Not Your Father’s Data Center - The Evolution of Generative AI
Episode Date: October 10, 2023In this episode, Data Center and Technology Expert Bill Kleyman joins the show.After 15 years in the technology space, Bill has the chance to see quite the endless advancements. Today, he wor...ks with leaders in digital infrastructure to help build a more sustainable and inclusive future and support an ever-connected digital society. He is also a contributing editor to leading industry publications, including Data Center Frontier, Data Center Knowledge, ITPro Today, and InformationWeek.Today they discuss the evolution of generative AI, but before they get there, Bill tells the fascinating story of his journey to America, fleeing a dangerous radioactive Kiev after the Chernobyl fallout in the late 1980s. They then discuss the incredible advancements we’re seeing in generative AI, and how that can help in a myriad of ways across data centers, technology, health, and everything in between.To connect with Bill, visit his website (https://billkleyman.com/) and connect with him on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/billkleyman/).
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Welcome again to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center.
I am your host, Raymond Hawkins.
Today, you will not hear me talk much at all
because we have the great Bill Clayman with us.
He is going to man the microphone,
which will make my job really easy.
He's awesome to talk to, a friend of the program.
We love him at Compass.
He is far more entertaining to listen to than I am.
After I get through his illustrious array of titles,
we are gonna hand him the microphone
and let him talk about his background
and how he got in the data center business.
So a board member and advisor at Neuro,
AFCOM data center world program chair,
and a contributing editor at both data center frontier
and data center knowledge.
So if you read about the data center business,
Bill's had something to do with it.
If you care about our standards and AFCOM,
Bill's had something to do with it.
And Neuro, he's all over that place.
So Bill, welcome to Not Your Father's
Data Center. You know what my kids say every time they hear that they go, but dad, it is my dad's
data center. So there's only two people that this show title doesn't work for.
Yeah. I think my five-year-old doesn't quite know what a data center is yet. She just understands
all the blinking lights and whatnot, but you know what? I love it. And thanks for having me here,
Raymond. I really appreciate it. So we're super happy you joined us. And if you're willing, we're going to let you
dive right into telling us about you because I think you're pretty well known in our industry
and our space. And lots of folks know a lot about you, but I don't think they know everything about
you. So let's go all the way back to the beginning. Where'd you grow up? Where'd you go to
school? How'd you get in the data center business? Let's dig into some of that and see where that takes us.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. And everybody listening, it's a pleasure to be here on this show.
The data center industry, just technology in general, is something that's near and dear to
my heart. It's actually funny. If you go on my LinkedIn profile, I think literally the byline
or the very top is like, I love technology. And then I go on to tell you why I like it. There's a really good book out there. It's an Amazon bestseller that I
had a chance to co-author. It's called Greener Data that outlines the beginning of or the nexus
of my career and what I've been doing. I got a nice little bulky chapter in that book. So, okay,
everybody, we're going to be friends really quick. My name is not really bill it kind of is uh i was
born my name is vitaly and i was born in kiev ukraine and uh you know i came to the united
states in the in the early 90s and the reason i'm telling you this is because you know raymond and i
had a little quick little chat he's like bill in the same level of excitement bill how did you get
into this data center industry how did it all start and um what's fascinating is that uh
my my nexus actually started when i when i was very young uh in in soviet ukraine in kiev and
my brother he used to compete in uh there's no other way to put it telegraph competitions
the switch the switch and everything and he would let me sit on his lap and he would put like these
big headphones on my head and uh he taught me numbers and some letters.
And I was like six or seven years old and I would be able to communicate with people all over then Soviet Russia and obviously Ukraine as well.
And even at that really sort of young age, I was fascinated, fascinated by how we could bring people together and closer by using technology.
And obviously, yes, phones were available.
This was in the late 80s.
But it was absolutely fascinating.
And I really enjoyed the concept and the solutions and just the idea behind using these tools
to bring people together and closer.
