the chatbot. We've seen that done that That's moved on to co-pilot like human augmentation and then predictive all that's got data This is kind of foundational kind of like low-hanging fruit And then the big question is role of open source and the power law Dave that we've published around what the language models are What the foundation model is big better than small? What's in production? What's not in production Rob kind of what's the reality? We're gonna hear a lot of that this week and this show What's real what's hype and where the hype matches at Dave? What's what do you guys see out there in terms of as we look at this program? What's jumping out as the core theme? I mean, obviously, we're very excited As is everybody about AI and generative AI But I think it's important to your point is you got to separate the hype from from reality And when you look at reality you look at it spending it spending is not going up dramatically. It's funny I saw a note from Gartner saying it spending in 2024 is going to grow by eight and a half percent There is currently no evidence of that in any of the spending data, you know right now It's sort of very pretty tepid and so I think you know given the geopolitical uncertainties And when you talk to customers and you do the surveys It's it's much much lower than and now it could change and AI could be that big driver But right now what's happening John and Rob is I think you see this in the data that AI initiatives are stealing from other budgets The AI is by far now the number one sector that that with in terms of spending momentum And it's stealing from other areas and most of the AI is still experimental now The good news is and we've talked about this John is it the AI Experimentation is spending is actually matching the hype, but still it hasn't translated yet into a productivity boost which Eric Brynjalsson MIT professor and economist said he would be disappointed if productivity didn't globally didn't increase from its current 1.2 percent to as much as 4% or even more if that happens look out That's that's huge news Rob. What's your take on the role of data? You've been tracking this part of the cube research team What's what's the data aspect data angle here? Yeah, I think it's everybody is trying to figure out where is all their data There so there's a big infrastructure push to Do I consolidate it all into one data platform? Do I have multiple data platforms? How do I have a mesh over them? Where do I do? Transformation there's a lot still going on at that data layer as people talk about building data products And I think what we're seeing is that really people are focused on those You know segmented language models or smaller language models and being focused like I'm using it for HR I'm using it for finance and bringing that data together because they own that and that's their IP But there's big security concerns and how do I have a moat between that and make sure that it's not going back into the Models so there's a lot still going on with that data infrastructure And I know we have some great guests on that we're going to talk pretty deep about that guys I want to get your thoughts. We obviously we have AWS keynoting We also got an enterprise panel headed up by one of our community members how we shoe whose heads up AI and at machine learning at Palo Alto Networks, he's going to run a panel with Google Salesforce and Microsoft Okay, that's the end of I call the enterprise leader that perspective Then we have a startup panel that I'm going to moderate with a bunch of startup CEOs We're trying to get to that B round Rob a B round financing In this market and then so we have that kind of developer and we have a founder panel Okay going on so it's going to be multiple perspectives there, but we also had an in conversation with snowflake Box CTO Reggie Townsend AI ethics person at SAS and the CTO Brian Harris at SAS So we got conservative approach SAS is kind of a conservative company. They got a lot of install base So they're not rushing and saying buy the new shiny new toy with AI But clearly you're leaning in they've had data and machine learning but not generate AI now They're bringing that to the table so that the spectrum of consumption and usage and Experimentation is across the board. There's no one Playbook, it's not like oh you got to be a pioneer or an innovator every single company from conservative to cutting-edge is Leaning into AI. What does that tell us? Yeah? I mean, I think to Dave's point I think this spending kind of tells us that people are experimenting still and I think again We're you know, you had the first ones who got out there with chat GPT like Bringing that in and using that to get some efficiencies and things of that nature But the long tail from a power law perspective is really where we're starting to see People start to make those plans and I think that's where the real investment happens. I mean again It's I think a big tell you can can we cue the power law? Yeah, actually talk about that a little bit So this is something that Rob and John and I Developed and the vertical axis so we took that concept of a power law We kind of took some liberties with it and applied at the gen AI the vertical axis is the size of the model the horizontal is the model Specificity that's where all the industry action is happening and that orange line is basically an example of The music industry where there were like four companies four labels that dominated the music industry of the past And that's why you see that hard right angle what we're saying here and John Furrier You you've talked a lot about this those red arrows. That's open source and third party pulling the torso up So we think it's going to be a smoother line and then so you got the big guys the big cloud guys and Nvidia and open AI With those large language models the size of model is huge But then as you go down to the right a huge long tail both on premises would specialize the AI and then at the edge The telco edge we have we have a guest who's going to be talking about that a system on a chip And that's really where all the action is the last thing I want to say John And I'd love to get your thoughts on this as you help develop this model In fact, you you were the seed the catalyst of this this is not spending this is most of the spending I personally think is going to be on that long tail. There's me a lot of money made You know by the big cloud giants, but they'll be a lot of action on that long tail. Yeah Well, also you mentioned the music it put that slide back up again and show that again The the tail there was no there's no neck and no torso no stomach basically straight line down a straight tail This not always a music industry, but if you remember when the web started search looked like this top queries were you know Well known and then what happened is as the population of websites came out you saw that expand in that torso You saw kind of affiliate marketing kick and then you still had the long tail of keywords So search was an interesting