Grey Beards on Storage

Jason and Keith joined Ray for our annual year end wrap up and look ahead to 2024. I planned to discuss infrastructure technical topics but was overruled. Once we started talking AI, we couldn’t stop.

It’s hard to realize that Generative AI and ChatGPT in particular, haven’t been around that long. We discussed some practical uses Keith and Jason had done with the technology.

Keith mentioned its primary skill is language expertise. He has used it to help write up proposals. He often struggles to convince CTO Advisor non-sponsors of the value they can bring and found that using GenAI has helped do this better.

Jason mentioned he uses it to create BASH, perl, and PowerShell scripts. He says it’s not perfect but can get ~80% there and with a few tweaks, is able to have something a lot faster than if he had to do it completely by hand. He also mentioned its skill in translating from one scripting language to others and how well the code it generates is documented (- that hurt).

I was the odd GreyBeard out, having not used any GenAI, proprietary or not. I’m still working to get a reinforcement learning task to work well and consistently. I figured once I mastered that, I train an LLM on my body of (text and code) work (assuming of course someone gifts me a gang of GPUs).

I agreed GenAI are good at (English) language and some coding tasks (where lot’s of source code exists, such as java, scripting, python, etc.).

However, I was on a MLops slack channel and someone asked if GenAI could help with IBM RPG II code. I answered, probably not. There’s just not a lot of RPG II code publicly accessible on the web and the structure of RPG was never line of text/commands oriented.

We had some heated discussion on where LLMs get the data to train with. Keith was fine with them using his data. I was not. Jason was neutral.

We then turned to what this means to the white collar workers who are coding and writing text. Keith made the point that this has been a concern throughout history, at least since the industrial revolution.

Machines come along, displace work that was done by hand, increase production immensely, reduce costs. Organizations benefit, but people doing those jobs need to up level their skills, to take advantage of the new capabilities.

Easy for us to say, as we, except for Jason, in his present job, are essentially entrepreneurs and anything that helps us deliver more value, faster, easier or less expensively, is a boon for our businesses.

Jason mentioned, Stephen Wolfram wrote a great blog post discussing LLM technology (see What is ChatGPT doing … and why does it work). Both Jason and Keith thought it did a great job about explaining the science and practice behind LLMs.

We moved on to a topic harder to discuss but of great relevance to our listeners, GenAI’s impact on the enterprise.

It reminds me of when Cloud became most prominent. Then “C” suites tasked their staff to adopt “the cloud” anyway they could. Today, “C” suites are tasking their staff to determine what their “AI strategy” is and when will it be implemented.

Keith mentioned that this is wrong headed. The true path forward (for the enterprise) is to focus on what are the business problems and how can (Gen)AI address (some of) them.

AI is so varied and its capabilities across so many fields, is so good nowadays ,that organizations should really look at AI as a new facility that can recognize patterns, index/analyze/transform images, summarize/understand/transform text/code, etc., in near real-time and see where in the enterprise that could help.

We talked about how enterprises can size AI infrastructure needed to perform these activities. And it’s more than just a gaggle of GPUs.

MLcommons’s MLperf benchmarks can help show the way, for some cases, but they are not exhaustive. But it’s a start.

The consensus was maybe deploy in the cloud first and when the workload is dialed in there, re-home it later. With the proviso that hardware needed is available.

Our final topic was the Broadcom VMware acquisition. Keith mentioned their recent subscription pricing announcements vastly simplified VMware licensing, that had grown way too complex over the decades.

And although everyone hates the expense of VMware solutions, they often forget the real value VMware brings to enterprise IT.

Yes hyperscalars and their clutch of coders, can roll their own hypervisor services stacks, using open source virtualization. But the enterprise has other needs for their developers. And the value of VMware virtualization services, now that 128 Core CPUs are out, is even higher.

We mentioned the need for hybrid cloud and how VCF can get you part of the way there. Keith said that dev teams really want something like “AWS software” services running on GCP or Azure.

Keith mentioned that IBM Cloud is the closest he’s seen so far to doing what Dev wants in a hybrid cloud.

We all thought when DNN’s came out and became trainable, and reinforcement learning started working well, that AI had turned a real corner. Turns out, that was just a start. GenAI has taken DNNs to a whole other level and Deepmind and others are doing the same with reinforcement learning.

This time AI may actually help advance mankind, if it doesn’t kill us first. On the latter topic you may want to checkout my RayOnStorage AGI series of blog posts (latest … AGI part-8)

Jason Collier, Principal Member Of Technical Staff at AMD, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group

Jason Collier (@bocanuts) is a long time friend, technical guru and innovator who has over 25 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur in technology.

He was founder and CTO of Scale Computing and has been an innovator in the field of hyperconvergence and an expert in virtualization, data storage, networking, cloud computing, data centers, and edge computing for years.

He’s on LinkedIN. He’s currently working with AMD on new technology and he has been a GreyBeards on Storage co-host since the beginning of 2022

Keith Townsend, President of The CTO Advisor a Futurum Group Company

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) is a IT thought leader who has written articles for many industry publications, interviewed many industry heavyweights, worked with Silicon Valley startups, and engineered cloud infrastructure for large government organizations.

Keith is the co-founder of The CTO Advisor, blogs at Virtualized Geek, and can be found on LinkedIN.