And I carried that excitement on through my high school career where I did a bunch of
AP classes, definitely around things like coding and comp sci. And I realized that my passions lie more around physical
infrastructure, that design, architecture, engineering, and so on. I feel like I'm an
anomaly here, Raymond, that I'm telling you this story because I'm not a transplant. I started off
in the data center industry. I actually went to a trade school and got a network engineering
undergrad, and then
a master's in business, then another master's in information security.
And from graduating with my network engineering undergraduate, I've been in the data center
industry.
I had a chance to work for the country's largest Citrix partner for a while, left them as their
CTO.
I had a chance to spend time in DevOps, spent four years working with, obviously,
co-location data center industry with my former company called Switch.
And now I get a chance to dive into and work with all of these crazy things that you're hearing about, like chat GPT, generative AI, large language models.
But what's really fascinating is that these tools that I'm working with right now, we
can talk about them, are things that are democratized for our industry, Raymond,
the data center industry and telecommunications,
and how we can be capturing the power of these technologies
and not just leaving it
and relegating it to the hyperscalers.
So I feel that I'm lucky.
I was at a 7x24 conference just recently,
and I was at a big panel.
We were talking about education
and young people in our industry,
and I asked the question,
all right, everybody,
how many in this room
are native to the data center industry?
And by the way, everybody listening to this,
are you native to the data center industry
or are you a musician, a doctor, accountant?
I was the only one that raised his hand
because everyone else was in some way adopted.
I'm lucky.
I love this industry.
I love working with critical infrastructure. I'm lucky. I love this industry. I love working with critical infrastructure.
I'm absolutely fascinated by everything that we do every single day. And I love,
love, love showcasing and sharing with the industry that we are so much more than big
buildings and blinking lights. I mean, this industry is really cool.
All right. So I'm sticking with Vitaly because I like it and I think I can say it properly.
So I'm sticking with Vitaly for the rest of this recording.
You weaved right through Kyiv and then you went into the Telegraph and then you jumped into the data center business.
Hold on.
Okay.
Kyiv and Ukraine are in the news a little bit for the last year.
So let's back up.
How did you get from, because you're in Chicago now, I think, right?
Yeah.
So there's a big journey in there
that we'd love to hear a little bit about.
So get us from six-year-old Vitaly,
working, communicating via telegram to other people
and get me to how you're in the United States.
There's gotta be a fun story there, a fascinating story.
So let's hear some of that journey. You know, I feel like we, you know, I wish we had more time to talk
about some of this because I'm giving like the CliffsNotes version of it. So yeah, born in Soviet
Ukraine in Kiev. And I'd say things started to sort of go downhill when Chernobyl happened in
1986. You know, we actually moved to Crimea
for a little while just to try and escape it, you know, making sure that I didn't have any
health issues and so on. And we stayed there for a little while and then went back right around
88 and 89. We pretty much saw the writing on the wall that, you know, the Soviet government wasn't
going to last very long. So Vitaly, for people that aren't as old as you and me, give them
the distance from where you lived to the Chernobyl incident. And I know you moved south down to
Crimea. Give people a little bit of Eastern European geography.
Free Payat to Kiev, it's not that long. It's probably like a 20, 30 minute drive or so.
So for folks who don't appreciate this, the largest nuclear accident on our globe's history was less than an hour from your house.
So when you say you moved, you guys were getting out of town.
Yeah, yeah, we definitely.
So overall, it's between like, it's about an hour drive, hour and a half hour drive, I would say.
Chernobyl's a little bit further away.
It's probably like 50 to 60 miles from where we were.
Still not, you Still not very far.
I just want folks listening to appreciate when you say you guys were, hey, Chernobyl was an incident. It wasn't like it was a docuseries that we got to watch 40 years later. This was your
family, an hour's drive away. This accident's happening in Soviet, at the time Soviet controlled
Ukraine, and probably not the best flow of information about the accident.
No, no, we didn't know what happened effectively. And as you remember, they had a parade, I think
literally like the next day in the city of Pripyat, where somebody on the roof was taking a picture of
the green glow of the graphite reactors melting and spewing out, you know, iridium and cesium into
the... No, Vitaly, I've read about this. I was read about this. I was not born yet, so I don't think I'd get past that one.
