>>Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering my groin. Insight 2019 brought to you by micron. >>Welcome back to pier 27 in San Francisco. I'm your host Dave Vellante with my cohost David foyer and this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our live coverage of micron insight 2019 we were here last year talking about some of the big picture trends. Derek ticker is here, he's the general manager and vice president of the storage business unit at micro and great to see you again. Thank you so much for having me here. Welcome. So you know we talk about the super powers a lot, you know, cloud data, AI and these new workloads that are coming in. And this, this, I was talking to David earlier in our kickoff like how real is AI? And it feels like it's real. It's not just a bunch of vendor industry hype and it comes in a lot of different forms. Derek, what are you seeing in terms of the new workloads and the big trends in artificial intelligence? >>I think just on the, on the front end, you guys are absolutely right. The, the role of artificial intelligence in the world is, uh, is absolutely transformational. I was sitting in a meeting in the last couple of days and somebody was walking through a storyline that I have to share with you. That's a perfect example of why this is becoming mainstream. In Southern California at a children's hospital, there were a set of parents that had a few days old baby and this baby was going through seizures and no one could figure out what it was. And during the periods of time of the seizure, the child's brain activity was zero. There was no brain activity whatsoever. And what they did is they performed a CT scan, found nothing, check for infections, found nothing. And can you imagine a parent just sitting there dealing with their child and that situation, you feel hopeless. >>This particular institution is so much on the bleeding edge. They've been investing in personalized medicine and essentially what they were able to do was extract a sample of blood from that sample of blood within a matter of minutes. They were able to run an algorithm that could sift through 5 million genetic variants to go find a potential match for a genetic variant that existed within this child. They found one that was 0.01% of the population found a tiny, tiny, call it a less than a needle in the haystack. And what they were able to do is translate that actual insight into a treatment. And that treatment wasn't invasive. It didn't involve surgery. It involves supplements and providing this shower, just the nutrients that he needed to combat this genetic variant. But all of this was enabled through technology and through artificial intelligence in general. And a big part of the show that we're here at today is to talk about the industry coming together and discussing what are the great advances that are happening in that domain. >>It's just, it's super exciting to see something that touches that close to our life. I love that story and that's, that's why I love this event. I mean, well, obviously micron memories, you know, DRAM, NAND, et cetera, et cetera. But this event is all about connecting to the impacts on our lives. You take, you take that, I used to ask this question a lot of when will machines be able to make better diagnoses than, than doctors. And I think, you know, a lot people say, well they already can, but the real answer is it's really about the augmentation. Yeah. You know, machines helping doctors get to that, you know, very, you know, uh, a small probability 0.1001% yes. And it'd be able to act on it. That's really how AI is affecting our lives every day. >> Wholeheartedly agree. And actually that's a, that's a big part of our mission. >>Our mission is to transform how the world uses information to enrich life. That's the heart and soul of what you just described. Yeah. And we're actually, we're super excited about what we see happening in storage as a result of this. Um, one of the, one of the things that we've noticed as we've gotten engaged with a broad host of customers in the industry is that there's a lot of focus on artificial intelligence workloads being handled based on memory and memory bandwidth and larger amounts of memory being required. If you look at systems of today versus systems of tomorrow, based on the types of workloads that are evolving from machine learning, the need for DRAM is growing dramatically. Multiple factors, we see that, but what nobody ever talks about or rarely talks about is what's going on in the storage subsystem and one of the biggest issues that we've found over time or challenges that exist is as you look at the AI workloads going back to 2014 the storage bandwidth required was a few megabytes per second and called tens of, but if you just look every year, over time we're exceeding at gigabyte, two gigabytes of bandwidth required out of the storage subsystem. >>Forget the memory. The storage is being used as a cash in it flushes, but once you get into a case where you actually want to do more work on a given asset, which of course everybody wants to do from a TCO perspective, you need super high performance and capability. One of the things that that we uncovered was by delivering an SSD. This is our 9,300 drive. We actually balanced both the read IOPS and the ride IOPS at three gigs per second. And what we allow to have happened is not just what you can imagine as almost sequential work. You load up a bunch of data into a, into a training machine, the machine goes and processes on it, comes back with a result, load more data in by actually having a balanced read and write a model. Your ingest times go faster. So while you're working on a sequence, you can actually ingest more data into the system and it creates this overall efficiency. And it's these types of things that I think provided a great opportunity for innovation in the storage domain for these types of that's working >> requiring new architectures in storage, right? I mean, yeah, >>I mean, th th so one of the things that's happened in, in bringing SSDs in is that the old protocols were very slow, etc. And now we all the new protocols within in Vme and potentially even more new protocols coming in, uh, into this area. What's micron? What, how is micron making this thing happen? This speed that's gonna provide these insights? >>It's a fan fan. Fantastic question and you're absolutely right. The, the world of standards is something that we found over the course of time. If you can get a group of industry players wrapped around a given set of standards, you can create a large enough market and then people can innovate on top of that. And for us in the, in the storage domain, the big transitions had been in Sada and NBME. You see that happening today when we talked a little bit about maybe a teaser for what's coming a little later at, at our event, um, in some of the broader areas in the market, we're talking about how fabrics attach storage and infrastructure. And interestingly enough, where people are innovating quite a bit right now is around using the NBME infrastructure over fabrics themselves, which allows for shared storage across a network as opposed to just within a given server there. >>There's some fantastic companies that are out there that are actually delivering both software stacks and hardware accelerators to take advantage of existing NBME SSDs. But the protocol itself gets preserved. But then they can share these SSDs over a network, which takes a scenario where before you were locked with your storage stranded within a server and now you can actually distribute more broad. It's amazing difference, isn't it at that potential of looking at data over as broad an area as you want to. Absolutely. And being able to address it directly and having it done with standards and then having it done with low enough latency such that you aren't feeling severely disadvantaged, taking that SSD out of a box and making it available across a broad network. So you guys have a huge observation space. Uh, you sell storage to the enterprise, you sell storage to the cloud everywhere. >>I want to ask you about the macro because when you look at the traditional storage suppliers, you know, some of them are struggling right now. There aren't many guys that are really growing and gaining share because the cloud is eating away at that. You guys sell to the cloud. So that's fine. Moving, you know, arms dealer, whoever wins it may the best man win. Um, but, but at the same time, customers have ingested so much all flash. It's giving them head room and so they're like, Hey, I'm good for awhile. I used to have this spinning disc. I'd throw spinning disc at it at the problem till I said, give me performance headroom. That has changed. Now we certainly expect a couple of things that that will catch up and there'll be another step function. But there's also elasticity. Yes. Uh, you saw for instance, pure storage last quarter said, wow, hit the price dropped so fast, it actually hurt our revenues. >>And you'd say, well, wait a minute. If the price drops, we want people to buy more. There's no question that they will. It just didn't happen fast enough from the quarter. All of these interesting rip currents going on. I wonder what you're seeing in terms of the overall macro. Yeah. It's actually a fantastic question. If you go back in time and you look at the number of sequential quarters, when we had ASP decreases across the industry, it was more than six. And the duration from peak to trough on the spot markets was high double digit percentages. Not many markets go through that type of a transition. But as you suggested, there's this notion of elasticity that exists, which is once the price gets below a certain threshold, all of a sudden new markets open up. And we're seeing that happen today. We're seeing that happen in the client space. >>So, so these devices actually, they're going through this transition where companies are actually saying, you know what, we're going to design out the hard drive cages for all platforms across our portfolio going into the future. That's happening now. And it's happening largely because these price points are enabling that, that situation and the enterprise a similar nature in terms of average capacities and drives being deployed over time. So it's, I told you, I think the last time we saw John, I told just one of the most exciting times to be in the memory and storage industry. I'll hold true to that today. I, I'm super excited about it, but I just bought a new laptop and, and you know, I have, you know, a half a half a terabyte today and they said for 200 bucks you can get a terabyte. Yes. And so I said, Oh wow, I could take everything from 1983 and bring it, bring it over. >>Yeah. Interestingly, it was back ordered, you know, so I think, wow, it am I the only one, but this is going to happen. I mean, everybody's going to have, you know, make the price lower. Boom. They'll buy more. We, we, we believe that to be the case for the foreseeable future. Okay. Do you see yourself going in more into the capacity market as well with SSTs and I mean, this, this, this drop, let's do big opportunity or, yeah. Actually, you know, one of the areas that we feel particularly privileged to be able to, to engage in is the, the use of QLC technology, right. You know, quad level solar for bits per cell technology. We've integrated this into a family of, uh, of SSDs for the enterprise, or interestingly enough, we have an opportunity to displace hard drives at an even faster rate because the core capability of the products are more power efficient. >>They've got equal to, or better performance than existing hard drives. And when you look at the TCO across a Reed intensive workloads, it's actually, it's a no brainer to go replace those HDD workloads in the client space. There's segments of the market where we're seeing QLC to play today for higher, higher capacity value segments. And then there's another segment for performance. So it's actually each segment is opening up in a more dramatic way. So the last question, I know you got some announcements today. They haven't hit the wire yet, but what, can you show us a little leg, Derrick? What can you tell us? So I, I'll, I'll give you this much. The, um, the market today, if you go look in the enterprise segment is essentially NBME and SATA and SAS. And if you look at MDME in 20 2019 essential wearing crossover on a gigabyte basis, right? >>And it's gonna grow. It's gonna continue to grow. I mentioned earlier the 9,300 product that we use for machine learning, AI workloads, super high performance. There's a segment of the market that we haven't announced products in today that is a, a a mainstream portion of that market that looks very, very interesting to us. In addition, we can never forget that transitions in the enterprise take a really long time, right, and Sada is going to be around for a long time. It may be 15% of the market and 10% out a few years, but our customers are being very clear. We're going to continue to ship Satta for an extended period of time. The beautiful thing about about micron is we have wonderful 96 layer technology. There's a need in the market and both of the segments I described, and that's about as much as I can give you, I don't bet against data. Derek, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you guys so much. You're welcome. There's a lot of facts. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back at micron insight 2019 from San Francisco. You're watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE studio here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We're here introducing a new format for CUBE panel discussions, it's called Around theCUBE and we have a special segment here called Get Smart: Unpacking AI with some great with some great guests in the industry. Gene Santos, Professor of Engineering in College of Engineering Dartmouth College. Bob Friday, Vice President CTO at Mist at Juniper Company. And Ed Henry, Senior Scientist and Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff for Machine Learning at Dell EMC. Guys this is a format, we're going to keep score and we're going to throw out some interesting conversations around Unpacking AI. Thanks for joining us here, appreciate your time. >> Yeah, glad to be here. >> Okay, first question, as we all know AI is on the rise, we're seeing AI everywhere. You can't go to a show or see marketing literature from any company, whether it's consumer or tech company around, they all have AI, AI something. So AI is on the rise. The question is, is it real AI, is AI relevant from a reality standpoint, what really is going on with AI, Gene, is AI real? >> I think a good chunk of AI is real there. It depends on what you apply it to. If it's making some sort of decisions for you, that is AI that's blowing into play. But there's also a lot of AI left out there potentially is just simply a script. So, you know, one of the challenges that you'll always have is that, if it were scripted, is it scripted because, somebody's already developed the AI and now just pulled out all the answers and just using the answers straight? Or is it active learning and changing on its own? I would tend to say that anything that's learning and changing on its own, that's where you're having the evolving AI and that's where you get the most power from. >> Bob what's your take on this, AI real? >> Yeah, if you look at Google, What you see is AI really became real in 2014. That's when the AI and ML really became a thing in the industry and when you look why did it become a thing in 2014? It's really back when we actually saw TensorFlow, open source technology really become available. It's all that Amazon Compute story. You know, you look what we're doing here at Mist, I really don't have to worry about compute storage, except for the Amazon bill I get every month now. So I think you're really seeing AI become real, because of some key turning points in the industry. >> Ed, your take, AI real? >> Yeah, so it depends on what lens you want to kind of look at it through. The notion of intelligence is something that's kind of ill defined and depending how how you want to interpret that will kind of guide whether or not you think it's real. I tend to all things AI if it has a notion of agency. So if it can navigate its problem space without human intervention. So, really it depends on, again, what lens you kind of want