Cloud Decentralization

“Half of every dollar we pay to online services like Netflix and Asana goes to a cloud provider, either Amazon, Google or Microsoft. 80% of that market is controlled by four companies… we pay an invisible Amazon tax. When Amazon goes down, half the internet goes down — that’s how powerful it is.” — 00:17:14

“People don’t care about decentralization, people don’t care about control as much as you and I like to think. But what they care is access… even though Akash is like 80% cheaper, it’s not that hard to get a regular computer on Amazon — there’s abundance of it. But I think GPUs are going to be one of those killer use cases for Akash.” — 00:21:33

“You had companies like AOL that actually went ahead and created these choke points, but the market came around and rejected those choke points and it went back to decentralization. Now we are seeing the opposite, where you have heavy concentration of compute power by a few providers… the best solution is not government intervention, it’s really the industry self-correcting.” — 00:10:14

“If you want something permanent like a blockchain… you have complete control over cost and complete control over privacy. What Akash comes into play and does is really enables you to have your own data center — that gives you sovereignty and control — and sell any unused capacity you have in the data center to people that want to use it, or tap into a larger pool when you want to scale.” — 00:23:54

“50% of every dollar you and I spend on online services like Asana, like Netflix, like Notion goes to Amazon or Google. The Amazon tax — it’s an invisible tax that we all have, and guess who pays the bill.” — 00:20:16

“As we’re deploying our software to a lot of these data centers, we discovered most of the compute is not used — like 85% of the time a data center is not used.” — 00:12:57

“The actual term for what Akash does is it’s called a supercloud. Akash is [a] supercloud in the sense that it aggregates various heterogeneous resources to give a homogeneous interface, to make it easy to deploy, easier to manage, easier to secure… across different servers, and it promises sovereignty but at scale.” — 00:16:33

“There’s no reason [why], if Twitter is doing AI, for them [not] to be able to sell their underutilized capacity to Facebook… and do so in a way that is decentralized and you don’t require trust. So I think decentralization is an amazing way for competitors to cooperate.” — 00:36:05

“A16z did an amazing blog post analyzing their companies… as well as the public companies… on average, half of every cent, every dollar you spend goes to Amazon, Google and Microsoft on online services… Twitter… burning like 1.5 million dollars a day on the cloud… Asana spends 60% of their margins on Amazon.” — 00:07:55

“Decentralization is about removing concentration of risk. Decentralization is about removing attack vectors that compromise the network.” — 00:54:30

“Any marketplace should be decentralized. Any value exchange I believe should be decentralized, because marketplaces optimize for perfect competition.” — 00:15:06

“It’s really about removing the risk of a system failure — removing systemic failure risk… Today you have centralized systems like Amazons and Googles of the world: if the company collapses, the product [dies], no matter how important it is to you or to the society. If the company dies, [the] product [dies].” — 00:12:15

“The internet that I want needs to be sovereign, needs to be private, needs to be decentralized, and needs to be efficient. That’s the internet that I want… it’s a foundation.” — 00:00:00

“It is the largest market — we have about 50 providers right now… and that’s growing very quickly, and with incentives we expect at least a thousand provider footprint in the next 12 months… it will be the most distributed network. I think from a regional distribution, Akash is a lot more distributed than Amazon’s… the way we’re trending, it’s only a matter of time.” — 00:13:31

“When I talk to developers, people don’t realize we actually have a viable open source cloud… I think that’s a big deal for me and a big deal for, I think, the world.” — 00:45:14

“If you consider cloud to be the fabric that holds a society, we need this fabric to be open and we need this fabric to be governed in the public and resources allocated in the public, rather than a single corporation doing it in a completely opaque manner.” — 00:14:00

“In the future you won’t be surprised to see an Amazon user using a GPU on Google, paying using their Amazon account, and actually not leaving Amazon… now Amazon has a way to retain the user… and actually work with a competitor — and Akash is the bridge.” — 01:20:52

“I think in a year or two timeframe you’re going to see quite a lot of [hyperscaler] participation… and as that progresses it’s not hard to see how Akash becomes a second market for cloud-grade compute.” — 00:31:16

“The first major milestone for Akash Network is parity with the cloud… post parity, imagine having 10,000 providers in every city of the world — GPU, CPU, whatever resource — imagine being able to provision a workload that follows your user no matter where they go.” — 01:09:28

“That’s the kind of future that we’re looking at, and it’s only possible for a decentralized system, because centralized systems will absolutely fail. There’s no way, at the scale which we talked about, a centralized system can function… it has to be decentralized from the get-go — the core has to be decentralized.” — 00:40:28

“The whole point of Akash is to remove the heavy concentration of power… compute cloud today is a fabric of modern society — our data, your data, everything runs [on it] and there’s no going back… the concentrated compute power: Amazon, Google, Microsoft control over 80% of the market today.” — 00:29:45

“Because Airbnb is a network that connects unused space and offers a price point that [is more] attractive, so Akash is that sort of layer that is very similar to Airbnb for developers that host cloud data.” — 00:02:55

