It has been a big road month for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, with countless events on the calendar. What has emerged out of the start of our summer events season has been a continued emphasis around developments in generative artificial intelligence.

It’s reached the point where if a company doesn’t have some kind of AI story at its conference, people start asking why they’re “burying the lede,” said theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante (pictured, left).

“It’s the most important story of the year, so you have to have AI in your narrative or you look like you’re out of touch,” Vellante said on the latest episode of theCUBE podcast.

The pitfalls of ‘AI-washing’ in the tech industry

Companies also run the risk of “AI-washing,” something that has emerged amid the AI gold rush. Some companies, such as Cisco Systems Inc., have avoided AI-washing at recent conferences by suggesting they will infuse AI into everything they do, according to Vellante.

“The way Dell handled that, they said, ‘Hey, we announced Project Helix, which is this partnership with Nvidia, and it’ll turn into a product next year,’” he added.

AI-washing may be taking place all around the industry right now, but being AI-enabled is going to define the characteristics that stand out in various AI announcements in the coming months, according to theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier (right).

At the end of the day, there will be two questions that everyone will be asking, according to Furrier: How do I build it, and how do I stand up the infrastructure to enable it?

“That, fundamentally, is a developer concept,” he said. “That’s what open-source development is all about. It’s getting faster, smaller, more efficient and highly scalable with the cloud.”

One emerging trend is data infrastructure and next-gen clouds pivoting quickly to become infrastructure services to stand up to builders who are trying to figure out how to build AI apps. It’s a big story right now that nobody yet has that playbook, according to Furrier.

“There’s going to be, I think, a rush to figure out who’s going to land where with their developers. How do you build AI apps? Who do you use? How do you unlock that potential for generative AI?” he said. “It’s going to come down to: How do you build it, and how do you run it?”

Rants on Reddit and crypto

Backlash against Reddit Inc.’s plans to make controversial changes to its application programming interface boiled over this week, with thousands of forums switching into private mode to protest the changes. In an internal memo, Reddit’s CEO wrote that the blowup “would pass,” which led some moderators of popular subreddits to vow to keep their forums offline indefinitely.

“This, to me, speaks to the culture,” Furrier said. “Reddit is going back to fourth grade with this move. They should not bite the hand that fed them. Their users there is their company. And the API dynamic is how people code.”

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo similarly fumbled situations with developers in the years he ran that company, in Furrier’s view.

All in all, Reddit’s response to the growing controversy has been “tone-deaf” to what people want right now.

“That’s, again, back to the open-source dynamic and cultural shift,” Furrier said. “Again, you’re seeing a commercial cultural shift by the enterprise vendors coming in to participate. I just find that a bad move. That’s my rant for the week.”

On last week’s episode of theCUBE podcast, the latest developments in crypto, including those involving Binance Holdings Ltd. and Coinbase Global Inc. were discussed. This week, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced it would open its first office outside the U.S. in London, citing a more welcoming environment for cryptocurrency entrepreneurs.

It’s a big mistake by the U.S. to push out innovation, according to Vellante.

“Big tech is under attack,” Vellante said. “I feel like we’ve got to defend digital a little bit. Every now and then, think about the good that tech has brought to the world. And that includes crypto.”

It’s part of a broader conversation that theCUBE has been having since the COVID-19 pandemic started, according to Furrier.

“Software power dynamics will start influencing things like data infrastructure, government,” he said. “Look for software truly to start eating the world in a way that’s never been seen before, with the kind of cloud scale. We’re going to continue to monitor with theCUBE.”

Watch the full theCUBE Podcast below to find out why these industry pros were also mentioned:

CJ Moses, chief information security officer and vice president of security engineering at Amazon Web Services

Rob Bearden, chief executive officer of Cloudera

Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice president of storage, streaming, messaging and monitoring/observability at AWS

Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe

Chris Lynch, executive chairman and CEO of Atscale

George Gilbert, principal at TechAlpha Partners

Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon.com

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel

Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle

Ginni Rometty, co-chairman at OneTen, former chairman and CEO of IBM

Sam Palmisano, president and CEO of HealthLink, former CEO of IBM

Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies

Keith Townsend, founder of CTO Advisor

Matt Baker, senior vice president for corporate Strategy at Dell Technologies

Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit

Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter

Gary Gensler, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chair

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Photo: SiliconANGLE