to look at it through? It's a set of moving goalposts, right? If you take your smartphone back to Turing When he was coming up with the Turing test and asked them if this intelligent, or some value intelligent device was AI, would that be AI, to him probably back then. So really it depends on how you kind of want to look at it. >> Is AI the same as it was in 1988? Or has it changed, what's the change point with AI because some are saying, AI's been around for a while but there's more AI now than ever before, Ed we'll start with you, what's different with AI now versus say in the late 80s, early 90s? >> See what's funny is some of the methods that we're using aren't different, I think the big push that happened in the last decade or so has been the ability to store as much data as we can along with the ability to have as much compute readily disposable as we have today. Some of the methodologies I mean there was a great Wired article that was published and somebody referenced called, method called Eigenvector Decomposition they said it was from quantum mechanic, that came out in 1888 right? So it really a lot of the methodologies that we're using aren't much different, it's the amount of data that we have available to us that represents reality and the amount of compute that we have. >> Bob. >> Yeah so for me back in the 80s when I did my masters I actually did a masters on neural networks so yeah it's been around for a while but when I started Mist what really changed was a couple things. One is this modern cloud stack right so if you're going to have to build an AI solution really have to have all the pieces ingest tons of data and process it in real time so that is one big thing that's changed that we didn't have 20 years ago. The other big thing is we had access to all this open source TensorFlow stuff right now. People like Google and Facebook have made it so easy for the average person to actually do an AI project right? You know anyone here, anyone in the audience here could actually train a machine learning model over the weekend right now, you just have to go to Google, you have to find kind of the, you know they have the data sets you want to basically build a model to recognize letters and numbers, those data sets are on the internet right now and you personally yourself could go become a data scientist over the weekend. >> Gene, your take. >> Yeah I think also on top of that because of all that availability on the open software anybody can come in and start playing with AI, it's also building a really large experience base of what works and what doesn't work and because they have that now you can actually better define the problem you're shooting for and when you do that you increase you know what's going to work, what's not going to work and people can also tell you that on the part that's not going to work, how's it going to expand but I think overall though this comes back to the question of when people ask what is AI, and a lot of that is just being focused on machine learning and if it's just machine learning that's kind of a little limited use in terms of what you're classifying or not. Back in the early 80s AI back then is really what people are trying to call artificial general intelligence nowadays but it's that all encompassing piece. All the things that you know us humans can do, us humans can reason about, all the decision sequences that we make and so you know that's the part that we haven't quite gotten to but there is all the things that's why the applications that the AI with machine learning classification has gotten us this far. >> Okay machine learning is certainly relevant, it's been one of the most hottest, the hottest topic I think in computer science and with AI becoming much more democratized you guys mentioned TensorFlow, a variety of other open source initiatives been a great wave of innovation and again motivation, younger generations is easier to code now than ever before but machine learning seems to be at the heart of AI and there's really two schools of thought in the machine learning world, is it just math or is there more of a cognition learning machine kind of a thing going on? This has been a big debate in the industry, I want to get your guys' take on this, Gene is machine learning just math and running algorithms or is there more to it like cognition, where do you guys fall on this, what's real? >> If I look at the applications and look what people are using it for it's mostly just algorithms it's mostly that you know you've managed to do the pattern recognition, you've managed to compute out the things and find something interesting from it but then on the other side of it the folks working in say neurosciences, the first people working in cogno-sciences. You know I have the interest in that when we look at that, that machine learning does it correspond to what we're doing as human beings, now because the reason I fall more on the algorithm side is that a lot of those algorithms they don't match what we're often thinking so if they're not matching that it's like okay something else is coming up but then what do we do with it, you know you can get an answer and work from it but then if we want to build true human intelligence how does that all stack together to get to the human intelligence and I think that's the challenge at this point. >> Bob, machine learning, math, cognition is there more to do there, what's your take? >> Yeah I think right now you look at machine learning, machine learning are the algorithms we use, I mean I think the big thing that happened to machine learning is the neural network and deep learning, that was kind of a mild stepping stone where we got through and actually building kind of these AI behavior things. You know when you look what's really happening out there you look at the self driving car, what we don't realize is like it's kind of scary right now, you go to Vegas you can actually get on a driving bus now, you know so this AI machine learning stuff is starting to happen right before our eyes, you know when you go to the health care now and you get your diagnosis for cancer right, we're starting to see AI in image recognition really start to change how we get our diagnosis. And that's really starting to affect people's lives. So those are cases where we're starting to see this AI machine learning stuff is starting to make a difference. When we think about the AI singularity discussion right when are we finally going to build something that really has human behavior. I mean right now we're building AI that can actually play Jeopardy right, and that was kind of one of the inspirations for my company Mist was hey, if they can build something to play Jeopardy we should be able to build something answer questions on par with network domain experts. So I think we're seeing people build solutions now that do a lot of behaviors that mimic humans. I do think we're probably on the path to building something that is truly going to be on par with human thinking right, you know whether it's 50 years or a thousand years I think it's inevitable on how man is progressing right now if you look at the technologically exponential growth we're seeing in human evolution. >> Well we're going to get to that in the next question so you're jumping ahead, hold that thought. Ed, machine learning just math, pattern recognition or is there more cognition there to be had? Where do fall in this? >> Right now it's, I mean it's all math, so we collect something some data set about the world and then we use algorithms and some representation of mathematics to find some pattern, which is new and interesting, don't get me wrong, when you say cognition though we have to understand that we have a fundamentally flawed perspective on how maybe the one guiding light that we have on what intelligence could be would be ourselves right. Computers don't work like brains, brains are what we determine embody our intelligence right, computers, our brains don't have a clock, there's no state that's actually between different clock cycles that light up in the brain so when you start using words like cognition we end up trying to measure ourselves or use ourselves as a ruler and most of the methodologies that we have today don't necessarily head down that path. So yeah that's kind of how I view it. >> Yeah I mean stateless those are API kind of mindsets, you can't run Kubernetes in the brain. Maybe we will in the future, stateful applications are always harder than stateless as we all know but again when I'm sleeping, I'm still dreaming. So cognition in the question of human replacement. This has been a huge conversation. This is one, the singularity conversation you know the fear of most average people and then some technical people as well on the job front, will AI replace my job will it take over the world is there going to be a Skynet Terminator moment? This is a big conversation point because it just teases out what could be and tech for good tech for bad. Some say tech is neutral but it can be shaped. So the question is will AI replace humans and where does that line come from. We'll start with Ed on this one. What do you see this singularity discussion where humans are going to be replaced with AI? >> So replace is an interesting term, so there I mean we look at the last kind of Industrial Revolution that happened and people I think are most worried about the potential of job loss and when you look at what happened during the Industrial Revolution this concept of creative destruction kind of came about and the idea is that yes technology has taken some jobs out of the market in some way shape or form but more jobs were created because of that technology, that's kind of our one again lighthouse that we have with respect to measuring that singularity in and of itself. Again the ill defined definition, or the ill defined notion of intelligence that we have today, I mean when you go back and you read some of the early papers from psychologists from the early 1900s the experiment specifically who came up with this idea of intelligence he uses the term general intelligence as kind of the first time that all of civilization has tried to assign a definition to what is intelligent right? And it's only been roughly 100 years or so or maybe a little longer since we have had this understanding that's been normalized at least within western culture of what this notion of intelligence is so singularity this idea of the singularity is interesting because we just don't understand enough about the one measure ruler or yardstick that we have that we consider intelligence ourselves to be able to go and then embed that inside of a thing. >> Gene what's your thoughts on this, reasoning is a big part of your research you're doing a lot of research around intent and contextual, all these cool behavioral things you know this is where machines are there to augment or replace, this is the conversation, your view on this? >> I think one of the things with this is that that's where the downs still lie, if we have bad intentions, if we can actually start communicating then we can start getting the general intelligence yeah I mean sort of like what Ed was referring to how people have been trying to define this but I think one of the problems that comes up is that computers and stuff like that don't really capture that at this time, the intentions that they have are still at a low level, but if we start tying it to you know the question of the terminator moment to the singularity, one of the things is that autonomy, you know how much autonomy that we give to the algorithm, how much does the algorithm have access to? Now there could be you know just to be on an extreme there could be a disaster situation where you know we weren't very careful and we provided an API that gives full autonomy to whatever AI we have to run it and so you can start seeing elements of Skynet that can come from that but I also tend to come to analysis that hey even with APIs, while it's not AI, APIs a lot of that also we have the intentions of what you're going to give us to control. Then you have the AI itself where if you've defined the intentions of what it is supposed to do then you can avoid that terminator moment in terms of that's more of an act. So I'm seeing it at this point. And so overall singularity I still think we're a ways off and you know when people worry about job loss probably the closest thing that I think that can match that in recent history is the whole thing on automation, I grew up at the time in Ohio when the steel industry was collapsing and that was a trade off between automation and what the current jobs are and if you have something like that okay that's one thing that we go forward dealing with and I think that this is something that state governments, our national government something we should be considering. If you're going to have that job loss you know what better study, what better form can you do from that and I've heard different proposals from different people like, well if we need to retrain people where do you get the resources from it could be something even like AI job pack. And so there's a lot of things to discuss, we're not there yet but I do believe the lower, repetitive jobs out there, I should say the things where we can easily define, those can be replaceable but that's still close to the automation side. >> Yeah and there's a lot of opportunities there. Bob, you mentioned in the last segment the singularity, cognition learning machines, you mentioned deep learning, as the machines learn this needs more data, data informs. If it's biased data or real data how do you become cognitive, how do you become human if you don't have the data or the algorithms? The data's the-- >> I mean and I think that's one of the big ethical debates going on right now right you know are we basically going to basically take our human biases and train them into our next generation of AI devices right. But I think from my point of view I think it's inevitable that we will build something as complex as the brain eventually, don't know if it's 50 years or 500 years from now but if you look at kind of the evolution of man where we've been over the last hundred thousand years or so, you kind of see this exponential rise in technology right from, you know for thousands of years our technology was relatively flat. So in the last 200 years where we've seen this exponential growth in technology that's taking off and you know what's amazing is when you look at quantum computing what's scary is, I always thought of quantum computing as being a research lab thing but when you start to see VC's and investing in quantum computing startups you know we're going from university research discussions to I guess we're starting to commercialize quantum computing, you know when you look at the complexity of what a brain does it's inevitable that we will build something that has basic complexity of a neuron and I think you know if you look how people neural science looks at the brain, we really don't understand how it encodes, but it's clear that it does encode memories which is very similar to what we're doing right now with our AI machine right? We're building things that takes data and memories and encodes in some certain way. So yeah I'm convinced that we will start to see more AI cognizance and it starts to really happen as we start with the next hundred years going forward. >> Guys, this has been a great conversation, AI is real based upon this around theCUBE conversation. Look at I mean you've seen the evidence there you guys pointed it out and I think cloud computing has been a real accelerant with the combination of machine learning and open source so you guys have illustrated and so that brings up kind of the final question I'd love to get each of you's thought on this because Bob just brought up quantum computing which as the race to quantum supremacy goes on around the world this becomes maybe that next step function, kind of what cloud computing did for revitalizing or creating a renaissance in AI. What does quantum do? So that begs the question, five ten years out if machine learning is the beginning of it and it starts to solve some of these problems as quantum comes in, more compute, unlimited resource applied with software, where does that go, five ten years? We'll go start with Gene, Bob, then Ed. Let's wrap this up. >> Yeah I think if quantum becomes a reality that you know when you