Editor’s Note: I was at HumanX this week, so this is an abbreviated newsletter without the News of the Week section. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at feedback@fastforward.blog.

ForwardThinking 🤔

AI hype...AI reality

I spent the first part of the week at HumanX, the AI-focused conference in San Francisco where I moderated a couple of panels, talked to a bunch of smart people and caught up with many old friends. One thing that stuck out, especially on the main stage, was that the endless AI hype didn't match my everyday AI reality.

I say this as someone who was lying in my hotel bed yesterday morning, thinking about this commentary and how I could use AI to query my transcripts from the week to surface themes to write about. Even before I did, the idea for this column popped into my head (human creativity for the win).

You’d think from the way it was described on stage that most of the hard problems have already been solved. I use AI every day, and by turns have been dazzled and dismayed by what it spits out. To hear the industry luminaries from companies like Nvidia, Google and AWS, there is nothing to be dismayed about.

The problem is, when you talk about AI with relentless hype, you do everyone a disservice, because anyone who uses it knows it has strengths and limitations like any other software.

Whether you are predicting AGI doom like Sam Altman, suggesting the end of white collar jobs like Dario Amodei or overselling like some of the speakers at HumanX, the end result is the same. You are painting an unrealistic picture of what the technology can really do. It's what Bloomberg's Parmy Olson called the "dark art of AI marketing."

We saw a perfect example of the hype machine operating at full throttle this week with Anthropic's preview release of the security-focused Mythos model. Some people were calling it the end of zero‑day vulnerabilities, while others warned it could dramatically lower the bar for bad actors to find and exploit critical bugs. This from preview software that few people have used yet.

It was a clear display of hype and doom playing out in the real world in real time, all while I was at a conference discussing all things AI. I’m beginning to think AI is like the myth of the five blind men touching the elephant, each describing the animal differently based on where they’re standing.  

In the same way, each of us interacts with AI differently, and our results depend a great deal on our use case and requirements. My problems might not be your problems, and my successes won’t match yours. But when the loudest voices insist they’ve seen the whole elephant, that’s when we should be skeptical.  

To be fair, there were many more grounded conversations happening off the main stage. There were also real signs of what this technology can do, especially when it comes to programming. A former TechCrunch colleague showed me a suite of products he built this week for his agency, all neatly available on his phone. He isn’t a trained programmer, but he created these tools himself, including some that replace expensive commercial alternatives.

This example shows the real power of AI to put activities that used to require a specific set of skills in reach of so many more people. But it can’t do everything. And the sooner we have more realistic discussions about it, the better off we will be, particularly at events like the one I just attended.

~Ron

Editor's Note: The HumanX conference paid for my airfare and hotel to attend.

What's new on the blog 📰

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It's a compelling vision for a SaaS company like Salesforce because not only does this take a burden off the customer, it actually places the agentic value back inside the software.

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CrowdStrike CTO faces two-way challenge when it comes to AI

CrowdStrike CTO Elia Zaitsev was initially excited by the possibilities of large language models until he realized the attackers would have the same tools. I talked to him about the two-way challenge of building AI defenses while the adversaries use AI to rewrite the rules.

"Once the initial euphoria wore off, I started thinking, man, the adversaries are going to be using this stuff too."

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Everyone's talking about vibe coding killing SaaS, but the enterprise leaders I spoke to from Zuora, ServiceNow, LaunchDarkly, Forrester and SAP say it's not that simple. The real risk isn't where most people think it is.

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~Cameron Etezadi, CTO, LaunchDarkly

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Databricks takes on security and a whole new buyer

Databricks leapt into the cybersecurity market this week. While it technically makes sense to think about security as a data problem, the question is whether the company can shift buyer personas successfully.

Former Gartner analyst Sanjeev Mohan says it will require a different sales motion: "Selling to infosec, DevOps and SRE teams is very different from selling to analytics or business users. That's something they would need to develop."

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His view on how most companies handle it? "I'm really not interested in taking a colander, blocking a few of the holes and calling it a bucket. That's called security theater."

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What I'm reading 📚

Silicon Valley’s Hottest AI Metric Is Also Its Least Trusted
~By Annie Bang, Bloomberg

AI agents are scrambling power users' brains
~By Megan Morrone, Axios

Why OpenAI bought TBPN
~By Om Malik, Om.co blog

Iran Strikes Leave Amazon Availability Zones “Hard Down” in Bahrain and Dubai
~By Alex Kantrowitz, Big Technology (via LinkedIn)

Look who's talking 👄

“If you want to go fast, you need a seat belt. Every organization out there is trying to figure out, what's the right seat belt for this [AI] use case? Once they have that in place, they can go 100 miles an hour."

~Superblocks CEO Brad Menezes, speaking on 'Everyone’s Building with AI - Is Your Enterprise Ready?' panel at HumanX.