Yes, I remember.
I couldn't get that one out with a straight face.
I wasn't born yet.
Unfortunately, I was.
I appreciate that.
You try to make it.
All right.
So Chernobyl happens.
Mom says we got to go.
Literally, mom and dad.
Dad actually had to stay back and work a little bit.
But me, my mom, and my brother and some extended family hopped on a train, literally, and went to Crimea.
And that's actually where we learned what happened.
We had an idea what was going on.
It was either the Americans launched the bomb or, you know, because we were being told to get the heck out of Dodge.
And we weren't sure what was going on.
But when we got to the south, to Crimea,
you were able to, like, tune in to, like, European radio stations.
And you could hear, like, they're like,
okay, something happened in northern Ukraine,
like, right by the Belarus border.
And we're like, okay, we think we know what's going on here.
And that was sort of like, that was the nexus behind
a lot of the decision making that we had to sort of get out and not just out of Dodge, but I get
out of the country. And many folks stayed. You know, we had we had some family members and some
friends definitely stay back. But when when we decided to leave, that was right around the
collapse of the Soviet Union. And the Soviet government at the time that we announced that
we wanted to leave, they took our passports, they tore them up and they called us traitors to the nation because
you're either Russian or you're nothing, which is, you know, Raymond and everybody listening,
not unlike what's happening to the Ukrainian culture right now by the Russians. And so we
basically had to get rid of everything. We had, you know, just a couple hundred bucks. I had a
couple of toys with me, a couple of backpacks, and we were political asylum refugees living in Europe for a while until we finally got a political asylum visa to the United States and came to good old Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in the early 90s and then moved into a little apartment in north of Chicago.
It was in the city, just north side, lived our extended family in one little apartment
and literally built everything from scratch. And so this is the late 80s, early 90s by the
time you get to Chicago, yes? Yes. Yeah.
All right. Awesome stuff. You won't hear many data center podcasts where you're going to get
a firsthand account of fleeing
chernobyl that is pretty pretty amazing stuff so that's why i wanted to make sure you got it in
there because it's not just hey we decided to leave ukraine this was we got to get out of dodge
and uh and yeah how it led you to end up being now an american which we're so excited about
and i love i love being here it's here. This is an absolutely wonderful country.
Nowhere else I'd rather be.
For those listening, that series, Chernobyl, that was done,
that was very, very well done.
Very good perspective, very open and honest.
If that's like the one thing that you watch about what happened in my home country,
to really try to embrace and understand the situation, that's a good one.
That's a good one.
You know, get a tissue or two already, you know,
because we obviously had friends and people that we knew responding to that incident.
And, you know, some of those folks are going in nothing but like a gas mask
and a, you know, paper-thin radioactive suit.
When studies show that in the center of the radioactive zone,
you couldn't really spend more than 30 to 40 seconds
shoveling that stuff off a roof where, you know, people were spending more than, more than that. But, you know, kind of
goes to show you the state of things back then. So, so I did watch, I can't remember if it's
Netflix or what it is, but I did watch the whole miniseries. And, and I think the, the biggest
thing that, that, that struck me and the lack of respect for human life out of the Soviet Union. I think that's the thing I left
with is thinking that their lack of appreciation for the safety of their people, for the sanctity
of life, that the image of the state and technological advancement and the honoring
the country from a perspective of, hey, look how great we are, was more important than the humans
that live there. That to me was probably the biggest impression and the biggest heartbreak watching that whole series.
I mean, it goes to say, like, there's a nuclear meltdown and the Russian government decides,
hey, let's have a parade.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And let's tell everybody it's not our fault.
It wasn't us.
It's fine.
It's no problem.
Don't worry.
Green glow is normal.
Yeah.
Nothing to see here.
Incredible stuff.
Well, we don't get too many folks that got to live through what an incredible part of history and talking to us on the podcast.