have the exponential growth this is going to be exponential and exponential. Quantum is going to address a lot of the harder AI problems that were from complexity you know when you talk about this regular search regular approaches of looking up stuff quantum is the one that allows you now to potentially take something that was exponential and make it quantum. And so that's going to be a big driver. That'll be a big enabler where you know a lot of the problems I look at trying to do intentions is that I have an exponential number of intentions that might be possible if I'm going to choose it as an explanation. But, quantum will allow me to narrow it down to one if that technology can work out and of course the real challenge if I can rephrase it into say a quantum program while doing it. But that's I think the advance is just beyond the step function. >> Beyond a step function you see. Okay Bob your take on this 'cause you brought it up, quantum step function revolution what's your view on this? >> I mean your quantum computing changes the whole paradigm right because it kind of goes from a paradigm of what we know, this binary if this then that type of computing. So I think quantum computing is more than just a step function, I think it's going to take a whole paradigm shift of you know and it's going to be another decade or two before we actually get all the tools we need to actually start leveraging quantum computing but I think that is going to be one of those step functions that basically takes our AI efforts into a whole different realm right? Let us solve another whole set of classic problems and that's why they're doing it right now because it starts to let you be able to crack all the encryption codes right? You know where you have millions of billions of choices and you have to basically find that one needle in the haystack so quantum computing's going to basically open that piece of the puzzle up and when you look at these AI solutions it's really a collection of different things going underneath the hood. It's not this one algorithm that you're doing and trying to mimic human behavior, so quantum computing's going to be yet one more tool in the AI toolbox that's going to move the whole industry forward. >> Ed, you're up, quantum. >> Cool, yeah so I think it'll, like Gene and Bob had alluded to fundamentally change the way we approach these problems and the reason is combinatorial problems that everybody's talking about so if I want to evaluate the state space of anything using modern binary based computers we have to kind of iteratively make that search over that search space where quantum computing allows you to kind of evaluate the entire search space at once. When you talk about games like AlphaGo, you talk about having more moves on a blank 19 by 19 AlphaGo board than you have if you put 1,000 universes on every proton of our universe. So the state space is absolutely massive so searching that is impossible. Using today's binary based computers but quantum computing allows you to evaluate kind of search spaces like that in one big chunk to really simplify the aspect but I think it will kind of change how we approach these problems to Bob and Gene's point with respect to how we approach, the technology once we crack that quantum nut I don't think will look anything like what we have today. >> Okay thank you guys, looks like we have a winner. Bob you're up by one point, we had a tie for second but Ed and Gene of course I'm the arbiter but I've decided Bob you nailed this one so since you're the winner, Gene you guys did a great job coming in second place, Ed good job, Bob you get the last word. Unpacking AI, what's the summary from your perspective as the winner of Around theCUBE. >> Yeah no I think you know from a societal point of view I think AI's going to be on par with kind of the internet. It's going to be one of these next big technology things. I think it'll start to impact our lives and people when you look around it it's kind of sneaking up on us, whether it's the self driving car the healthcare cancer, the self driving bus, so I think it's here, I think we're just at the beginnings of it. I think it's going to be one of these technologies that's going to basically impact our whole lives or our next one or two decades. Next 10, 20 years is just going to be exponentially growing everywhere in all our segments. >> Thanks so much for playing guys really appreciate it we have an inventor entrepreneur, Gene doing great research at Dartmouth check him out, Gene Santos at Dartmouth Computer Science. And Ed, technical genius at Dell, figuring out how to make those machines smarter and with the software abstractions growing you guys are doing some good work over there as well. Gentlemen thank you for joining us on this inaugural Around theCUBE unpacking AI Get Smart series, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, that's a wrap everyone this is theCUBE in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat funk music)

[Music] everyone welcome to the special cube conversation here to talk about the big announcements big news big concepts and big trends happening Cisco live in Barcelona I'm John for your host of the cube we're here with Fabio Gauri senior director cloud solution marketing at Cisco I've been great to see you things are spending time to me to unpack all the exciting news in Barcelona great stuff thank you thank you for having me John so one of the things that's happening with Cisco we've covered certainly we've been reporting and reporting are other outlets as well and you guys have been transforming and continuing to innovate Cisco has transformed itself into the next level building on your successes we've been covering that and that's been all about the clouds been all about networking going you know software driven you know software powered network operations DevOps the whole thing is now infiltrating into into the new model but it's clear now there's no debate that on-premise data centers on-premise environments of IT service providers the entire old you know computing industry is connecting with the cloud that's been kind of validated and we've been staring at that for a couple of years and now everyone's starting to take action this is a key theme here in Barcelona for you guys and we heard you see you talking about it last year at Cisco live in North America that transition to cloud validated across the voice or Andy chassis the CEO of AWS actually announced an on-premise device hybrid cloud has been validated so public cloud and on-premise and now visibility into what kubernetes is enabled with multi cloud mm-hmm this is the new normal describe that impact in the marketplace what does it mean for customers what do they do what what is it what does this mean when now enterprises are seeing on-premise and cloud coming together absolutely well you know if you think about it you gotta start from the application so if you take a step back right we've been talking about digitization for so long but what does that ultimately mean right people need to build more and more applications to digitize their their business processes their customer experience and so on and so forth ultimately what we're seeing is that this applications are becoming exceptionally distributed right because they go what it makes sense whatever the data is whatever the user is you may have low latency needs you may have actually just you know the right needs to go all the way to the cloud in reality you have a mix of this kind of needs but workloads are distributed and people want to harness this multi cloud world and that's what we're seeing I love these chips it's kind of like people have been living on two sides of the street you know old way new way it's clear that the migration to this new model cloud is the new way and that's been validated again so you've got the old way in new way describe in your mind the old way and the new way from Cisco because if you look at the history of Cisco the dominance and the success I had and recently had an opportunity to be John Chambers at his house and he talked about that that dynamic of how Cisco is so dominant the culture and then going the next level the datacenter you guys have a great success networking edge this is New York or business yeah that's still relevant with the cloud in the new way so talk about what's changed all the way new way Francisco I'll give you a try so fundamentally if you if you if you remember where we're coming from we are coming from an era where we've been seeing infrastructure kind of dictating application requirements through the other way around as well but you had an application you will buy specific hardware networking and everything else including firewalls for a specific infrastructure right so that era actually is not going away is there because it's built an immense amount of legacy that you can not all of a sudden throw away however the new world is a world where you see applications fundamentally going pretty much across multiple type of domains not just to do the center domain anymore but here comes the cloud we have a lot of applications that are going to the edge if you have a branch office right you may want to take your application over there because it's simpler it's it's sometimes it's more economic you don't need to move all the data and still you can have those applications collaborating with your data center with your cloud so what you're now seeing is a completely from world where applications want the infrastructure to be programmable and easy accessible and still extremely secure that's interesting in the old way was you know the you dictate applications you can only do as much as the network and the infrastructure will let you to do yeah and then now as infrastructure becomes more abundant yeah data tsunamis have spent a lot of data's coming in so that's why the storage industry never docking it's always growing storage industries always growing servers as always need for compute but as is more abundance than that it almost as a limitless opportunity for applications so it's not a you know kill the old and bring in the new it's more of a foundational hold as now foundational it is literally next level thing so kubernetes service meshes these programmable policy-based abstractions are showing the way and that's a network construct policy is a network concert so the first time we're seeing is the coming together of the app market with infrastructure absolutely and if you think about it even a step before the apps people have when they build application they have a business intent right let's make an example you take healthcare application right you want in a hospital you want the doctors to be able to access you know the full extent of the data of a customer record for instance you may not want the nurses doing the same thing or for instance you don't want the nurses and the doctors to get access to the financial system of the hospital so this is actually a business intent that that given application will have to respect well the infrastructure can and has to cope with this kind of requirements by delivering the appropriate kind of segmentation right so that you'll be able to ensure that what the application wants to do the infrastructure delivers what has changed in the on premise and cloud world in your mind because to have that kind of coordination and you guys are have announced here it's some great announcements around seamless end-to-end as a theme we're seeing you're seeing hyper convergence anywhere are you seeing application centric infrastructure concepts everywhere but when you actually go into the hood and look at how complex it is it's almost magical in the sense that it's going on its I know it's hard work and people who know networking know it's hard what are the innovations what's enabling that what is the key driver that's making you guys connect an on-premise data complex data center environment that is now edges private networks hybrid private cloud IOT edge enterprise edge campuses the old stuff now with cloud what are the key linchpins well hey I'm gonna take on one of the the words that you use complexity people are looking for the opposite of complexity people are looking for simplicity easy to say more difficult to do but what sits between complexity and and and turning it into a more simple kind of architecture is automation so what you have to have is fundamentally an infrastructure that becomes automated programmable that takes the business intent or the application intent as an input and actually with a closed-loop system fundamentally monitors and gives you the assurance okay the implementation the assurance that actually what you want to do gets delivered by the infrastructure and this has to be literally annalistic and cross-domain kind of architecture what do I mean with cross-domain you're going out of the data center you're going out to the edge you're now going to the cloud this should be seen as a cohesive almost fluid environment where you can actually push your policy your security models right and transform in this highly fragmented the architecture into a set of domains or a multi domain architecture that you can control that you can automate as if it was all yours so to speak even though in the cloud for instance you're going into a domain that you don't control end-to-end so big concept here being discussed in Barcelona is multi domain you just get that explain that a little bit and then take that to where cloud integration comes in because the other thread that we're seeing here is multi cloud yeah so multi domain multi-cloud the same are they different what's the nuance points there yeah again the the critical point is let's think applications applications want to go and it's convenient to go into multiple domains right depending on what you want to do what you want to access to you wanna access clouds innovation from whatever they come from so that's why we have a multi cloud world the data center is still there is critically important you have a lot of applications databases that are still there and now we're seeing the big new shiny object which which is more and more super Robo remote office branch office applications where for instance IDC believes 30% of applications are going to be deployed into this kind of environments so your problem is now connecting all of this together right and because the applications are going anywhere are the designer strategy is that the data center needs to follow the applications and support them wherever they go so it's a data center anywhere kind of kind of strategy the data center has to flex and provide that yes be ready for anything basically from from applications what you're getting at and all the all the plumbing and all the all the intelligence underneath it have to be reactive to what the application wants absolutely a vocation doesn't have to get into the provisioning or any kind of policy because that's the infrastructure as code DevOps the point is that that kind of absolutely the application has an intent right there's also application policy etcetera but it needs to be translated into infrastructure policy where we've been talking about it a minute ago when we were doing the the healthcare kind of example right well we've been super excited in collaborating with you guys on kubernetes we have a special section on silicon angle called the kubernetes special report that's evolving into multi cloud special reports the folks watching Silicon angle comm check out the multi classify syrup or that should be up and yeah by now it was the COO Bernays but ton of interest was seeing startups coming out of the kubernetes you're seeing a cloud native world CN CF and Linux foundation promoting tons of great ecosystem development pulling together those developers want more infrastructure and so that and they wouldn't want to deal with it right so this is where you the cloud strategy has been paying off for you guys you guys have had done deals with Google as your AWS s ap Red Hat among others you guys are well poised for this talk about cloud Center that's a big piece of the story here yeah cloud Center suite a new capabilities talk about the impact of cloud and cloud Center yeah so let me let me let me take us the buck if you want and tell you a little bit more about what we're announcing here right because it's a pretty big announcement I mentioned at the center anywhere what does it mean right