“Big hyperscalers are looking at [Akash] and finding ways to, like, figure out great ways to work with [Akash] publicly… I think it’s going to be [Akash] just as a global standing of how people use compute… it’s going to be like AWS support[ing it], for example.” — 00:37:59

“90% of contributors come from outside Overclock Labs — that means outside the issuer… in a year or two years time maybe 99% will come from outside Overclock Labs, and that’s the goal we are working towards.” — 00:30:11

“Government has to step in and break them down — like break AT&T down — without which we wouldn’t have the internet. Think about it. We are similar in cloud infrastructure: cloud is the new telco and it’s heavily gated.” — 00:10:51

“Cloud is so integral and so invisible in our lives that you and I, we pay a cloud tax like it or not… if you use Netflix, if you use Dropbox, if you use Gmail… 50% of what you pay goes to an invisible tax collector called a cloud.” — 00:10:08

“Most data centers — there are about 8.4 million data centers in the world — most data centers are not used to the point they’re supposed to be used: 85 percent of time they’re unused. If we can leverage the supercloud and connect these data centers and actually get a price point that’s significantly lower than what you would otherwise pay to these hyperscalers… that’s what we’re seeing with Akash.” — 00:16:28

“Andreessen Horowitz wrote a very thorough, thoughtful research piece where they estimated, backed by data — they pointed out over 50 percent of the margins that these online services get goes to a cloud [provider]. If you use Dropbox or Asana or Netflix, 50% of… the profits are going to go into the cloud providers. So there’s an invisible tax we pay, like it or not.” — 00:14:23

“Akash Network is a first decentralized supercloud. The idea of a supercloud… we introduced in our white paper in 2018. Now… if you Google supercloud you’ll see Forbes, you’ll see all these mainstream media writing about supercloud — really they discovered like last year, but we were pushing the idea for supercloud for five years.” — 00:11:30

“The biggest and the most exciting feature is the GPU marketplace. This is, I believe, the first instance of an open market for GPUs. There is no open source market right now available, centralized or decentralized, so this is the first time ever the world is experiencing what an open market for GPUs looks like, and it is coming amid the biggest supply crisis we have for GPUs.” — 02:49:28

“Most data centers, there are about 8.4 million data centers in the world. Most data centers are not used to the point they’re supposed to be used. 85% of the time, they’re unused. So, if you can leverage the super cloud and connect these data centers and actually get a price point that’s significantly lower than what you would otherwise pay to these hyperscalers.” — 00:16:44

“Anderson Horowitz wrote a very thorough, thoughtful research piece… they pointed out over 50% of the margins that these online services get goes to a cloud provider. Like, if you use Dropbox or Asana or Netflix, 50% of the payment on the profits are going to go into the cloud providers. So, there’s an invisible tax we pay like it or not.” — 00:14:24

“We stuck to our values and stuck to our thesis. Akash is exactly what it is in the white paper we wrote… Narratives are like, yeah, I’m going to take off. Like, yeah, we know. We knew that five years ago, right?… we know SuperCloud is going to be a thing.” — 00:56:31

“Decentralizing and open systems can go far, whereas centralizing closed systems can go fast… that’s why I believe open and decentral systems will reach [places] where centralized systems just cannot.” — 00:24:36

“The next big milestone for Akash is called cloud parity. That means we can get to a point where we can do… anything possible that’s on the cloud today.” — 01:02:45

“We technically are an alternative to Amazon Web Services, but we don’t have all the bells and whistles… we have one thing that Amazon doesn’t: that’s open source, and that translates to everything we need. Now we have GPUs — the high-end GPUs Amazon doesn’t have. It’s really about identifying the one thing that nobody else has and you have, and getting 100% behind the one thing.” — 00:54:31

“I keep saying community is the competitive moat for Akash. It’s one thing that no one else has — no big cloud provider has a large, open community.” — 00:55:18

“All of us pay a cloud tax — you and me, we just don’t realize it. For context, next [nearly] 50% of all the subscription fees you pay for online services goes to one of the cloud providers, you just don’t know it.” — 00:02:11

“A corporation is going to optimize for corporation; community is going to optimize for [community]. That’s why decentralization leads to communal public utilities… if you consider cloud to be a public utility… it is very, very important that it is decentralized.” — 00:16:13

“Once we get to parity we get to post-parity, which I call innovation beyond imagination. You and I cannot sit here and imagine what kind of innovation [there] will be… Amazon has about 30 regions right now; instead of 30 regions you’re going to have 10,000 regions.” — 00:59:09

“The whole notion of a decentralized system is not how fast you can move but how far you can go… with open systems you can go far, while with closed systems you can go fast. I’m not here to build closed systems.” — 00:52:09

“Our best-case scenario is when Google, Microsoft and Amazon integrate Akash on the demand side — that’s our ideal win state… we do have some efforts in place to attract the big cloud onto Akash.” — 00:45:36