Bootstrapping the Future: Matt Devost at OODAcon 2024
Welcome to OODAcon 2024 thanks for being here my name is Matt Devost the CEO and co-founder of OODA and what I wanted to do this morning uh as I typically do for these events just kind of kick it off to set the framework for uh what we're thinking about and kind of what's on our mind as we drive the agenda for today's event uh and tell you a little bit about the OODA Network itself first if you weren't at our opening reception last night we are greatly indebted to Carahsoft and Craig and the team there it is very difficult in today's environment to throw a conference that is not a uh pay-to-play event that is content first focused uh where you're inviting speakers and setting an agenda and Craig and his team not only provide logistic support financial support they personally help us round up the sponsors and get them to understand that this is the room that they need to be in that is influenc in the decisions I don't know why my slides are Auto advancing sorry about that um influencing the decisions of the people that they want to be talking to so a huge thanks to them and it was a great reception last night as well what is the OODA Network. OODA is a super small boutique consulting firm but we operate this Professional Network uh of about 350 people Professional Network that's focused on looking at the intersection of disruptive technology National Security cyber security geopolitics we run a website that is member driven the members get to determine uh the content for the site uh what sort of research agenda they want to pursue we have researchers like Daniel that go and focus on producing content around those particular topics we run this event uh and we also uh host the OODA cast which is our podcast series and if you haven't checked it out we're like a 120 interviews in uh including me many of the people who are present on stage with us today have been interviewed in some capacity uh here's just a highlight of of recent interviews that we've done on a whole series as you can tell of interesting and kind of complex topics from information Warfare to saving cyberspace to the space economy uh so we really enjoy the conversations that we have with the folks on the uast and then uh just recently relaunched the website so if you're familiar with the the old OODA Loop site I would invite you to check it out it's more content driven and easier to navigate and super focused on the network elements of the community uh enabling you to find events and things of that sort that you can uh participate in as part of the OODA Network so our theme for today uh is called convergence last year if you remember our Focus was on disruptive Technologies and exponential Technologies and I feel like so much has happened over the past year we could have done another event on that and those will certainly play a role uh in what we talk about today but from our perspective what was super fascinating is where these Technologies converge where they start to mash up where you start to have bio medicine with AI uh where you start to have the uh space uh economy with cyber warfare so we wanted to develop an agenda that was a little bit more focused not on the disruptive Technologies the exponential Technologies but where they're going to converge this is my uh only slides that I'm repeating from last year because I do want to set the stage around this exponential Technology Drive that we talk about within the uh the OODA Network itself and sorry Randy I didn't reinsert the photos of uh of the metaverse the the year-to-year changes that we've seen just over the past 18 months but when we talk about uh exponential disruption I always like to use the analogy of the invention of Chess where the the the Fable has it that there was a king that was born Bo that wanted new games and he called out to the kingdom bring me new games and this peasant brings the game of chess and he's so enamored with it that he's offers the peasant I'll give you anything that you want by way of reward and the peasant says great I will just take one grain of rice on the first square of the chess board two on the second four on the third and we understand the exponentials there and the King says so cheap I'm going to get this in just great game for just a pile of rice on a chessboard but if anybody understands the math behind that it starts to turn out to be more rice than the modern economy produces in like 70 years it's a massive number and when we think about Technologies like Ai and the exponential nature of them I talked to folks and they say well chat GPT came out two and a half years ago three years ago and will could tell us exactly um that's the start of AI but in reality we're multiple decades into AI so we're actually on the back half of the chessboard so the increase in technology that we see is really big numbers and really surprising capabilities that are as human beings we're not accustomed to being able to absorb so when we talk about exponential disruption that's what we're talking about is almost our human inability to comprehend what's next even though what's next is only one year away so that's an element that we wanted to highlight uh highly recommend the the coming wave as a book uh it uh talks about this movement from technology being an an