well of course our data center portfolio is sent around two big components the first one is networking right particular application center came first structure a CI based on the Nexus 9 K kind of architecture and the second one is our computing portfolio particularly you know the hyper-converged infrastructure cisco hyper flex that's of course you know an extremely efficient way of condensing you know what you need to make it very flexible in your application implementation where we have two major news here right in this two areas and the third is absolutely what you were asking for which is Cloud Center so with a CI and it's interesting because they're going into two if you want different directions when it comes to the small T cloud domain AC I was already visualized in the previous releases sorry application centric infrastructure is fundamentally cisco in ten base networking for the data center okay it gives you program ability of the infrastructure it gives you segmentation gives you security and a high degree of automation capabilities exactly okay continue and so in the previous in the previous if you want developments releases of ACI what we've been doing was to aggressively visualize a CI right so that you will have constructs like virtual poles and virtual leaves to rescale your data center implementation to the edge now where we're going with this new announcement is exactly on the other side which is we're standing ACI to the cloud to usher in AWS so that the construct that you have typically on Prem under your control such as tenants EP G's and things of this nature will be translated into the equivalent construct in AWS whether it's VP C's or security groups and the likes the two things end up fundamentally corresponding so now we have one construct that extends from the edge to the data center to the cloud that's a pretty big deal and what does that mean to the customer just give an example it means a high degree of automation security and control on the resources right so that you can impose one policy it propagates all across the board one way of monitoring you know the data center flows and discovering for instance if you have if you have any kind of security threat monitoring application performance thanks to the inter so this fully checks this hybrid cloud box this ship I say yes is one a hybrid deployment this checks the box saying I can operate and say whatever cloud and on-premise in the datacenter with a CI both places without changing any code is it seamless what's the what's that well with a CI is gonna come with a specific software this is all software that's that's the beauty of it right it's it's in line with the transformation the company that you were referring to it's all software and it goes into AWS and uses of course all the api's to connect 2d to the AWS resources that you were you're you're acquiring from AWS right so that's one big bucket of news the second bucket o news is hyper flex that's actually heading to the edge because what we're seeing is more and more applications that have components of the application itself or even entire applications that are going into remote office branch offices and the reason are many right it could be cost reason it could be did a gravity reason it could be just low latency reason right we all know that you know to go back and forth from the cloud that's not always convenient as well as if you lose the connectivity your branch is dead right so you have to you need to have business continue it in all of this and so it doesn't mean that you don't want the cloud you want a collaboration across this again fluid sort of infrastructure so I purflex come with a very efficient kind of kind of fun factor over there now it's either flex edge and its control Emilia this is that because you have many remote offices and branch offices is controlled from the cloud with cisco inter side which is of course our console and cloud system to manage all these hand points no just hyper flex but also UCS so when you think of this now you understand what do we mean with the dissenter anywhere because we're taking both our networking and our computing platforms anywhere the application needs them right and the third component which actually is where your questions started from is application lifecycle management in this kind of infrastructure becomes even more of a problem right it is extremely complicated now to have applications in multiple clouds and then in your data center and to the in India JH and in you know all these different kind of places so what we've done with cloud center which is our flagship club management and an orchestration system is two big things first we have expanded the functionalities by adding new modules especially the cause optimizer the helps operations team at Center suite now it's the cloud center suite and I'll explain you in a moment why we remove the branding slightly from cloud center to cloud center suite because we highly modularize the software and and make it and made it really much more easy to consume I'll go there in a moment but going back to what is new first of all is cost optimizer right that's that's brand new and it helps Operations team to right-size the workload to pick up the the best instances in the cloud are you using to actually minimize your investment or reach your your goal of performance and cost right that's one big thing the second one is that we're adding a very smart so called action Orchestrator which is a workflow manager that helps you automate in there tear connection of your cloud management system to all the other systems right some of these plugins and integrations come outer-box particularly with the higher level tiers of licensing such as with service now for instance or we give you already built-in integration with cisco inter side or UCS director which is the infrastructure manager for Cisco infrastructure but you can use the kind of platform and module to build your own integrations with the other systems that's very important because the cloud management system doesn't exist in isolation right it needs to integrate with all the other IT management solution that you have on Prem and that's one big thing the second big thing as you said before when you said about the suite is the fact that because we have written all of this new software and cuber Nerys right this is highly scalable highly portable so now we can give you different tiers of licenses you can start very small as small as around $50,000 right for subscription service and you can actually bite subscription on pram or that's big news you can buy Nate software-as-a-service so cloud center is now Asaf offering yes available when it's gonna be so all the subscription use the new software is going to be available literally a next month in a few days for now right in February and the SAS version is gonna be available in North America in March so right away for Europe of course due to the GDP our implementation our customers will have to wait until the summer but it's pretty immediate and you hear a bit of an extra work done yeah okay so bottom line me on the cloud Center suite what is the the purpose is it to be the high level management suite how is it connecting into other systems so if I have all these different management tools out there when Cisco and others is it connecting into am i connecting up and you just explain quickly you know the purpose of it yeah works so really the goal of Cloud Center is to do a salute three things the first one is a he wants to simplify cloud management and how it does it right one of the key patents that we acquire together we clicker right click a cloud center when we brought them in more than two years ago was the really unique way that they have to model applications right the way that people are managing cloud management and an organization is still extremely manual I mean many customers are still kind of doing scripting we have cases of customers that are scripting like 1200 lines of codes just to upload a piece of software onto the cloud we think the approach should be different right the approach should be you should be able to model that application your application model wants and then thanks to cloud API so we have 16 different API into a cloud integrations with AWS our Google you name it right I BM and the likes we realize of course on parameter private cloud once you model your application you can use any of these other clouds as a target for implementation okay that allows you to have a very very effective cloud management solution because don't risk to make mistakes you leave the tool so you said it's written in kubernetes absolutely we scraped all this now we program all this in Cuban Eddie's so you may tell us hey you're walking the talk absolutely doing that and that's very in that sow actually we can do it on Prem in a Cuban IT infrastructure by the way if you need one we have the Cisco cloud center platform a hyper flex underneath to do it or you can buy from the cloud because we're uploading a little dot to the cloud you guys have done a good job at kubernetes just as a side note you guys done the work it's doing the cloud integrations and I think wasn't she about kubernetes unlike other trends I've seen in some of these open-source projects some hype comes up and then it kind of drops off or it gets hyped up and it's too hard to roll out or use it cost too much and so people actually using kubernetes for not just standing it up they're actually pulling it for a purpose so congratulations on that I think it's a real good thank you for thank you know we're a big believer in to this so simplifying really multiplayer management is one big thing reducing time to value is another big thing because with the integrations and the ability you know to integrate with the other tools you can put it in production very very quickly and then it's incredibly easy to consume you can start small and grow up so I did a little checklist here I want to just run this by you and then I'm going to ask you a question around what all this means to your to your customer base because I'm sure the world's changing we've done a lot of kind of you know surveys and interaction with a lot of network guys to kind of spiel out how the markets going get your reaction so interesting thing you guys have a this builder model very similar to Amazon you know toolkits for cloud builders you guys are really investing heavily and it's a security you got stealthWatch tetration analytics you've got app dynamics and tetration as well datacenter hyper flex UCS Nexus check cloud apps WebEx I know what else is in there there's also cloud apps cloud native apps which you're connecting into management cloud center container platform and IOT kinetic and networking the edge Meraki cloud service route or bunch of other things so you guys are building quite the portfolio on here right so given that you guys have that security to network and kind of end-to-end with the application centric infrastructure are kind of expanding and intent based networking combined cloud seems to be kind of the end-to-end is the theme it really is it's it's again end to end and across multiple domains because that's the thing that doesn't come across with end to end is the fact that you need to cross different domains that are exceptionally different from from each other and so having consistent policies and a single security model having one mean of networking and securing all this in a containerized world which which is where we're progressively going that's everything and you know it's not me saying it but if you look at the CN CF surveys they'll tell you the securing and working containers is one of the toughest things so I got to ask you that the tough question totally makes sense you got my buy-in on it I totally believed in the vision making it work okay making it smart and making it at scale are the three kind of things I'm looking at give us your take on how you guys are looking at those three kind of you know checkpoints you got to get this up and running so one make it work you know end-to-end mobile domains yeah make it intelligent that's data smarter you know automation kicks in and I'll see scaling it up but you know with all the checkbox security everything else so take us through the strategy yeah and what you guys are thinking there and and the impact with that in mind so the person on the other side your customer the buyer and customer Sisko to manage it that's that's a big sea change yeah and the benefits are pretty lucrative on the other side if you can pull this up yeah yeah upon three big aspects so first of all we mean we've been talking about architectures but architectures doesn't mean that you shouldn't have Best of Breed products right it starts from there those are the atomic components of any strategy right you gotta have best of the products now these products need to integrate into an architecture that solves true business problems such as the intent base you know architecture that we've been talking about the third aspect is actually how you help customers to be successful and I will love to call out our partner strategy right which for I would say for as long as 30 years has been Cisco's critical differentiator and I think this is an enormous asset especially when you look at the number one problem in IT out there which is not kubernetes and it's no cloud is actually lack of talent people don't have the skillset and talents so relying on an ecosystem that helps you expanding what you need because you don't have it inside its fundamental importance on you guys absolutely but this is a critical asset and you know we're doing a lot of investments also on the customer experience side of the house with our leader Maria Martinez the staking actually this customer experience so approach to the next level more and more it's about these architectures also being cloud a touch so you heard me talking about inter-site it doesn't come by chance right the more you can rely on on this kind of architectures the more you can harvest analytics you can do cross correlation across multiple networks and domains and figure out what is going wrong that's something that providers of pinpoint products just cannot even dream of delivering as final question for first of all thanks for spending the time and chatting and he was going to be rolling out a lot of content we're gonna be following what's going on with on your end to really like Cisco's vibe you guys are very transparent and collaborating appreciate being there working with you guys final question if someone's watching this I'm a Cisco customer you know we've been talking about the network I which I've talked to a couple you know and surveying some some enterprises where you know the network's they've done the heavy lifting that's been part of the computing industry you know networking compute they've been running the show and really have moved the needle campus networking the list goes on and on but now that foundation set we're going to a whole nother level it's almost like a sea change on the personality side persona of the people who've built it out and now have to build the next generation yeah and my relevant am I gonna be the mainframe guy am I gonna be leading the charge or may be left behind there's a lot of cognitive dissidence around decisions so that go here should I go there architectures so there's a lot of psychology and also decision-making that's gonna be determined by your core audience mm-hmm that person out there is your target audience they're thinking about these things because they want to do well and they don't wanna be left behind what do you say to that audience about Cisco now the opportunity for them personally their ability to one grow their skill gaps or have an impact to being a key change agent for this next generation what do you say that that person out there about the Cisco and the opportunity for them it's it's a very big question I would split a question in two parts first of all is what is your advice to IT professionals right how can they not just survive but thrive and be the heroes of this this transition and it's pretty simple actually you have to understand what your business wants we've been talking about how do you close this gap between of infrastructure and application but in other terms is covering the gap between what you do and what the business wants you've got to understand that right so that's number one second part of the question is okay considering this is cisco the right partner for me and the answer of course from cisco standpoint is approximately yes because our entire company strategy is wrapped around this concept of intent-based architecture where our goal is to map the business intent into the infrastructure underneath and that's exactly your core business mr. IT professional right so I see this as a as a marriage in heaven right in terms of where I see really the talent need for IT going right in IT professionals and where the company is going right if we if we're right and I think we are this is gonna be a great ride and not a threatening one I think everything's lining up you're getting clear visibility into what the role of cloud is the scale PC and personal links are just undeniable and that the role of technologists now are super important there's no jobs really going away they're shifting this is this is the reality this is kind of what the exciting opportunity it is but but again it's about bringing IT very close to the business in the end I believe it's just it's just gonna be continuity between what we call today line of business and IT it's just a company that wants to win in the marketplace right wants to get faster efficient usual kind of you know terminology but you know does this gap is gonna go away Fabio thank you for taking the time to share this conversation I'm John furry this is a cube conversation here at Barcelona live go live Europe back to the cube coverage go to the cube dotnet to check out all the live coverage and cube interviews in Barcelona I'm here with Fabio Korey senior director cloud solutions marking Cisco I'm John for the cube thanks for watching [Music] you