power law as well now It's ironic Rob that and Dave is that search is one of the key Problems that they I saw co-pilot retrieval was getting into some of that data It's a data graph and if you look at the models again, I'll put that back up again The the the dynamic also includes open source. So the third-party open source also plays in the tail as well So what's happening now and we're going to hear this and this is going to be the premise We're going to unpack over the course of the next six months after this super cloud is as these models develop You're seeing a flipping of the script some of them are proprietary data sets Rob I use the word proprietary will live in the long tail, right? They'll be smaller high quality data And so we're seeing a trend where today they call the the chat open AI and proprietary models They're actually more open because they crawl the web the proprietary models will be the proprietary data sets Which is the initial property that's going to be the value of the company And then what's going to happen is people going to leverage the training of the bigger models to reduce their cost and focus On inference so a lot of model integration is going to come down and this kind of comes down to the cloud native World and you're going to see a lot of changes in this in this long tail the tail will get most maintain the torso and belly will grow and The model will define who you are as a company because that's where your IP will be and that's will be the engine of the application So that's going to be one of our things we're going to look at and I think that's Notable cutting-edge Dynamic and we're seeing it play out with open source There are two other really important points there the the big blockers to implementing Gen AI in production our privacy data privacy security Compliance and governance and so that's where these specialized models are going to have to shine and the second point I want to make and we're going to hear this from CMA AI that telco edge That's going to be all about power per watt, you know low-cost high performance Very very efficient and those are going to be arm-based processors and the I've thought for a while now that the economics at the edge Right now, you know, they're maybe not ready for mainstream enterprise even though we see it with Amazon and Graviton and others But that economic disruption that's going to come from the edge could be massive because it could create a whole new price Performance game in the enterprise. Yeah, I think that's really the key where the work actually gets done It's going to be closer to the consumer not all in a centralized cloud database You're going to have it where you train your model centrally you distribute out for him You know inference and it gets done the work gets done out there, especially when you talk about IOT and machine Actual machine data being you don't want to pull it all the way back into your cloud To be able to do all that you want actions to take place within seconds out in there or milliseconds And one of the things we talked about on a cube pod John is what's going to happen on-prem?  Optionality that's in the cloud today. You were definitely on the side of hey the lot of stuff is going to happen on Yeah, I mean I think the models models point to the fact that the data is back in the game again It's the data is where the action is and it's just in the word proprietary I use that on purpose because that's a bad word the other bad word that we used to the poo poo You know 20 years ago 15 years ago was walled gardens if you look at the models the ones that are successful The ones Rob are proprietary intellectual property of the company or the entrepreneur and they put a wall around it And then they interface with other models via API. So you're going to start to see these data sets look like walled gardens Because the high quality actually makes them better the bigger the model the more Dirty data or bad data you have the more hallucinations kick in so I think we're going to see kind of a neural network AI system emerge And this is what's going to be interesting to see how that app development kicks in So it's the classic cloud game infrastructure middleware and apps Dave in the middlewares the data and The apps are going to be either AI wrappers like we're seeing today or Other cloud cloud native AI native. So we're going to start to hear AI native more I don't really know what that means, but we get buzzword, you know But and and as well to your point when you talk to customers about where they're spending their time They're spending that time on getting their data quality right because we don't have the data quality right and vast Is coming in today and they talk about this concept of model collapse, right? They've Chris Miller had a pretty good article on that where when the large language models are actually creating more data There's derivative data, you know, it starts to get stupid Well, there's three this three this three areas I want to talk about you guys about and get your reaction because we've been seeing it in some of the interviews There's three areas of AI development right now One is I called the AI wrapper and that's where people take their data They call open AI or a big language model and wrap that around their data and produce a UI and we we do that with some of our cube data I think Bloomberg's doing it with their GPT That's that's a like a website to me That's like an instant app and I used to be kind of down on that but I actually see that as a very viable game plan and then there's going to be the cloud native AI native Proprietary app and then there's going to be some sort of infrastructure piece developed That's where the action is right now and right now everyone loves the AI wrappers because it's very easy to execute if you got the data And I think that's one category and the other one that's that's a wildcard right now is how do you actually build From the ground up modern application with AI native built in But I think you hit on a really good point in the Bloomberg as an example because IBM for instance for Watson X has gone out and trained one of the granite versions of Watson X for finance on the Bloomberg data So you start to look at where that data comes from and how it's actually utilized and Can it be used on-prem or in a smaller model in that very specific or segmented language model that can be used and That's bringing an opportunity for companies to monetize their data in a different way And I think we're going to start to see that as well as part of the economy is how do I get better data cleaner data That I know is known good for doing you know I want to produce a you know LLM for my CFO so that my 10 K's my 10 Q's get developed in the same way and they're Formatted that's a really good use case for it So you start to look at the use cases that get pulled along with this and the cleansing of the data the importance of that where it Is and how it gets refreshed okay? I don't want to push my 10 Q data my financial data into a model But