assistance to us to kind of taking Center Stage you see here it starts acting it starts sequencing it starts writing it starts leading we had a an uh interesting element of that in the OODA Almanac as well where we called it the code era right code that writes code code that breaks code you start to have code that operates in an autonomous manner that we think is hugely impactful uh in something that we all should be tracking but that's enough from last year's exponential technology talk I want to transition to this year which is around convergence and I do feel a little bit like Ted lasso with the practice episode anybody ever remember that if you're a Ted lasso fan when he talks about practice we're talking about practice we're talking about practice we're talking about convergence today right that is the issue that is kind of top of mind for us because we now have these exponential technologies that we have an inability to comprehend as human beings how fast they're growing and we're mashing them together so what does that look like this is just drawn from the UDA Almanac over the past four years of some of the key words that are showing up in there we have cyber security and Quantum and Ai and uh Systems Innovation you start to have this mashup of all of these different concepts and Technologies and platforms that start to come together but we also recognize that there's this balance that we're always you know even in our own OODA Community kind of arguing around should AI be controlled should it not be controlled does that disrupt Innovation we want the advantages of using bio medicine to solve for disease but we don't want people to create bioweapons right so we're trying to think through these elements of how do we establish this balance of deriving the good from these Technologies while preventing the bad and we're doing it in an environment where uh if you uh read the OODA Almanac we refer to as binary fractures where we are moving to extreme right not just in politics but in how we think about systems and how we think about technology and that puts us in this binary proposition of a one or a zero it's either on or it's off right where the truth is kind of somewhere in the middle so when we talk about convergence we're not just talking about the convergence of the Technologies we also want to talk about the convergence of the policies by which we manage and regulate and secure and ensure the safety of these Technologies in that ecosystem as well and also recognizing that there are clear trend lines we spent uh a a bit of time at the first uh in-person udon because we did the virtual one in 2020 uh about self- sovereignty and the role that Technologies like blockchain would play in that uh that was just three years ago and today we see the emergence of $550 million being invested the photo here is from the Praxis website if you're not familiar with Praxis it is a network state if if you're not familiar with the concept of a network state it is an entity that is seeking to become sovereign that is outside the current nation state infrastructure aligned with technology technology policy they exist kind of in the virtual domain right now and you see that articulated through you know the Zanzibar autonomous Zone you see it in uh Dubai a little bit uh I am a digital citizen of palao everybody know where palao is I actually have a citizenship ship card of palao that is issued to me that I can use to kyc myself into foreign companies that don't do business with the United States right so you're seeing this disruption of what we called when I when I sat on the floor with the early Cipher punks I don't if Bob Stratton is here yet used to talk about this regulatory Arbitrage where we will just seek to go into jurisdictions that aren't regulated in the same manner that we are the poow digital citizenship is a perfect Exemplar of that where there are some crypto exchanges for example example uh or blockchain ecosystems that I cannot participate in as a US citizen but as a digital citizen of palao I can now there's 550 million invested to build an actual Physical City in a jurisdiction and you always say like well how do you establish sovereignty they don't have an army they don't have weapons they'll have ai they'll have the blockchain if we talk about the convergence of these Technologies they might have bioweapons they have access to drones right like we need to think in these modern contexts and also this recog nition that at the OODA network is always burning in our mind and always comes up uh and we referred to it in the UDA Almanac as the conflict protocol is always running there is always some sort of geopolitical conflict there's something that is uh impacting uh the global stage and international relations and the deployment of technology and even as we think about cyber War this is a Matt Devost quote from like a decade ago that someone memeified right where we talked about okay well you can get into a cyber War but you have to shoot your way out of it right this Nexus between that uh but what we didn't Envision that kind of the future of technology war in the current environment is going to be more about drones and pagers than bits and bites right so that recognizing that real world conflict drives what we're talking about the other aspect that I wanted