So grateful to hear that part of your story, Bill. And I like Vitaly. I may have a hard time going back to Bill.
You're welcome to do it. Raymondmond that's part of what happened so when we came to america uh if i'd say my name to another american you know
vitale people say it just fine but if they read my name they say like vitally or vitality maybe
sound like an herbal supplement and yeah yeah and so my mom she like she asked an american friend
she's like well what does vitale sound like and they were like it sounds like william i guess and
my mom was like he's good we go change now and so to like you know my american counterparts it's bill in my in high school i was
billy uh and obviously william and then all of my slavic speaking friends that i you know still
interact with it's it's vitality they say vitalik with with a k right you know like
the mayor of uh of kiev right now yeah yeah former boxer hey just mayor now former box yes humanism world
heavyweight champion if i'm not mistaken right yeah not just boxer that's right former heavyweight
champion yeah by the way i've enjoyed some of his interviews during this last year and a half and
his passion for his homeland and his people and his city i feel fascinating stuff i promise we're
going to talk about the potato center business but i gotta ask one more kiev ukraine family so you as we chatted earlier you did mention a fascinating fact about your mom
so so folks that listen no i'm a marine's at but i do want to hear you we got to give props to your
mother and we got to talk a little bit about her service in the military. Just a little bit. Sprinkle some of that in.
Yeah, got to hear it.
It was in the Soviet Army.
I honestly have not asked her very many details.
I know that she was.
We don't want to have to kill all our listeners.
So nothing top secret here.
I can tell you that she was very good shot.
Quote, top of her class with a sniper rifle.
Very nice.
And she was like, I never missed.
I'm like, oh, my God, Bob, I don't think I can hear this conversation from my mother.
What was interesting is that while she was doing that work, my dad, he was in the Army Corps of Engineers in the Soviet Army, Soviet Ukraine Army, I should say.
I knew that he was designing missile silos.
What I didn't know, it was for those missiles.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those.
And so I had no idea.
And honestly, I found out a lot about their military service here in the United States when I was like in my late 20s just because I never really asked.
And they never got a chance to keep their medals. None of their, their,
all of that stuff. Just again, you're either Russian or you're nothing. Right. My dad maybe
got a chance to keep like one or two service medals, if I'm not mistaken, same thing with my
mom. Um, but very, very, very little, if anything. They don't talk about their military career.
My mom does maybe less so, maybe because of what she did.
My dad will talk about his engineering feats all the time, though.
Love the story of your mom.
Love her background and love the story of how you guys got to America.
So thank you for giving us a little piece of you, Bill.
That's super awesome.
Let's switch gears and let's talk a little bit about the data center industry, although
it will pale in comparison to your background, which I love and enjoy getting to hear about.
Like you highlighted, I was in the systems integrator business for years.
I filled buildings full of computers, walking in and out of data centers.
I only ever had one question.
Hey, can you tell me when the circuits are going to be provisioned?
Because that's when my servers could plug in and I could get paid because I didn't get paid until they knew their
servers work. And then 10, almost 11 years ago now, someone said, hey, have you ever looked into
the data center business? I was like, wait, you mean someone owns those buildings? Like, duh.
And I got to join our friends at Digital Realty and learn the industry. And it has been an
incredible 10, 11 years of my life now. And I love to say
that we're really the foundation upon which digital transformation happens, right? Our
industry occasionally will get an elbow to the ribs about, oh, you guys use a lot of power.
You're not a very green industry. What are you doing? And I always joke with folks. I say, hey,
just grab your phone. Just tell me what on here you'd like to stop doing. We'll shut it down.
You don't want to have food brought to the house anymore?
No problem.
Postmate, we're done with that.
Uber Eats, we're done with that.
You don't want to catch a ride to the airport?
No problem.
We'll kill Uber.
You don't want to order plane tickets?
No problem.
We'll kill that.
You don't want to watch Netflix?
No problem.
It is really the foundation for digital transformation.
The stuff that we've all become accustomed to here all lives in our buildings.