>> Hello and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. We're here in Sundance 2018 at the Intel Tech Lounge for a panel discussion with experts on the topic of The New Creative. We believe a new creative renaissance is coming in application development and also artistry. The role of craft and the role of technology and software coming together at the intersection. You're seeing results in the gaming industry. Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. A new wave is coming and it's really inspiring, but also there's a few thought leaders at the front end of this big wave setting the trends and they're here with us in this special panel for The New Creative. Here with us is Brooks Browne, Global Director of VR at Starbreeze Studios, a lot to share there, welcome to the panel. Lisa Watt, VR Marketing Strategist at Intel, Intel powering a lot of these VR games here. And Winslow Porter, co-founder and director of The New Reality Company. Many submissions at Sundance. Not this year, but a ton of experience talk about the role of Sundance and artistry. And then we have Gary Radburn who's a director of commercial VR and AR from media within Dell, Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to this panel. Lisa, I want to start off with you at Intel. Obviously the Tech Lounge here, phenomenal location on Main Street in Sundance. Really drawing a massive crowd. Yesterday it was packed. This is a new generation here and you're seeing a younger demographic. You're seeing savvier consumers. They love tech, but interesting Sundance is turning into kind of an artistry tech show and the game is changing, your thoughts on this new creative. >> Yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I've been here for, this is my third year coming back with VR experiences. And it's really just been incredible to see. Sundance has been on the leading edge of exploring new technologies for a long time and I think this is, I feel like you know this feels like the break out year really. I mean, it's been successful the last few years, but something about this year feels a little bit different. And I think maybe it's the people are getting more familiar with the technology. I think the artists are getting more comfortable with how to push the boundaries. And then we certainly are getting a lot out of seeing what they're doing and how we can improve our products in the future. >> We were talking yesterday, Lisa, about the dynamic at Sundance. And you were mentioning that you see a few trends popping out. What is the most important story this year for the folks who couldn't make it, who might be watching this video that you see at Sundance? Obviously it's a great day today, it's snowing, it's a white day, it's beautiful powder, greatest snow on Earth. But there's some trends that are emerging. We had a march this morning, the Women's March. You're seeing interesting signals. What's your view? >> I think there's a lot less desire to put up with subpar experiences. I mean I think everyone is really starting to push the boundaries, I mean, we saw a lot of 360 video which we love for a linear narrative. But they're really breaking out and really exploring what does it mean to have autonomy especially in the virtual reality experiences, a lot more social is coming to the forefront. And then a lot more exploration of haptics and the new ways of extending into more 4D effects, etc. So I think it's very very exciting. We're really excited to see all the new innovations. >> Winslow, I want to ask you, if you can comment, you've been an active participant in the community with submissions here at Sundance. This year you're kind of chilling out, hanging out. You've been on the front lines, what is your take on the vibe? What's the sentiment out there? Because you're seeing the wave coming, we're feeling it. It feels early. I don't know how early it is, and the impact to people doing great creative work. What's that take? >> Well yeah, it's kind of like VR years are like dog years, you know. Like a lot can happen in a month in the VR space. So I had a piece here in 2014 called Clouds. It was an interactive documentary about Creative Code, but that was back when there was only two other VR pieces. It's interesting to see how the landscape has changed. Because CCP Games had a piece there. An early version of E Valkyrie. And unfortunately in the last three months, they had to close their VR wing. So, and then Chris Milk also had a Lincoln piece with Beck. Which was a multi camera 360, actually it was a flash video that they recorded to the DK1. And so that was, seeing that everyone was, saw the potential. The technology was still pretty rudimentary or crude even, we should say. Before any tracking cameras. But every year people learned from previous Sundances and other festivals. And we're seeing that Sundance kind of raises the bar every year. It's nice that it's in January because then there's all these other festivals that sort of follow through with either similar content, newer versions of content that's here, or people have just sort of learned from what is here. >> So I got to ask you. You know, obviously Sundance is known for pushing the boundaries. You see a lot of creative range. You see a lot of different stuff. And also you mentioned the VR. We've seen some failures, you've seen some successes, but that's growth. This market has to have some failures. Failures create opportunities to folks who are reiterating in that. What are some of the things that you can point to that are a positive? Things that have happened whether they're failures and/or successes, that folks can learn from? >> Well, I think that this year there's a lot more social VR. We're connecting people. Even though they're in the same space, they're able to be in this new virtual world together. There's something amazing about being able to interact with people in real life. But as soon as you have sort of a hyper reality where people are able to be experiencing a Sufi ritual together. Things that you wouldn't normally... That they're not possible in the real world. And also, I think that there's issues with lines too. Obviously every year, but the more that we can have larger experiences with multiple people, the more people we can get through. And then more impact we can make on the audience. It's really... We were in claim jumper last year. And we could only get one person in every 10 minutes. And that makes things pretty tricky. >> And what are you doing at Sundance this year? You've obviously got some stuff going on with some of the work you've done. What's your focus? >> So yeah we have a company called New Reality Company where we produce Giant and Tree. It's part of a trilogy where Breathe is going to be the third part. We're going to be completing that by the end of this year. And right now, I would say the best thing about Sundance is the projects, but also the people. Being able to come here, check in, meet new people, see partners that we've been working with in the past. Also new collaborations, everywhere you turn, there's amazing possibilities abound. >> I want to talk about empathy and social. I mentioned social's interesting in these trends. I want to go to Brooks Brown, who's got some really interesting work with Starbreeze and the Hero project. You know, being a pioneer, you've got to take a few arrows in your back, you've got to blow peoples' minds. You're doing some pretty amazing work. You're in the front lines as well. What's the experience that you're seeing? Talk about your project and its impact. >> Well for us, we set out with our partner's ink stories, Navid Khonsari, a wonderful creative, and his entire team to try to create that intensely personal experience kind of moving the opposite direction of these very much social things. The goal, ultimately being to try to put a person inside of an event rather than a game style situation where you have objective A, B, or C. Or a film that's a very, very hyper linear narrative. What is that sort of middle ground that VR itself has as unique medium? So we built out our entire piece. Deep 4D effects, everything is actually physically built out so you have that tactility as you walk around. Things react to you. We have smell, temperature, air movement, the audio provided by our partners at DTS is exceptional. And the goal is ultimately to see if we put you in a situation... I'm doing my best not to talk about what that situation is. It's pretty important to that. But to watch people react. And the core concept is would you be a hero? All over the world, every day people are going through horrific stuff. We're fortunate because we're the kind of people who, in order to experience, say a tragedy in Syria, we're fortunate that we have to go to Park City, Utah and go in virtual reality to experience something that is tragic, real, and deeply emotional. And so our goal is to put people through that and come out of it changed. Traumatized actually. So that way you have a little bit more empathy into the real world into the actual experiences they went through. >> And what's the goal? This is interesting because most of the some stuff you see, the sizzle out there is look at the beautiful vistas and the beaches and the peaks and you can almost be there. Now you're taking a different approach of putting people in situations that probe some emotional responses. >> Yeah. It's a big deal to us. The way Navid like to put it, and I'm going to steal this from him, is you see a great deal of people prototyping on hardware and all of these things, and it's great cause we need that. We need to be able to stand on the shoulders of those giants to be able to do these things. But you see very few people really prototyping what is the concept of story as per VR? We've been doing, at Starbreeze, we've been doing location based for some time now and I've been getting thousands upon thousands of pitches. And whenever you get a pitch, you can pretty much identify, oh you come from a film background, you come from a games background. There's very few people who come down that middle line and go, well this is what VR is supposed to be. This is that interesting thing that makes it very deeply unique. >> What's the confluence and what's the trend in your mind as this changes? Cause you mentioned that gamers have affinity towards VR. We were talking about that before we came on the panel. You know, pump someone in mainstream USA or around the world who does email, does work, may not be there, you're seeing this confluence. How is that culture shifting? How do you see that? Cause you're bringing a whole nother dimension. >> We're trying to go back to a little bit, something about this Sundance being a little bit different. I think in general in VR, you're seeing this sort of shift from a few years ago it was all potentiality. And I think a lot of us, the projects were great, but a lot of us who work in VR were like oh I see what they're trying to do. And people like my dad would be like I don't. I don't see what they're trying to do. But that is shifting. And you're seeing a larger shift into that actuality where we're not quite there yet where we can talk about the experiences every day Americans are going to have. What is the real ready player one that we're actually going to have existing. We're not there yet, but we're much closer every time. And we're starting to see a lot of these things that are pushing towards that. Final question before I go to some of the speeds and feeds questions I want to get with Intel and Dell on is what is the biggest impact that you're seeing with your project and VR in general that will have the most important consequences for societal impact? >> Well, we were fortunate yesterday we had a number of people come through Hero. And a number of them simply actually couldn't handle it. Had to come out. We had to pull people out. The moment we took the headset off, they were, tears were streaming down their face. There's a level of emotional impact VR is extremely able to cut through. It's not that you're playing a character. It's not that you're in a separate world. You are you inside of that space. And that is a dangerous but very promising ability of VR. >> Winslow, could you take a stab at that, I'd like to get your reaction to that because people are trying to figure out the societal impact in a positive way and potentially negative. >> Yeah I mean, so with that, whenever you traumatize somebody else or have the ability to possibly re-traumatize somebody... In Giant, we made sure that we gave them a trigger warning because yeah these things can be intensely intimate or personal for somebody who already has that sort of baggage with them or could be living in a similar experience. In Giant, we witnessed the last moments of a family. As they're convincing their daughter that the approaching bomb blast is a giant that actually wants to play with her. And so we put haptics in the chair so the audience was also surprised. But we let them know that it was going to be taking place in a conflict zone. So if that was something that they didn't want to participate in, that they could opt out. But again, like we didn't know... We had to go and buy tissues like right off the bat because people were crying in the headset. And that's kind of a... It's an interesting problem to have for the sake of what are sort of the rules around that? But also it makes it more difficult to get people through the experience in a timely fashion as well. But yeah, but we're seeing that as things become more real then there's also a chance to possibly impact people. It's the... >> So it's social for you? You see it as a social impact? >> Well, I mean if everyone's experiencing the same thing that can be social, but again if it's a one on one experience, it's sort of like up to the filmmaker to make sure that they have the scruples that they are playing by the rules. Cause there's right now most every piece of content is being released through Oculus, Steam, or Viveport. But there will be... It's heavily regulated right now, but as soon as there's other means of distributing the content, it could take a different sort of face. >> Certainly some exciting things to grab on, great stuff. I want to get to the commercial angle. Then we're going to talk more about the craft and the role of artistry in the creating side of it. Gary, you're the commercial VR expert at Dell. You're commercializing this. You're making the faster machines. We want faster everything. I mean everyone... Anyone who's in VR knows that all the graphics cards. They know the speeds and feeds. They're totally hardware nerds. What's going on? Where's the action? >> Okay, that's such a large question. I mean we've had some great