to acknowledge is just this sense that we get in the network that the decisions that you make now are more impactful how you're thinking about these Technologies and the decisions that you make to adopt them not adopt them uh seem much more impactful than maybe they did even just five years ago so that recognition that the failure to make a decision around these Technologies is a decision in of itself that could lead to stale stagnation possible Extinction of some of these organizations and is not just corporate we see you know with the network state initi that there are some that want the concept of nation state to become stale so thinking about how we operate in that environment is important as well and this was a fun one uh in the OODA network of this you know what we called the Schroeders mental model you know is the cat alive or is it dead we also as decision makers as entities running companies need to maintain multiple models in our head all the time because the the pathways on some of these Technologies are not clear and that can be challenging in of itself right uh in maintaining peace and prosperity conflict right you pick your scenario we are having to operate with multiple decision trees at the same time uh and developing strategies and plans around those different Pathways because there are some that we might be able to influence but there are others that we will not be able to influence so we have to maintain the model mental model for Skynet at the same time that we do that Innovation wants to be free right like I'm an old school hacker that information wants to be free we got this Innovation wants to be free uh so these multiple mental models looks a lot like the balance sheet that we had right but then if we go a little bit further back in the archive uh and for folks that don't know me by trade I started my career as a red teamer you'll see that reflected a little bit today in some of the conversations that we have uh and about a decade ago I did the lessons learned from 20 years of red teaming and one of those Lessons Learned was that there's asymmetry everywhere we always think about like oh we need balance in the force or we're going to uh be equal with competitors whether it be corporate competitors International competitors but really maybe nature seek symmetry but I think as human beings we seek asymmetry and that needs to be top of mind as well right in a world where things seek asymmetry competitors seek asymmetry technology seeks asymmetry uh it means that we need to be a little bit more deliberate about trying to influence the outcome we need to make deliberate decisions we need to put our fingers on the scale uh maybe it needs means that we need to operate in an uncomfortable mode from a policy perspective or maybe it means you know when we talk about OODA we talk about this kind of living operating investing in beta I'm an early adopter so I'm perfectly comfortable with you know the new technologies and Adoption of Technologies but we're finding more and more that you almost have to kind of operate and live in beta around some of these Technologies in your organizations not saying that you have to adopt them fully but they have to be kind of in the sandbox you have to understand the impact they're having on your organization you can't just sit back and wait for the dust to settle because when the dust settles it might be one of those drastic decision points where you've missed the off-ramp that allows for continued Prosperity what's that mean from an OODA perspective well we've been rapid adopters of early technology as well we have an OODA AI agent that's trained on all the content from our website that's super interesting to interact with um we use as part of our workflow tools like vectara chat GPT claw midJourney uh you might notice that you know we don't pay for stock images on the website anymore uh they're almost almost all mid Journey generated uh it saves saves money it allows us to fine-tune it uh we are editing you know and uh using some of these tools notebook LM if you're in the OODA slack I was obsessed with the podcast capability I uploaded a 30y old paper more than 30 33 year old paper I wrote on uh virtual reality and kind of simulation hypothesis and not only did it dissect it and have a 15minute conversation about my paper it talked about the modern world as well like it brought it into current context so tools like that are super fascinating uh I did that with the the pillar security red teaming paper on uh generative AI where I was like oh here's a great 10-minute summary I can listen to this on the way to work these tools are super interesting uh when we talk about crypto we don't publicly acknowledge it much but I'll do it here for this group uh micro strategy went to a uh Bitcoin uh balance sheet element we did that at OODA in 2018 and we're up 430 64% annualized return lot better having made that investment from a cash Reserve perspective than leaving it in the bank uh and that doesn't even account for the runup that's happened today which is 8 10% and I haven't tracked it closely uh and then of course we're obsessed with tracking these Technologies on the OODA Loop site so I would implore you to uh if you're not familiar with it get comfortable with it and then on a personal level uh I have a u a GPT we