And what a joy to get to help provide changing the technology landscape for the world and building the place for that to live.
I really think that's what we do.
And it's been a joy.
No, I hear you.
And, you know, we'll probably talk about this a little bit more. I feel like we've seen a
transition happening in this industry where we used to say that we are the foundation of the
internet. Now, I firmly believe that we are the foundation for humanity. And I think that's
really special. I think that is a change in perspective, especially with all this crazy
stuff that we're hearing about AI, generative solutions. We are shifting the kinds of things that we are supporting for everyday life i
mean it's really special yeah here here i don't think it's too far a reach that the foundation
that humanity is using to launch itself into into all of that's next is really built on the the the
critical infrastructure industry the data center of business So talk with us a little bit. Everybody wants to talk about what's happening, how's our industry changing, what's going on.
And clearly, the thing that makes the news and that everyone hears and sees is chat GPT and generative AI,
and it's changing the world and machine learning and all the great acronyms but talk a little bit about from your perch what you see um as as the technology industry and really mankind shifting what happens
inside those ones and zeros and blinking lights so at the highest level possible uh i want to make
sure people understand uh what what these systems are and certainly how they work. Generative AI is a type of machine learning, right?
So AI is at the very top, overarching umbrella definition term.
And generative AI is a type of that, which at its core works by training models,
software models to make predictions based on data without requirement for explicit programming.
That sounds really detailed and complicated.
Traditional AI models, the old school stuff, right, from a while ago, was designed
to identify underlying patterns, data sets based on probability distribution and find
similar patterns and so on.
Think of it as trying to train a child as to what a picture of a dog looks like.
That's what it is, right?
The more pictures you show, the more accurate it is, and the more it's able to define using a neural network what a dog looks like, what it should be,
different kinds of dogs. Generative AI is the same thing, but now instead of teaching the child to
recognize a dog, you're teaching a child to both recognize a dog and then draw it, right? Paint it
your own interpretation. So it's still based off that same concept and model of the data,
except now you're creating images or text or videos or all of these other kinds of other
systems. And these are done through different kinds of transformative generative kind of
technologies. We've got generative adversarial networks, transformers, and some of these other
ones. Now, here's the big difference. I'll say this in terms that we can understand. A single Google search can power a 100-watt light bulb for 11 seconds, consuming
about 0.3 kilowatt hours of energy per one Google query. There's roughly between 80, 90, to 100,000
queries in a second. A single ChatGPT query, so Raymond asks ChatGPT a question just one time,
is about 50 to 100 times more powerful than that, consuming anywhere between as little as maybe one to two, upwards of three, four, and five kilowatt hours per query.
Now, if Raymond comes out and says, I want a 50 slide deck built in PowerPoint, that's going to be a little bit more power consuming. When we start to take a look at AI, generative AI, everybody listening,
please understand this is not Zoom. This is not EVs. You're going to flood the data centers with all this information. We don't have a precedent for this technology. And just to give you an idea,
I think it was the first two months that they had a million users, active users. And over the course
of nine months, they're just shy of a billion active users, unique users on ChatGPT. We don't
have anything to compare
this to, not Instagram, not the most popular TikTok applications, nothing. Has Facebook hit
a billion users? I mean, now that I think about it, are they even, and they've never been here
20 years, right? I mean, a billion users. We can check as we talk. But in that sense,
Raymond and everybody listening, when the foundation of
the internet came out, traditional data centers kind of sort of lost the race. We were relegated
to traditional workloads, VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, all of these other tool sets.
And again, the building of the internet was relegated to these big hyperscalers,
the larger ones. They were able to build a lot of that foundation. Right now, it feels like we're
losing that race again to the large hyperscalers. The data center industry is starting to catch up.
They're seeing that their customers are asking for generative AI, large language model training
capacity, or just general AI support. And these customers are reluctant to go to the cloud.
They don't want their data to be trained against. They want to pay lower prices.