I want to use a model on it So how do I do that and how do I do that wall to garden in this you know effective way and Rob You're talking mentioned some of the horses on the track. It's probably worth naming some names AWS with sage maker They were one of the leading companies you had Microsoft because of their deal with Databricks They were pretty prominent Google always had good AI They just didn't have the cloud momentum of the size of the cloud what happened was the open AI deal with Microsoft First of all open AI shot up to the mind-share lead Everybody's using you know their products whether it's chat GPT or other tools that they have Microsoft does that deal with them they shoot up Amazon still prominent but moved a little bit You know not as prominent just in terms of the the mind-share and the market share Google ticked up a little bit and then you had anthropic You know because they're everywhere coming out of nowhere Databricks still pretty prominent and you have IBM you mentioned IBM They went from kind of nowhere on the momentum and now they're popping back up and even Oracle of course is showing up So they're they're the incumbents that are playing and they have a smattering of other companies That are in there like data robots of the world and so it's a pretty crowded space right now But the big cloud guys are fairly dominant Well the cloud guys aren't going to go away and that's the dynamic but you bring up a good point And I think this is a nuanced point, but I'll bring it up because you mentioned those names All those companies are all saying the same thing. We've been doing AI for a long time Okay, that's like the classic line and they're right, but they weren't doing generative AI I think what's why we're focusing on the super cloud is generally AI is that that creates a new dynamic is when you generate Something that's new data and the question of whether it's good data or synthetic data as you generate Data concepts like vector databases and retrieval kick in so things like memory come up I've had a conversation Multiple times in the past month they were the word memory came up not like memory as in like hardware remembering remembering that in the retrieval vector embeds that this answer was good Because that could go away. So now there's a whole observability question Rob, which models which tweak knob that I push Changes the output if you look at a lot of these these AI models you type in the same question you get different answers Yeah, and so that's not remembering anything. So memory is a huge topic Yeah, and you can talk about data lineage and catalogs and how that all ties together I think when you get to it there is this hey We're still learning how to build these platforms to really be effective long term I mean everybody complained when chat GPT 3.5 started to you know give worse answers because they were segmenting the model down and how that was being retrieved But you start to look at how do you get at the right answers more consistently? Especially if you're building it yourself, and I think that's where people are really focused is how do I build the infrastructure out? Where do I build it out? Where is it most cost-effective? And I think one thing that we probably won't have time to get to is the sustainability of it because that is a huge issue when you look at I think it's six Chat GPT requests uses 16 ounces of water in Microsoft's data center in Iowa It's like it's a bottle of water for you know doing one prompt You know you're going in to figure something out and chat GPT that's huge Yeah, and that's where that long tail edge it is and efficient processors is going to well I mean not to bring up like the distributed computing but blockchain day We've been talking about this data sets being distributed in these walled garden little data sets You know I think that the end of the day the future when you look to the future the what will be written about our era My prediction is that we're going to look back and saying what we knew about data warehouses and data is completely going to change I think we're going to see a complete change over radical Transformation of how data is managed to distribute a date. Well just data in general I mean Rob and I riff on this all the time on the Cube It's like you know, you know snowflake and data bricks They could be extinct if this goes in a distributed way or they get bigger and better But certainly the old data silo is going to go away because unless it's integrated into the AI so again The old way of handling data management is going to be upside down But I think it's going to buy into the governance It is going to go distributed and those companies are going to have to pivot and and adopt and adapt to that distributed nature Well, I mean data bricks and an event they announced the open source They got parquet and iceberg now with just Everybody is that whole all those worlds are coming together, right? I mean they have deltaring and everything else I think put that lower the bar to get into the to scale side of the data. How do you scale the data? It's a disruptive force There's no question about it and those companies have to respond and it's going to be distributed I mean, there's no doubt they're all they all know it and I think it's a what segment of this do I do? I think what we're seeing is that a lot of features that have been Data platforms are coming together and you can't just be one piece of the data platform anymore You have to have multiple pieces to be viable going forward. Yeah, the buzzword is bring AI to the data Well, the data is going to be everywhere Yes, you can be bringing AI everywhere and that's where your comments about inference or critical Costs are driving it. Look at the silicon action. It's in David infrastructure data Absolutely your stack and I would just encourage people to go check out the latest breaking analysis We did some the ETR guys and their survey work, you know a lot of the you'll you'll see the momentum of the various companies And it's it's worth sort of putting in context. Well, we got a great program. We are here This is part of our super cloud for this is our part of our in studio live performance We're live on the cube here and we have guests coming into the studio folks who couldn't make it We're going to bring them in remotely to have a conversation here with the cube, but we got some great lineups here We got a founder panel coming up. We got a Executive panel with the analysts. We got gen AI startups geni enterprise leaders and of course, we got the big the big companies AWS We got AI 21 labs hot startup and and one of the large language models and just some great companies with their leaders We got Intel coming on as well Hopefully address all these concerns around processing and compute and we're going to hear some interesting ideas Around how to get these workloads into production. What's the bottleneck? What's the big trends? This is where we unpack January I thanks for watching and states with us more for the next keynote presentation from AWS