call it that is a llm where I've uploaded material that includes the things that I've said the things that I've written the interviews that I've given on podcasts but then interestingly enough you know having worked on some of the early machine learning data science projects going back 20 years I've been waiting for this moment so I had an archive of over 2 200 documents that I had collected that influenced my decision- making stuff that I read whether it be a national strategy a technical paper a piece of investment advice I had saved that all off and I uploaded it and it's pretty fascinating uh to look at the way that it is able to interact with folks and I I list here I've got cesos that use it I've got students I've got an international sales team that called up and said they felt guilty they wanted to pay me money because uh their sales team of 600 people was using Matt GPT to coach themselves before they were going to talk to customers so pretend that you're this and that uh it has better memory I than I do I use it all the time as well I was on a uh call and I was trying to remember a book that I cited in my 1995 thesis on information Warfare and I couldn't remember the name of the book and so I go on Google and I can't find it I'm like Amazon I'll have it I go on Amazon I can't find it I go to Matt GPT and I said what book did you cite in your thesis about accidents in critical infrastructure oh you're talking about Charles perau normal accidents and here's why you cited it and here's what the book says and gave the summary right so it has that great memory and also myself I can't recall all off the top of my head all of the names by which the cyber security industry refers to ap28 Matt GPT knows right uh so it's interesting so you know we're using it for blog posts it's conducted interviews uh also something I don't disclose outside of public the OODA Almanac every year uh which is a document that we invest a lot of time in I invest a lot of person personal time in 25% of it I co-wrote with Matt GPT Bob gourley who's known me and collaborated and we've written stuff together for over 20 years could not tell what was written by Matt GPT and what was uh written by Matt Devost in real life so pretty pretty interesting Dynamic there uh and interestingly enough it turned out you know I was meeting with an investment adviser and we were talking about Matt GPT and he's like let's just see how it does on investments and it provided this phenomenal advice on invest he's like oh my God you're going to replace me how is your Matt GPT cyber security you know expert and uh giving such great advice on investments well it turns out in that archive I had saved off all of the birkshire Hathaway annual letters I had saved off Seth claran at bow poost with a client of mine I had a pdf version of his book right so that was in there I had the stuff from Ark invest I had all this material about investing and it had basically just you know taken that and provided some expertise so uh Bob has one as well that he's focused more on like how do you do business with the federal government right with the Bob gourley AI but we're embracing these Technologies and also on the personal level uh just across the street uh UDA operates in a startup studio uh that I created there to try and drive a uh ecosystem here in the DC area basically created the environment I wish existed as an entrepreneur when I was building my companies we got a whole Rolodex of companies being built uh but some that are really driving the adoption of new technologies I we Josh up here if you have the opportunity to talk to him with blackwire I always interact with folks that say well these llms can't be trusted to to provide operational advice right I can't trust them to give me cyber security advice if I go to chat GPT I might get the glue in the pizza element of not knowing what it's trained on they've actually built a technology that allows for llms to be used in the cyber security context in a trusted manner where they control the hallucinations they they validated the docu that are getting ingested they've categorized them it's a group of I don't know how many 40 experts that determine kind of what the training Corpus is and then validate the results right so solving that problem of how do we use llms in the application of a particular area of expertise uh or Kristen Del Roso at the back of the room with devc that is using data science llms and some of these Advanced Techniques to address large scale fraud bankruptcies liquidations if you think about the types of complex problems that these traditional investigation firms are focused on we come in and provide a very novel uh cyber element to it uh and this year actually cracked a case that was a kind of a I don't want to call it a cold case because it was active but it was a very large scale fraud that nobody knew what had happened uh or where the people went and the combination of the data analytics uh and the non-traditional thinking kind of hacker thinking solved for that particular case so uh we're trying to live in beta as it results in kind of everything that we do including this event so you're going to see us push the envelope with some of the topics and things that we address and with that I'm going to say welcome to OODAcon 2024
2024-12-15 14:27
