No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:29:27 · Sarah Guo
[00:29:27] S1: A top five financial said to me recently, like a, you know, a large technology buyer there that there was no chance that their organization had the capability to absorb a new model release every ten days anyway. And so three months behind, you know, was faster than the accepted well, like, regulated pace of their organization. So it made no difference to them to to to some degree. I I think open is here to stay as a big part of the puzzle. You know, one one question. I I know we're gonna keep asking you to look into the future, and it's kind of impossible. But given your history in in security, this is the first time in my career in technology where some very smart, well educated technologists are like, we need to turn the Internet off. We just gotta air gap everything because the Internet is gonna fall apart in the next year, and it will be unsafe for critical systems to touch it. How how much do you believe that to be, like, a reasonable probability in the future where there are lots of critical systems that society cannot rely on touching the Internet?
00:30:36 · George Kurtz
[00:30:36] S0: I mean, I think it's nonsense. You know? Like, is security and what agents can do and the risks that they pose, is that serious? Of course. That serious business. We should all look at that and go. Yeah, we got to make sure that we lock things down, you know, but is the world going to end because of these agents anytime soon? No. And when you look at what the agents are doing, I think there's this sort of mythical view of what an agent does. Like an agent doesn't just beam itself from your computer to another computer. It actually just does the same thing a human would do, just better and faster, right? So if you think about what companies like CrowdStrike have done for a long time, we prevent against these sort of attacks. Now they might come faster. There might be more lower level sort of vulnerabilities chained together and those sort of things. For the adversary, not great for the defender, but it's building the technology that can deal with all these sort of attacks. So what is AI done? It's created more vulnerability so you have more of them and you know you have more exploitation coming faster, so it's more and faster, but there isn't like a unique class that all of a sudden an agent just beams itself somewhere and I think people just get wrapped around the axle of like there's some new class of technique that's taking there. There isn't. It's just been trained on what we know. It hasn't developed its own yet, and that's why I kind of look at it and go security again is going to be an enabler for AI, which I think is incredibly important for the security industry, because normally it's you know you're putting the brakes on. You know we have to take time. You're not letting the business run as fast as they want, and now everyone's coming to CrowdStrike and others going, Well, how do you make AI secure so we can go faster in AI? So that's the way I would look at it. AI is here to stay. I think some of the concern is there, and it should be there, but sort of like there's a lot of kind of doomerism around some of this stuff, and I just don't think it's necessarily warranted.
00:32:40 · Elad Gil
[00:32:40] S2: I know you're also sometimes involved with companies as an angel investor and other parts of the ecosystem. Are there other areas that you're very excited about right now in terms of key areas of change or focus in the AI world in addition to the security world? Like what are some of the things that you think are really exciting that either just happened or are coming?
00:32:59 · George Kurtz
[00:32:59] S0: I think, you know, chips used to be kind of not in fashion. Obviously, we know they are in fashion today, and you're only going to need more of them and faster of them and more specialized. And I do think there will be some big breakthroughs in the chip world. You know, when we think about just sort of the speed, take, you know, Moore's Law might be a bit dated, but at the end of the day, you know, the chips came out and things just got faster and cheaper. I don't know the trajectory, but I can guarantee you it's going to be faster and cheaper in the future like that I can see. So as these specialized chips are developed at, you know, focus in maybe particular areas as new science is developed around the mathematics. Know there can be step function increases in performance. You know less power. Those sort of things. I think chips is a big one. The open weight models. I think there's a lot of room to grow. Certainly The US models, and I do think there's going to be a lot of advancements in taking these models and shrinking them down, you know, and being able to run them on your phone as an example. So I mean, we probably all know the history. Remember the days where you know it took a football field sized room of computers to to, you know, launch the space, you know, first rocket like we have more power in our iPhone today than they had in the entire room. So that's going to come. I think the area where you can make AI faster, cheaper, more efficient, you bring it to the desktop and you bring it to the phone where you're doing it at the edge, I think all of those are sort of exciting opportunities because that's really where I see. You know, you're probably going have a hybrid model, but you can do a lot of it now locally. Again, just looking at the, you know, the TPUs, MPUs, etcetera. Like, these are... They're they're all on systems that we have today, and and a lot of times they're going to waste. But I I don't think they're gonna be going to waste that that much longer.
00:35:02 · Sarah Guo
[00:35:02] S1: Just because it is, you know, your job to think ambitiously about what the defenders can do all day. I I wouldn't say, like, AI def... Sorry. Defenders... Security defenders are doomers in that specific term, but they're, like, generally kind of dour and, like, pretty pessimistic about the cat and mouse game getting any better in their favor. Can you can you make your best case for, like, actually, you know, if people invest correctly and we make better products and we automate many... Like, is there a version where it's actually defense dominant over the next decade?
00:35:36 · George Kurtz
[00:35:36] S0: I think it can be because if we again just with with the concepts that you know are not necessarily new or unique, but that the ability to always rapidly understand what the offense is doing and making sure that your defense is keeps up with it is going to be the key. I mean, it's sort of the modern day version of the hacking exposed book that I co authored many years ago, which was like if you show people how the offense works, the defense is going be a lot better. Now, that was a much slower sort of tempo than it is today, but I think that's going to be important, and as an industry, making sure this is a key thing for us, and I really drill this home with our team at CrowdStrike, is you've got to give as good or better capabilities to the defender than what the offense has. And if you're just slightly better, you know, just mathematically, you're still going to have an advantage. And I think it's again, it's always going be a cat and mouse game, but being really smart about it is going to be important. The only way to fight AI today is with better AI. And you know you've you've gotta use the advantages you have. The defender knows their own systems. The defender has the architectural diagrams. The defender has the code, right? So how do you put all of that into something that you can dramatically increase your probability of outsmarting the offensive AI?