They want to have data locality and data gravity. So for the data center industry, AI, and more specifically, this modern approach to generative
AI is a massive opportunity to capture a business that's going to be growing, that's hungry to
leverage this information. But to that sense, we're going to have to start thinking about maybe
designing things a little bit differently. Now, you mentioned something, Raymond, about sort of the fear, uncertainty and doubt, the not in my backyard kind of conversation.
I just wrote an article on data center knowledge.
It's titled Get Off My Lawn, You Crazy Data Centers.
And if you haven't had a chance to read that, please do, because some of those protesters that I saw for the first time in my career in Virginia responded to the article in the LinkedIn.
Very cool.
Yeah.
I loved what they had to say.
And I actually offline connected with one of them.
And she's like, Bill, I'm not an idiot.
I don't want to go back to the Stone Age.
I don't want to write stuff on pieces of paper.
I'm not against data centers.
What I'm against is the following.
And she gave me a really good perspective.
I know we're going on a tangent here.
She's like, Bill, I know you're responding to a market need. And then she goes on to explain
that places like Northern Virginia, for example, their government, because they want that business,
sometimes they will sign contracts and documents in general for energy consumption that's from
fossil fuels instead of renewable fuels. And that's what bothers them. They're like,
can you help us?
We need this leadership from the data center industry to go back to government and assign more pressure
to say, yes, this business is growing here.
Yes, it needs to be here,
but please stop signing contracts
that expand on fossil fuels.
That's not an illegitimate request.
And I think that's fair.
So there's a lot of learning and growth.
And I honestly think that things like generative AI,
that's just going to exasperate the challenges.
It's going to make it a lot louder.
I mean, Raymond, South Park did an episode on chat GPT.
If you can't go mainstream than that, then there you go.
Yeah, you've arrived.
Before my friends at Facebook had now met a hammer me,
2.9 billion global users.
It took them 5.1 years to get to a billion.
So multi years, right?
Half a decade.
So thank you, Google, for providing those answers at my fingertips while we talked about it.
But to your point, I mean, a billion users measured in months.
It's just the growth is astronomical.
Absolutely wild.
And what we've been doing at Nero has been really special.
So it's been the democratization of these technologies.
So bringing it into data center partners,
four years spent at Switch, I learned something.
And this is actually summarized beautifully by Peter Gross,
who's one of my mentors, is that the data center industry
loves innovation as long as it's 10 years old. Well, we don't have 10 years to wait on ChatGPT in
January. We have maybe months and we're already like six months behind. So one thing that I learned
is that for these technologies to actually be adopted by co-locations that serve enterprise
and different kinds of customers is that you have to allow them to continue to be good at selling space and power
and nothing else. So we are a platform that sits on top as a Kubernetes engine that continues to help data center customers, partners sell space and power, but in the sense of actually creating
an architecture that's dense, that is capable of supporting GPT generative AI-ready data centers,
so that these leaders stop experiencing revenue bleed by sending these customers to the cloud, which sometimes those instances for GPUs aren't even available.
They're grayed out.
So I want our industry to capture this market and be a leader in it.
Boy, our friends at NVIDIA, it's changing their world, isn't it?
I mean, these guys have been experiencing the craziest roller coaster ever, right?
From cryptocurrency.
Yeah, we love Nvidia.
It's coming down.
And then like now general AI, everything's using GPUs.
That's exactly right.
I'm glad you connected the dots back to crypto, right?
That was everybody had to have the latest miner
and had to have the latest processor.
Put it in the farthest reaches
where we can get the cheapest power.
And then that whole thing went south. I'll be tactful about how I say it. And now what AI is doing for the GPU is
just off the charts. It's crazy. It's absolutely wild. And just really quick, the GPU power isn't
always needed, right? You only need GPUs when you're doing large language model training.
When you're doing slight iterative changes to chat GPT,
you don't need that kind of horsepower.
Or if you're doing inference training,
like for example, Raymond, you ask GPT a question
and it retrains the model just because of what you asked,
it becomes a little bit better.
That also doesn't require massive amounts of GPU.
You can do all that stuff on CPUs.