stuff here that I also want to comment on as well. But inside the commercial side, then yeah everybody wants bigger, stronger, better, faster. And to Winslow's comment about the dog years, that really puts the pressure on us to continue that innovation and working with partners like Intel to get those faster processors in there. Get faster graphics cards in there so that we can get people more emotionally bought in. We can do better textures, we can get more immersion inside the content itself. We're working a lot around VR in terms of opening peoples' eyes for societal impact. So VR for good for instance. Where we're taking people to far flung corners of the Earth. We work with Nat Geo explorer Mike Libecki to show the plight of polar bears in Greenland and how they're gradually becoming extinct for an edutainment and a learning tool. The boundaries are really being pushed in entertainment and film. That's always been the case. Consumer has always really pushed that technology. Commercial's always been a bit of a lagger. They want stability in what's going on. But the creation that's going on here is absolutely fantastic. It's taken what is essentially a prosumer headset and then taking it into that commercial world and lit it up. 360 video, its very inception, people are using it for training inside of their businesses and so that's now going out into businesses now. We're starting to see advances in 360 video with more compute power needed. Where, to the point about immersion and getting people emotionally bought in. Then you can start doing volumetric, getting them in there. And then we're also working with people like Dr. Skip Rizzo who was on our panel yesterday where we're starting to go into, okay, we can treat PTSD. Help people with autism, through the medium of VR. So again, that buys into... >> These are disruptive use cases that are legit? >> Yeah. >> These are big time, market moving, helping people... >> Absolutely. And that where it becomes really, really powerful. Yes, we want our companies to embrace it. Companies are embracing it for training. But when you start seeing the healthcare implications and people crying inside of headsets. That's effecting you deeply, emotionally. If you can make that for good, and change somebody's trigger points inside of PTSD, and the autism side of helping somebody in interview techniques to be able to be more self sufficient, it's absolutely awesome. >> This is the new creative. So what's your take on the new creative? What's your definition? Cause you're talking about a big range of use cases beyond just film making and digital artistry. >> Yeah, absolutely so the new creative is like with all the great work that's here, people are looking at film and entertainment. Now the world really is the oyster for all the creatives out there. People are clamoring out for modelers, artists, story tellers, story experiencers to be able to use that inside their commercial environments to make their businesses more effective. But they're not going to have a 360 video production company inside of their commercial organization. And it's then leveraging all of the creative here and all of the great stuff here. Which is really going to help the whole world a lot. >> Lisa, I want to get your thoughts on this cause you guys at Intel here at the Tech Lounge have a variety of demos, but there's a range of pro and entry level tools that can get someone up and running quickly to pro. And so there's a creative range not only just for digital artistry, but also business we're hearing. So what's the... Cause AI's involved in a lot of this too though. It's not just AI, it's a lot of these things. What's the Intel take on this. >> Well I think it's really an interesting time for us at Intel because one of the things that we have that I think probably nobody else has. We have this amazing slate of products that really cover the end to end process. Both from the creation side of the house all the way to the consumption side. And we talk a lot about our processors. We worked on an amazing project, a couple of huge scenes inside of the Sansar environment. Which is a great tool for really democratizing the creation of spaces. It's a cloud hosted service but it utilizes this amazing client-server architecture. We created four huge spaces in a matter of eight weeks to launch at CES. And some of the technologies that Gary was referring to just in pure processing power like two generations old processors were taking three hours to render just a small portion of a model where our newest generation Core i9s with our opting technology took that time to 15 minutes. So when we think about what we can do now, and those technologies are going to be available in even portable laptop form factors. We've got the piece where we were working here SPHERES. They were able to actually make some corrections and some tweaks basically immediately without having to send them off to some render farm. They were able to do those things. And I know Winslow has talked about that as well. What does it mean to you to be able to react real time. And be able to do your creative craft where you are and then be able to share that so readily. And then you know... I just think that's kind of an amazing equalizer. It's really democratizing the creation process. >> Okay the next question that begs for everyone to address is where are we in this progression? Early? What work needs to get done? Where are we holding back? Is it speeds and feeds? Is it the software? Is it the routines, libraries, art? Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't it going faster? Or is it going faster? >> I would, and I'm sure the team would agree here, I would say that one of the key things is the creator tools themselves, right. They are still somewhat cumbersome. We were talking to another filmmaker. He was like I can't even, I have to play the whole piece from the beginning, I can't just go in and edit, you know change control, being able to collaborate on these pieces with other people. I mean, if you can collaborate in a real world space, you should be able to also collaborate in VR and have change control and all those sorts of things that are necessary to the iteration of a project. So we're trying to work with our software partners. They're all doing a really great job of trying to iterate that, but it's going to take some time. I mean I think that's probably the bigger thing that's holding everything back. We're going to be right there with the processing power and the other technologies that we bring to the table. OEM partners are going to be right there with the best devices. I really think it's something we've all got to push for as far as those tools getting better. >> Brooks, comment on anything? You're in the... >> So for me, the thing that's holding back VR in general is actually the art form itself. One of the great challenges, if you look back, at say the history of film... We're at Sundance, so it's probably fairly apropo. Very early on in the early movies, aside from penny arcade machines that you'd actually stare at, they were 10 minute almost like plays that people would go to almost a playhouse and they'd watch this thing. There were not cuts, there were no angles. It was a single wide shot. Great Train Robbery came around and there was this crazy thing they did called an edit. Where they spliced film together. And if you go back and you read, and they did these dolly shots. People will have no idea what they're watching. There's no way people will be able to follow that. Like people were not happy with it at the time. Now it's stuff that children do on their iMacs at home. They do iMacs all the time, they do it on their iPhones, on their Android devices. These are normal languages of film that we have. VR doesn't have that yet. And there's not a great deal of effort being made in that direction. There's people here doing that. So I'm kind of speaking in the middle of the group, but outside of these people, there's only a handful who are really doing that and it's a significant challenge. When people who are the mainstream consumer put on a VR headset, it needs to be more than just a magic trick where they go oh that's cool. And that tends to be the vast majority of experiences. So what is the thing that is going to make someone go oh I get why we have VR as a medium. And we're not there yet. We're in the direction, but that's >> So you mentioned earlier the point where you can tell if someone's from film or gaming or whatever when you talk to them about VR. Who is the future VR developer? Is it a filmmaker? Is it a gamer? Is it a digital artist? What is this evolving? >> It's a kid in his basement who no one knows and is screwing around with it and is going to do something that everyone thinks is stupid. Like, it's going to be that. Basically every major leap in gaming is kind of the same thing. It's when we understand how ludonarrative dissonance works inside of telling how people move around a space. It's about how we do Dutch angle suddenly in film. And these things get invented. It's going to be some kid who's just screwing around who doesn't have the baggage of the language of film. A lot of the people I know in VR have been fortunate to work in film, in games and interactive or web dev. So you come from a lot of places but someone's going to come along who has none of that baggage. And they're going to be... >> Well you guys are pioneers and you're doing it. So for the first person out there that's in their basement, that inspirational soundbite or comment. How can you guys talk to that person or that group? Because this is the democratization, this is what's happening. It's not the gatekeepers. It's real creatives out there that could come from anywhere. YouTube generation, Twitch generation, gaming. What would you say to that person to motivate them and to give them that passion? >> Well it's only going to get easier, faster, cheaper, all these things are happening. But again, yeah I totally agree with what Brooks said. It's really about the culture and about educating the audience and getting them up to speed. There are some VR experiences that as soon as they put on the headset, like somebody who's never done it before, immediately will take it off cause they'll get nauseated. And then there's people, like kids who are like jet fighters. They've seen everything. You could throw like a 30 frames per second experience at them and that doesn't even phase them. They can be, all of a sudden their worlds are changing and they're like bring it because they're ready for that. So I think it's sort of about raising the bar for what the audience is comfortable with, familiar with, educating the community. There's a lot of tools right now, you know with Unreal and Unity that allow people who have very little... They don't need to know C# or C++, they can get started in a lot of like visual. What you see is what you get. Being able to drag things into a virtual room. And the windows headsets that are out. They refer to them as mixed reality, but just even having the ability to flip up the screen and transition from the virtual world to the real world in milliseconds, it allows you to be able to create things more at the speed of thought instead of coming up with an idea, coding it, and making sure it works, and then eventually putting on the headset. The sooner that we can actually be ideating inside this virtual environment is when things will get really interesting. >> So the next question is to take to the next level is what's the playbook? How does someone get involved? How does someone ingratiate into a community? If I'm an artist, I want to get, and I'm proficient with technology, or maybe not, how do they get involved? Is it community driven? Is it social? You guys mentioned seeing social's a big trend here. How do people get involved? What's the track? >> Well yeah you don't just need to go to a grad school or... There's a lot of programs out there that are popping up. Almost every single major state school has like an interactive art program now. And that wasn't the case like two or three years ago. So we're seeing that that's a big shift in the culture. But again, VR is still... It's expensive and it's you know, like VR, I refer to it's in the stage of it's almost like in the neo geo phase, maybe a little before that. But it's the really expensive thing that your friend's neighbor has. Or his older brother or something. You get to play it a little bit, you're like that's great but there's no way in hell I'm going to... You know, I can't afford that or like that just doesn't really work with my lifestyle right now so it needs to incorporate itself into our everyday, our habits. And it needs to be something that... If we're all doing it then it makes sense for us to do it together not just somebody in their basement doing it by themselves. >> Yeah feel free to comment, this is a good topic. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So what we're doing is sort of about democratization and accessibility. So for people to get into the then they're going to need a rig, they're going to need a headset and previously it's actually been quite expensive to actually take that first plunge into it. So now by democratizing and bringing price points down, it makes it more accessible. That helps content creators because there's now more of an audience that can now consume that content. And the people that can then play with the medium and consume it now have a better reason to do it. So we're working on that. We're also working on the education pieces like Key. It's actually going out there to schools and actually letting them experience VR and play with VR. Because it is a whole new different medium. We've seen film directors and filmmakers go into the VR space and things that worked in 2D film like fast pans and whatever else so the points have already been made don't really translate into VR without somebody losing their lunch. So it is going to be somebody who's coming up who hasn't got the baggage of previous skill sets inside of 2D doing it inside of VR. So we're going to see that. And in terms of the technology, everybody's wanting things to progress. That shows the level of excitement out there. And everybody wants to get into it. Everybody wants to see it go further. And I'm reminded of the mobile phone. Mobile phone, 30 years ago? Two suitcases for batteries, a large brick on the ear and a car antennae. Okay, so where we are now, if you had a time machine and you went back in time to talk to the inventor of the mobile phone, well, I'd be a lot richer because I know sports results and all, but that aside, but you go back and talk to them and you said do you know in 30 years time, everybody is going to be carrying that device? Everybody's going to be dependent on that device? They're going to get social anxiety and separation anxiety if they lose it. And they will probably laugh in your face. >> Alright so since you brought up the phone analogy, since I love that example, are we in the Blackberry moment of VR and no one yet has built the iPhone? Because the iPhone was the seminal moment for smartphones. And you see what happened there. Is VR needing that kind of break? Or is it there? >> I think we're on the cusp. Where we are at the moment with technology, we've had the headsets, which I say have been more in the consumer space, they've been designed to hit a certain price point. We had CES the other week where we've had advancements now in the resolutions of headset that are now coming out. One of the issues was well I can't see texts, I can't read texts. So from a working environment, if you're actually using tools that you would normally use on a 2D screen, you can now translate that and read that text. However, in terms of the tools that people use, why are we trying to put 2D screens into a VR headset? We've got a whole new way of interacting with data. We've got a whole new way of doing things that are going to be more intuitive than the mouse and keyboard interaction that we're used to. Why just translate that. Let's push that envelope and those are the developments that we're pushing our partners and our ISVs to really embrace. >> So it's an evoution. >> It's absolutely an evolution. >> You guys have any thoughts on that comment. That we have that inflection point, are we hitting that, will we see it soon, is it here? >> Well I think it's a very interesting symbiotic relationship