One line of software can impact a billion rows of data.
A short SQL statement can delete a table, reformat date into the US format, or compute the average quota attainment by account executive by region over a company’s history.
As data has become a critical component of analytics & production systems, data engineers require more sophisticated tools to manage their data transformations.
Last week, public software markets suffered significant compression. MongoDB fell 24%; UIPath fell 36% ; Salesforce fell 15% ; Workday was down 11%.
Weaker revenue projections tend to cause sell-offs.
These large drops aren’t unprecedented. In 2016, valuations fell 57%. Is it different this time?
Growth rates have changed meaningfully. The 25th, 50th, & 75th percentiles for public growth rates have halved in the last 18-24 months. The grey bar indicates Covid ending & marks the beginning of the slide.
If I asked you, “When someone turns in a work assignment, how accurate is it? 80%, 90%, 95% or perhaps 100%?”
We don’t think this way about coworkers’ spreadsheets. But we will probably think this way about AI & this will very likely change the way product managers on-board users.
When was the last time you signed up for a SaaS & wondered : Would the data be accurate? Would the database corrupt my data? Would the report be correct?
NVIDIA’s growth is an index on the growth of AI. “Compute revenue grew more than 5x and networking revenue more than 3x from last year.”
Data center revenue totaled $26b, with about 45% from the major clouds ($13b). These clouds announced they were spending $40b in capex to build out data centers, implying NVIDIA is capturing very roughly 33% of the total capex budgets for their cloud customers.
“Large cloud providers continue to drive strong growth as they deploy and ramp NVIDIA AI infrastructure at scale and represented the mid-40s as a percentage of our Data Center revenue.”
For the past few days, I’ve been using the Mac ChatGPT app OpenAI demonstrated last Monday.
It’s unquestionably the future of human-computer interaction. Conversing with a computer is much more natural than typing. Imagine speaking t a colleague with the entire internet at their disposal. But also a verbose colleague without much sense of social cues.
Tapping a keyboard shortcut, the ChatGPT app loads & four little bars reminiscent of Google transcription software appear in the app. You can choose from 5 mellifluous voices who speak fluidly & naturally.
Ramp published its quarterly spending trends & revealed how businesses are spending on AI. There are many great data points that underscore the growth in AI but there are important nuances in the patterns.
First, AI growth rates across the most popular vendors have fallen 78% annually. On average, these AI businesses are growing customer counts 105% ; the median is 38%.1
On Thursday May 30th at 9:30 Pacific time, Office Hours will host Benn Stancil.
Benn co-founded Mode, a analytics platform acquired by ThoughtSpot. He writes about the future of data & analytics on his blog & asks deep questions about core tenets of software including Do software companies actually have good margins? & Disband the analytics team.
With a unique lens on data & software, Benn will share his views on some of these bigger topics including BI’s third form.
The Theory AI Index of publicly traded companies continue to outperform more classical software companies since we published the index earlier this year.
In addition to the delta in absolute multiple, is there a difference in the factors that drive valuation?
Across the five most important metrics, AI companies’ valuation correlates isn’t that much different than non-AI companies.
When a person asks a question of an LLM, the LLM responds. But there’s a good chance of an some error in the answer. Depending on the model or the question, it could be a 10% chance or 20% or much higher.
The inaccuracy could be a hallucination (a fabricated answer) or a wrong answer or a partially correct answer.
The fastest growing category of US venture investment in 2024 is AI. Venture capitalists have invested $18.3 billion through the first four months of the year.
At this pace, we should expect AI startups to raise about $55b in 2024.
AI startups now command more than 20% share of all US venture dollars across categories, including healthcare, biotech, & software.