That's a part of creating a foundation
built around AI
ethics, AI transparency, and most of all, AI sustainability so that people using this technology
have a very deep, I want to use this word, intimate understanding of what these tools are so that it's
not foreign to them. I think it's important. That's part of the democratization process for
people to understand what this is.
The kinds of use cases that we've been applying to this has been absolutely wild, just absolutely crazy stuff.
It's been really fascinating.
Yeah, and changing so fast.
That's the thing that's gotten me is how quickly what people are doing and how they're building tools and how they're engaging with it.
Shocking how fast.
And we used to, I'm going to date myself again.
We used to say that things changed at internet speed, right?
That's dated term now, right?
This AI speed has just been a blur, how quickly it's become a real thing and how quickly it's
become transformative in so many parts of our economy and now to our business, right?
It is changing what happens in our data
centers radically. I agree 100%. And one thing I want to eliminate this is fear. It's not going
to replace your jobs. It's a co-pilot. It really is a co-pilot, right? In every single use case
that we've been designing this, it's there to increase the value, even for junior engineers
and junior lawyers that we're working with, junior service people, instead of looking at one project for eight hours, this technology allows you to look at eight projects over the course of one hour each and then keep pushing forward.
The tools are so powerful.
And I know we might not have enough time to even go into some of these use cases, but they're extraordinary.
I'll give you one really crazy example, Raymond.
Yeah, give us one.
Just one, right?
So we're working with a data center services company. This company services both manufacturer equipment as well as physical facilities, and they have so much data, so much data that's being ingested. But then also train it against all of these manufacturers, constantly updated manuals, field manuals, drawings, recommendations.
Also train it against field technician notes.
I mean, everything from the back of a napkin drawing to specific requirements and documentations around IP addresses.
So Raymond from Compass gives me a call and starts explaining an issue to me.
What I'm capable of doing is we're actually going to be deploying an audio engine built with
GPT that's going to listen to Raymond as he's talking. Now, I'm listening to you, and just to
the left is a screen that's going to be saying, okay, Raymond is discussing data center number
four. Cool. Now he's talking about rack row number three in that data center. Cool. Now he's
specifically talking about this switch. Ah, he's describing this issue. Well, it looks like this
patch wasn't updated, which actually fixes the exact issue
that he's talking about right now.
So I, as a technician, I already have a solution.
I'm just waiting for you to stop talking
so I can go apply it.
And these aren't 500 page long documents.
They're not two, three sentences,
highly contextual to what you are discussing
and to what the specific situation is.
And what happens is after we're done, the model learns and becomes even better
and then takes that documentation, applies it to the customer
so that the next technician doesn't have to restart all this stuff over.
And it's that level of deep intelligence, multi-layered use of data
that now I can apply in real time, start to solve these level one, level two,
level three technical issues
based on all of this. And again, if BirdViv comes out and releases a new document for their
condensers, that's automatically ingested and trained against the model so that when the next
service comes in, it's already smart, a true co-pilot. I mean, that's just one scratch at
the surface of the use cases that we were working on. They are fascinating.
The thing that gets me there, it makes me think of, we used to use this term institutional knowledge,
right? That that business has learned, right? And while that business was a collection,
and we'll stick with your technician example, this collection of technicians, they're the guy
that's worked there three weeks, there's the guy who's worked there three years. There's the guy that's been there 35 years. And there's this collective
institutional knowledge of this firm that you go to to get engineering help. And you tap into all
of those individuals and it's between their ears and you collectively sort out the institutional
knowledge and experience and you get your problem solved. And what I hear you describing is we're
going to virtualize not only all of the collective of hear you describing is we're going to virtualize
not only all of the collective of the information,
but we're going to allow it to learn
off of all of each other's experiences
and every inbound call.
So that three-week-old technician,
he's getting data that goes into the model
because he's hearing something different
than when you go get the guy
who's been doing it for 30 years
and you send him out on the really complex problem.
And we're going to aggregate all of that experience into one solution and ingest it through this voice recognition software that goes, oh, this is what the guy's asking about.
