If you're leaving San Francisco

I hope you had a nice time

I’m writing this post from the back of an Uber, whilst stuck in traffic on the way home from Heathrow. I’ve spent most of the last week in San Francisco for Cube’s first ever user, customer and partner conference: Rollup. I was one of the keynote speakers and also had to present an ambitious demo - thankfully not having to run the demo tech as well as talk through it!

Josh Klahr of Snowflake gave a great talk on the need for semantic layers:

On the day of the conference, I was asked to stand in for

Arynn MP

on our panel, who was unfortunately ill on the day. Being part of a panel last minute is not a problem for me, thankfully. I’m very happy to adapt on the fly and just share my thoughts on what other panelists say and to answer audience questions. It’s much easier and less scary for me than having to prepare something to present. Especially a non-deterministic demo, like our new copilot!¹

Over the last few years working in tech, I’ve made a lot of friends who are based in the SFBA area. It was nice to spend some time catching up with these folks after the conference. I’ve heard a lot of negative things about how SF has got worse since I was last here in 2014, and I can see why and where these concerns lie. However, at the same time, it felt very similar and there are still really nice places to go in the city and nearby. I’d still be glad to return in the next few years.

As VP of AI, I felt it would be remiss of me not to try out a Waymo. It was really impressive, but what was particularly interesting was how the excitement wore off after about 3 minutes of being in the car. It got boring and just like being driven around by an Uber driver. It was able to respond to obstacles, people in the road etc pretty gracefully. The only time it missed a beat was when it pulled down a side road to drop me off and put my side of the car next to a very high curb that stopped me opening my door. However, when I had to scoot over to the roadside to get out, it did warn me of a passing motorcycle.

I feel like a lot of AI tech should aim to be like this - to do a good job to the point it just feels standard or run of the mill. Good services are things you use without thinking too much about them.

That’s all from me this week, I’m going to wander off and be jet-lagged.

1. They say you should avoid working with children and animals in a live setting - I would add LLMs to this list.