between multiple factors. So you know, we hear the cost factor, we hear the technology factor, then we have the content factor. You know I saw an interesting evolution at CES we had created this virtual booth experience so that you could still come to the CES Intel booth without actually having to be there. And I met a guy in there and I was like hey where are you? He goes I've been in here like all week. (laughter) And I was like oh yeah, where do you live? He goes oh I'm in my basement in Nebraska. But he had just, this was Friday when I met him. He'd been in there all week, but in 2D mode. And he had gone out the night before and bought a headset just so he could come back and go in VR mode. And I think, yes, all these factors have to kind of line up, but I do think that content, those experiences that are going to keep people coming back for more. Like these guys literally kept coming back to our booth. Right, to see... >> Content gain. >> To see who was there. And to them at that point, it wasn't really a barrier of cost. It was like there is something that I want to consume therefore I am going to go get what I need to consume it. And I use the analogy of HDTV, right. When we kind of moved over that hump where there was enough content people didn't really care how much that television cost. >> Sports was great. Sports really highlighted HD. >> Yeah. >> But this is a good point. This is a good question to ask. Brooks, I'd love to get your thoughts. Content drives experiences, amazing experiences, but we're building the scaffolding of everything at the same time. So where are we, what's your opinion? >> So here on the Starbreeze side, we're fortunate because we have our own headset. We have the StarVR headset we've been building with Acer. 5K all of that stuff and we're upgrading it over the next year. Our focus has been, we skipped the consumer market very much. We went straight to location based and enterprise. And the reason we did that is because there's a promise of VR at a basic, I don't want to say technology stand point, but from an experience perspective, when it comes to that resolution, when it comes to that field of view, when it comes to these things people expect. Average consumers who go to a movie and they see these giant screens. They want that translated. They don't have the understanding like we do of well, LED panels are actually a pain in the ass to build and it takes a little bit and they flip at their own speeds. Time to photon is not a thing my dad will ever see in his life. But there's a reality that people have a need for that. And it is extremely expensive. It's again the reason we went straight to LBE. But for us it's about marrying the two and consistently trying to match what's happening. So when we're talking about, as I mentioned earlier the technology and how we're standing on the shoulders of giants very very quickly, someone who's doing technology is going to see what we're doing content wise and go well I can do that better technology wise. And then we're just going to keep leap frogging. And it's very similar to the phone in the same way that we're not at the final stage of the phone. Like we're at our stage of the phone and no doubt in 30 years people will laugh at us for carrying anything. The same way we laugh about the briefcases and the giant batteries in the cars we had to pull with us. So it's one of those things that's continually transitional. And VR's in an odd, amazing place. >> Well you know, it was a lot of waves that we've all seen. You mentioned the mobile phone, that's a good one to point to. It feels like the PC revolution to me because the same culture of entrepreneurs and pioneers come from a bunch of different backgrounds. So I'd like to get Brooks perspective and Winslow's perspective on this because I think there's an entrepreneurial culture out there right now that's just emerging very fast. It's not like your classic entrepreneur software developer. So in this movement, in this wave, the entrepreneur is the filmmaker, it could be the kid in the basement, could be the gamer. Those entrepreneurs are trying to find a path. >> Yeah, it's a weird mix. VR is at this odd point where not only is it the people who are wanting to be cutting edge in terms of content or technology, but also that first mover strategy from the business side of things. And so everyone wants to be those guys who are charging ahead because in reality, if you look at the financials around all of this, VR is one of those things that you don't want to finance. It's not nearly as safe as say Marvel Avengers or the next Call of Duty. >> You've got to be, you've got to hustle. >> Yeah you've got to hustle. You've got to make... >> What's your advice? >> Start doing it. That's really it. It's the same advice I used to give to game makers when people would be like well I want to learn how to make games. It's like go to YouTube, download a thing and go do it. There's literally no reason why you can't. >> Are there meetups or like the Homebrew Computer Club that spawned the Mac. >> There are, there are infinite groups of VR people who are more than happy to give you all the terrible and wonderful opinions that come with that. There's no shortage of people. There's no shortage and it's an amazingly helpful group. Because everyone wants someone else to figure out something so they can steal that and then figure out something else. >> Winslow, your advice to entrepreneurs out there that are young and/or 14 to 50, what should they do? Jump right in obviously is a good one. >> Well yeah, experiment, break things, that's really the only way to learn. I would say watch as much VR as you can because sometimes bad VR is the best VR. Because you can learn don't do that. And if you learn, if you put all that together, you can really... It's like this lexicon that you can really follow. Also, I think we... As people in tech, we kind of get obsessed with things like resolution, frame rate, and these are very important, but it's also good to remember, or at least for me, I watch some of the best experiences from storytelling when I was a kid, eight years old on a 12 inch screen that was 640 by 480. You know, like scan lines on the VHS. But for me the story still resonated and it's important to think of story first, but obviously it's a dance between the story and the technology. They kind of have to both organically work together. And if they don't, one thing in the story that doesn't work because the tech isn't supporting it, can throw you out of the experience. >> Other concern entrepreneurs might have is financing. How do I get someone to help me build it? And then doing relationships. Finding relationships that could... One plus one equals more than two, right. So how do you? >> You have to get really creative when it comes to funding right now. Unless you're doing location based, which also requires a certain amount of investment to get it up to a bar where you want to be showing it to people with all the haptic effects when it's heat, smell, vibration, stuff like that. You know, it's not cheap to develop. But as far as like working with film foundations, we're fortunate enough to be sponsored by Fledgling Fund and Chicken and Egg. But we also were able to get partnerships with people like Intel and NVidia. And also work with people who come from a traditional film background. There's not one way to successfully fund a project. There's a million. And that's why it's interesting that the technology's innovating, but also the market place is as well. >> One of the things I want to ask is as any new industry gets building, is cultures form early. DNA forms in the entrepreneurs, in the pioneers. And one of the big hottest topics in the creative world is inclusion and diversity. So what's the makeup of the culture of this new generation? Because democratization means everyone can participate, everyone's involved. What's the state of the community vis a vis diversity, inclusion, and the role of the actors in the community. >> Well I think it's important to understand that VR has a profound ability to place you in somebody else's shoes. The trick though is to make sure that those feel like they're your shoes. But I think that we're learning a lot more about story telling techniques and we're able to empower people that their voices you know were previously not heard. The tricky thing is being able to yeah, educate all different groups of people how to use the technology, but once they're enabled and empowered to do it, it's amazing what you can experience inside the headset. >> So VR can be an enabler for education, outreach, a variety of things? >> Yes, I mean the term empathy, empathy machine gets thrown around a lot. You could do a drinking game around it. For panels when people are talking about it. But it's important to know there is a truth to that. And it's, yeah the perspective shift from looking at a screen, a 16 by 9 screen where you can look away, then dissolving the screen and becoming that person. Becoming the director, the actor, the camera person, the editor. When you're in the first person perspective, there's so much more... It feels more personal and that's a really interesting angle that we're going to continue to explore. >> So you could walk in someone's shoes, literally? >> Yes, you literally can. You just have to make sure that you got a... The tracking system's proper or else you'll look like there's... It can be come a horror movie pretty quickly if your leg is behind your head. >> Lisa, your thoughts on this, I know it's important to you. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's fascinating because I've been in tech for a really long time. And seen many, many trends. I mean the first job I had at Intel I was a PC tech and as you can imagine as a female, I think there was one other tech female in the department at the time and I would get funny looks when I would show up with my bag. They were like hi can I help you? I'm like I'm not here to deliver coffee, I'm here to fix your computer, you know. So I've seen a lot of trends and it's super exciting to me to see so much diversity cross culture, cross country, I mean we're having... We had guys come in from all over the world. From even war torn, they've escaped their country just several years ago and they're coming and they're bringing all that creativity to the market. We're seeing very, very strong female contingent from the filmmaker perspective so it's this wonderful, wonderful just primordial soup of people that I think are growing their own voice and their own power. They're breaking molds as far as how you actually get content produced. Distribution is kind of crazy right now. I mean, how do you get it distributed? There's like so many different ways. But all of those things are so important to the evolutionary and biological process of this. Yes, we need to let it go and sometimes we're frustrated. We're like where's the standards? Where's the one ring to rule them all? Where there's not going to be one. And it's good for us that there's not right now. It's frustrating from a business perspective sometimes. You're like, I can't peanut butter myself around all of these places, but I think it's just a very unique time where so many people are... The technology is accessible, that means that so many creators can now bring their fresh voice to this space and it's just going to be fascinating to continue to watch. >> That's awesome. Well two more questions and I'll give you some time to think about the last one which is your perspective on Sundance, what's happening this year, your personal view of what you think's happening, what might happen during this year. But the question I have for you now is to go down the line. We'll start with Brooks here, and talk about the coolest thing that you're involved in right now. >> It actually has to be Hero. We're debuting it here at Sundance. We've been working on it and not talking about it for about nine months. And it's been very difficult. Again it's sacrosanct to the experience that you don't know literally what you're getting in to. And the emotional response has been essentially our goal, trying to find out how far can we take that. You actually being in a space, moving around, having that interactivity, doing what you would do. But it being your story and how deeply we can absolutely effect a human being. And again, watching people come out, it's one of those things, I've been doing game development, I've worked on films, I've done all kinds of stuff. And you usually get a chance when someone experiences something you've made, you walk up to them and you go so what'd you think? And that's not at all what we can do with ours. >> How has it impacted you, that reaction? >> Well, I personally suffer significant PTSD and I've had some traumas in my life. And so it's been incredibly powerful to be able to share these things with people. Share this emotion in a deeply profound, yet amazingly personal way. Which I'm amazingly fortunate to be able to be a part of it. >> Alright thanks for sharing. Coolest thing that's going on with you right now here at Sundance. >> Just the fact that I'm here at all. I mean, it's incredible right? Personally was able to be an advisor on the SPHERES project that is premiering here with Eliza McNitt. She's someone who was an Intel Science Fair winner back in high school and kind of came back to us. So just to see the evolution of an artist really from the beginning to the point where they've been able to come here to Sundance. I'm also very passionate about the work that we're doing with Sansar. I kind of consider myself one of the chief storytellers at Intel around Virtual reality and this new move into social where people are like well what's this game. I'm like, it's not a game. It's you are the game, you are the interactivity. You become the person that makes the space interesting. We're just really setting the scene for you. And there's so many... You know there's a lot of different people kind of chasing this be togetherness. But what we've been able to produce there. And just to be able to explore some of my own personal ideas has just been such a gift. Then to be working with guys like these on the panels and see what they're doing and just be in touch is really just an exciting time. >> John: Awesome. >> Probably what, other than the people on the projects, or the projects that are being shown here, we're working on our new project, which we would have loved to premiere here, but we did... Basically when you get in, you have two months to create a piece, so you have a demo and you have to finish it, so we're taking a little bit more time. This one's going to be about a year development cycle. It's called Breathe where we take you from where Giant left off, where, in Giant, the ceiling collapses on a family. They're in front of you. In this experience, we use a breathing apparatus to basically bring yourself back to life. And then you realize you're trapped under rubble and you remove the... We actually want to have physical objects on top of you that are going to be tracked. So you're moving rubble from you and you realize that you're a six year old girl. You're the survivor from Giant. And you get to witness what it's like to be a future refugee sort of in different key moments of her life that use breath. Whether it's a flirtatious moment, blowing a dandelion, seeing your own breath in snow as a drone shows you a message that your parents pre-recorded on your 18th birthday. This is all in the future, obviously, but every time you walk around an object, you actually grow 10 to 15 years older in the experience. As you get older, the world becomes smaller. And then we witness what's like for her last breath. From being six years old to being 90 years old. But it's a profound personal experience. >> John: That sounds cool, cool. Gary, coolest thing that you're involved in right now at Sundance. >> Wow. I could say it's all cool that would be a bit trite. They say if you enjoy what you do, is it really a job? And I'm lucky enough to be in that position. Because working with all these guys here and like people around the place, they're doing such great things that every day I wake up and I'm astounded of where the industry's going. In terms of what we're doing here at Sundance, then we're really starting to push those envelopes as well. I've been lucky enough to be involved with Dunkirk