Let me go ask everybody all at once.
I mean, I know I'm being crude when I say let me go ask.
Let me go query the system about all the experience I've collected and provide an answer.
Virtual institutional knowledge. Exactly. It an answer. Virtual institutional knowledge.
Exactly.
It's ingesting that institutional knowledge.
And it's not just about everyone.
This engine is smart enough to go into specific pieces and places of documentation to ask
contextual questions that apply specifically to the conversation that's being had.
It's a similar thing that we're doing with an intellectual property law firm in just
all their IP, right?
All their laws, rulings, all all that stuff i'm not a lawyer uh and then and then in just all this other
information that's publicly available to them um and then the request is that can you write a legal
document or like a legal brief for example we're like don't think of it so linearly tell us the
judge that you're presenting to will in just all of his or her rulings and actually create a brief for you that is going to give you
the highest possible probability of winning the case because we now understand how this judge
rules. And so it's a deep conscious, I use that word carefully, approach to leveraging data to
solve these really, really complex problems. And again, in building these models, supporting people
and bringing value, we've seen all sorts of use cases, everything from like healthcare, increasing the number of people that go into bed, supporting more healthcare services and functions, using large language model training to on-the-fly data changes, for example, to a virtual AI data center inspector. A company wants to build in a certain region.
You as an organization can submit and input any document in any type of form.
It takes it, quantifies and qualifies it for you and acts as an actual inspector and says, you're going to have problems with this regulation.
You're going to have problems getting this part through this actual road because there's going to be forecasted closure.
So you're not going to be able to use this highway. So it gives you this detailed perspective of not just what the issues you're going to run into, but how you can fundamentally bring capacity online faster. That's another
concept that we're working on right now with the company. It's absolutely fascinating. Again,
if you can hear us talking about this, this is way beyond there being a stream of data,
us finding a pattern, reporting on that pattern,
and then going to business as usual. This is a truly added deeper layer of context.
Fascinating stuff and an exciting time to be alive. I think change scares people. I hear people
go, oh, we're going to have the laws, aren't going to be able to keep up. Well, whenever have the
laws been able to keep up? I mean, that's not a reason not to be charging into the future and engaging with this technology
and figuring out how it can change your business and your life
and your company and your customers' experience.
I mean, it's just fascinating stuff and exciting stuff.
And the rapid adoption, I think, speaks to how quickly it transforms things, right?
I mean, that's the reason the adoption's through the roof.
All right, well, Bill Vitale,
nothing has happened in this 40 minutes
other than it convinced me
that we have to do more than one episode with you.
So we're definitely gonna have to ask you back.
We will do, I can't, I just,
I've got like 19 different ideas
of things we're gonna have to talk about.
So we're gonna have to see
if we can get a contract in front of you
and convince you to do multiple episodes. But man, it's been awesome to have you. We're super grateful
to have you with us on the podcast, but to have you in the industry and have you as a friend
of Compass. So we really appreciate everything you do to promote our industry and what we do
as a business and grateful to have you on with me today. I appreciate you, Raymond. I appreciate
all of your wonderful listeners. Thank you for tuning in. By all means, don't be shy. Find me on LinkedIn or whatever it is.
Let's continue these conversations. I understand that some of these new technologies you're hearing
about can be scary or confusing or concerning. Let me kind of point it this way. At the latest
AFCOM Data Center World event, two of the three keynotes focused on AI, specifically generative AI.
And at the Data Center World conference, a generative AI company, software company, won an innovation award.
This is not a fad.
This is not something that's going to pass us by.
It is a fundamental part of what we're going to be doing every single day.
Your goal isn't to just like, you know, jump on the horse or both feet in the pool.
Your goal is to ask questions. Be curious, not judgmental.
Yeah. Hear, hear. I love that. Be curious. All right. Well, Bill, awesome stuff. Thank you for
having time to join us and grateful that folks get to hear you and hear you on our little bitty
platform, our little corner of the world. Awesome stuff.