and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Like last year, so some great pieces there. And moving out into this year, we've got some other developments which I can't mention at this point, but we're showing things like AR and VR mashup. So we haven't talked much about augmented reality here. It's an evolutionary, it's not a replacement. Both can be used and we've started to really start to blend those two technologies now. So you can still see the outside world. Just touching on the commercial side, and health care's very big for me. That's where I think the really cool stuff is happening. Entertainment is great and that's really pushing the envelope and allowing us to then take it for the good of human kind. >> It happens everywhere, it's not just entertainment. >> Yeah absolutely. You start looking at MRI scans inside of VR or AR. Talking a patient through it so they can actually see exactly what you're talking about. You're now no longer pointing at flat things on a screen. You're now actually taking them through it. If you're using AR, you can actually judge the responses of the patient as for how they're reacting to the news. And effectively, inside of the VR, and what's really cool for me is seeing people's reaction to that content and to the entertainment content. >> That's awesome. Okay final question. This is a little bit of self serving because I'd like you to help me do my job at SiliconANGLE. If you were a reporter and you were going to report the most important stories happening this year at Sundance or really kind of what's really happening versus what's kind of being billed to be happening here. What's the story? What is the story this year at Sundance 2018 in your personal perspective? We'll go down the line and share your observations. >> Well, mine here, I'm a Sundance newbie. This is my first year of being here. I'm absolutely astounded by the community spirit that's around. I go to a lot of technical trade shows and technical presentations. People coming here with a willingness to learn. Wanting to learn from other people. It's been touched on already. It's the pool of knowledge that's available inside of Sundance that everybody that comes here can actually tap into to create better content, to learn not what to do as well as learn what to do. And I just think that's brilliant because in that community spirit, that's really going to help enable this industry quickly. >> John: Winslow, you've got some experience, what's your thoughts? >> Obviously, this Intel house, just a little plug for you Lisa. (laughter) Tech Lounge. We got that? Okay good. I mean, yeah, the people that's here. Every year we come here and see where the high water mark is. All these people are... Some of these teams first started with two people and then they grew to six and then by the end of it, there's 100 people working around the clock, pulling all-nighters to be able to give the latest and greatest of what's available with these current tools. So it's amazing because the work itself doesn't really mean anything until people get to experience it. So that's nice that they make a big splash. The people here are very attentive to it. It's a very nice audience and this will continue the momentum for future festivals throughout the year, but also will excite people that have never done VR before. People who have never been to Sundance before. We're seeing that there's a lot of new people. And that will continue to influence many years to come. >> John: So you think VR is the top story here being told? >> As far as like just to generalize, I would say last year kind of the big VR year. This is kind of the big AR year. Next year's going to be the AI year. Then after that we're going to start putting them all together. >> John: Great, great feedback. >> I think it's just exciting for Intel just to be back here. I think Intel hasn't been here in quite some time. Dell coming in here probably one of the breakout years for us to come back and really talk to creators what we're doing from the Intel Studios all the way through to the stuff you can take home and do at home. And I think coming in, we're coming back here with a purpose really, not just to be here to be seen. We're really here with real things and want to have real conversations on how tech can enable what people are doing. Not just from a brand perspective, but from a real hands on point of view. >> John: Yeah, some great demos too, phenomenal tech. >> Really just, yeah everything from the AI stuff we have to the social to the great new pieces that have been submitted here like we mentioned with SPHERES. So I think, yeah, it doesn't feel gratuitous to me you know that Dell or Intel is here this year. We've really come with a purpose. >> You guys are moving the needle, it's really awesome. We need more horsepower. >> Brooks, your thoughts on Sundance this year. Observation, the vibe, what would you tell your friend back home when you get back? >> If, for me, I think it's almost the non-story. It's like the opposite of a story. It's just the deep integration of VR into the normal Sundance flow I think has been interesting. Some people have been here for a few years. And back in the day when it was one or two, it was a lot of oh, you do VR? What's that then? Whereas now, you see a lot more people who are crossing over. Going to see documentaries, then they come to see a VR piece and it's just a part of the normal flow. And the team at New Frontier has done exceptional work to kind of make sure that they have this ridiculous high level of broad content for all kinds of people. All kinds of experiences, all high end things. But it's not that VR's here. Oh good, we have a VR section. It's a lot more of an integrated set up. And it's been really encouraging to see. >> Well you guys have been great. It's been very inspirational. Great information. You guys are reimagining the future and building it at the same time so entrepreneurially and also with content and technology. So thanks so much for sharing on this panel The New Creative. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage of Sundance 2018 here at the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCube. Covering South by Southwest 27 deeds, brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live coverage of South by Southwest here in Austin, Texas. This is Silicon Angle's theCube, our flagship program. We're going to go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. Our next guest Ali Vahabaznet. >> Almost, Vahabzadeh. >> Vahazbadeh, Vahabzadeh, CEO of Chariot, a hot start up that was acquired by Ford Mobility Solutions last September. Really innovating in what I call the sharing economy which has been called, not I call, the sharing economy. But this really highlights the paradigm shift. So Ali, I want to thank you for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me, John. >> So Chariot is one of your cities not only in the Bay Area but here in Austin. Give a quick highlight of what's going on here in Austin for you guys and the freebie from the South by Southwest goers. >> Yes, Chariot is reinventing mass transit by crowdsourcing new routes in neighborhoods that either don't have the most commuter options or there's commuter options but there's not enough space on buses and trains. So we crowdsource these routes and we launch operations in these neighborhoods once we hit a tipping point and we get vehicles on the road. We started in San Francisco in 2014. We expanded to Austin, and then most recently in September we got acquired by Ford Smart Mobility to become a cornerstone of Ford's mobility strategy for many years to come. >> So this really highlights the sharing economy as I said, but what's going on is that the users interface to the real world is becoming digital. So obviously cars are not digital yet, they'll be self driving soon and Ford's announced mass production in five years. But it points to their relationship with others, collaboration. This is the big AI trend that gets surfaced in real-world benefits. >> Yeah, it's incredible. Everyone knows that Ford makes incredible cars, but Ford also wants to be a mobility company as well. With this thing that we have in our pockets, the phone, it provides a tremendous amount of data about us, commuters, riders, people who are trying to get from A to B. By harnessing that data for now it's given to us by the users themselves. By harnessing that data we can make some really intelligent and efficient choices about where our vehicles, in our example, 14-passenger Ford transit wagons, should be and could be to pick people up at the times where they need it the most. >> All right Ali, I want to kind of get you to riff on something with me. Imagine you're re-imagining the future, I love that. Or reinventing mass transit. So re-imagine some of the amazing things that are possible in your vision. Just kind of roll forward a few years. I mean we're going to have headsets and virtual reality and holograms that can bring my experience inside the vehicle. Not only am I just getting a ride somewhere, I mean in our area in Silicon Valley the Google buses and the company buses they've all gone wifi. They're working away. So I can imagine that you must have a vision for technology into your product. Can you share you vision on that? >> Yeah, imagine most people's commute is a twice-daily worst part of their day. We've moved the needle even without a lot of experimental things going on inside of Chariot. We've move it to, it's actually a decent part of your day and you don't have to worry about it anymore. What Chariot and Ford is looking forward to doing in the next couple of years is to actually make it, believe it or not, the best part of your day. You mentioned VR, entertainment options, social connecting options with other people in a Chariot who you may either want to network with professionally in the future or maybe even socially. Perhaps your next date is onboard. So there's so many things that you could be doing in that Chariot because we know your preferences. We know where you're commuting from and to. We know what you want to eat for dinner. We know where you want to go for happy hour on Thursday night and the Chariot's AI can actually be suggesting to you what Chariot to get on at what time and these folks are going to be onboard with you at that point. >> So you now I'm craving some Buffalo wings, so you just pull off the exit and I get some wings? Or bring out a Fitbit, or Johnny's going to take a bio break. I'm kind of being over the top, but this is what you're thinking, right? >> Perhaps you're on a diet and the device on your hand or the app, the diet app on your phone knows exactly what you had for breakfast and lunch. Perhaps the Chariot is headed in a certain neighborhood with a vegetarian option and you've had too much meat in the day. It could suggest to you hey, get off on this curb because there's a wonderful option here for you to have a non-protein meal. >> John: But that's in your future, you see that vision. >> It's in the future and it's not too distant from where we are right now. I mean what I think is cool between Chariot and Ford is Ford has these incredible resources. Also has vision with what they can do in the vehicle. Chariot, in a very short amount of time, in less than three years, we were able to penetrate a very attractive market of young professionals and actually have them tell us what they want to do, where they want to go from and where they want to go to. We're just scratching the surface right now. >> Tell me about your experiences here at South by Southwest. What's the vibe of the show? We've seen some touchpoints around. It's a VR show, it's some AI. Other things that you're observing that you could surface and say are the key top story lines that are developing on day one of South by Southwest? >> Yeah, you know it's my first South by Southwest, John. I was walking over here with a friend. I was remarking to her that I actually feel this is probably what world's fairs were like 100 years ago when people were discovering new technologies and companies like Ford were actually big participants in world's fairs. This feels like a 21st century world's fair. I'm just seeing such incredible installations and companies that I've never heard of before looking to make an impression on consumers or future users. Companies that don't even have a product, don't even have a service in reality right now and are just providing you a peak into their future. It's my first day here. I can't wait for the next few days. >> Well it's also a good mash up of creativity, industry, and just people, it's a melting pot of just kind of laid-back. It's Austin so it's pretty cool here. Easy living, as they say. >> Yeah, absolutely. There are people who are looking at what the future can hold. Also there are people who I can see in the look of their eyes what is my next start up going to be? Or where can I take my career next? Is it smart transportation like Chariot? Or it is something in VR or AI? Or something that doesn't even exist today? So it's great to see this collaboration. People also meeting each other who've never met each other before. Breaking plates and meeting new people for the first time. >> Okay, so personal question, last question to give you kind of on a personal note. Take your CEO of Chariot hat off at Ford Smart Mobility, put on your personal Ali hat. What are you most excited about? Not with the Chariot, but outside of Chariot as you look at the real world technically speaking. What are you most excited about? What's floating your boat, so to speak? Or driving your car or Chariot? >> Riding in a Chariot, you don't have to drive anymore. The first thing that comes to mind is I'm honored that I'm going to have dinner with a bunch of mayors this evening including Mayor Adler and several others. And I tell you what, when I started the company three years ago, no one would pick up our phone, regulators, city officials and the like. But now I think that the city and urban leaders whether it's Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor's Office, the Transit Authority, the Housing Authority, whatever the case may be, they really are open to not just innovations in transit, but innovations in housing, innovations working together, live-work. In a very short three years I've seen that sea change in the attitude. It's going to be, I think it's a dam that's opened up. I think you're only going to see this momentum accelerate with the civic authorities and innovators and technologists actually working together. >> It's a real impact. Final, final question since one popped in my head. What is AI going to do for your business, your industry, transportation and Chariot in general? What is AI's impact to your industry? I think AI's going to take cars off the street because we are going to know where people are coming from and going to at what probable hours. So we can run much more efficient routes and much more efficient networks. We'll run larger vehicles, larger format vehicles as opposed to single occupancy vehicles like you'll see on Rainey Street tonight. So that's gets me really excited because it doesn't only improve the human experience, it helps the environment and it's all good things. I can't think of a downside for AI in transportation. >> Well there might be some disruption in some transition. Let's just take one simple example. Parking lots, what are you going to turn them into? >> I can't wait to see parking lots converted into lower-income housing, into parks. >> Public easements. >> Into public easements, into more shared office workspace. >> The impact's bigger than people think. >> Just walk down Braswell Street or Congress Street. It seems like every other building is a parking garage. Or half of a building is now a parking garage. We have to stop building parking garages. We have to stop providing free parking both at home and at work so that we can force, transition people into the different formats of commuting. >> So all these jobs that are going away are now being shifted. Now again, idea for people out there watching just get in the business of retrofitting garages into housing, that's a new opportunity. >> That's my next start up, John, are you in? >> John: I'm in. >> Okay. >> Seed funding, this is theCube here live at South by Southwest at the Intel AI Lounge. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. More after this short break. (upbeat instrumental music)