Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

The science of the appliance and opening the lid of the black box to find... it's just software

Interview The tech industry has a habit of reinventing itself every few years. Kelsey Hightower would like someone to come up with a glossary because software is software, no matter what it gets called.

Acclaimed engineer, former mover and shaker within Google, and lately non-executive Director for Civo (he says "mostly in an advisory capacity"), Hightower told us last year he planned to sit out the generative AI wave that is washing over the industry.

Hightower reiterated his intention "to avoid this wave of AI altogether" over the weekend in a post on Bluesky: "If they are willing to spend time and money training artificial intelligence, why wouldn't I do the same for the real thing."

Dodging the current AI wave has not stopped the engineer from taking a long look at the technology landscape and bemoaning the industry's habit of using new words to describe the same old things and calling for cloud technology to scale down as well as scale up.

Hightower has a point – agents might be all the rage, but a scratch beneath the surface shows software. Some are just connectors. Others are just utilities in smart suits. Hightower wants a glossary of definitions to remove the mystique that might work well for stock prices but is less good for engineers.

An agent is, after all, just software to deal with data.

"Give us that glossary," he laughs during a chat with The Register, "so we can understand what we're evaluating here!" As far as Hightower is concerned, generative AIs and LLMs are black boxes that need to be decoded and understood.

"The more people who go work at companies like OpenAI and Nvidia, and then leave, and then start to tell the stories about how it was working inside the machine, then we all start getting clarity. What happened with DeepSeek was a moment of clarity."

Hightower acknowledges the shrieks of protest from some AI vendors, notably OpenAI: "They stole our stuff!" but ultimately he sees the incident as just another checkpoint: "So we're all getting deeper into the black box and then, over time, the black box becomes just another component in the software stack, and then we'll all move on to the next thing..."

"The fear," he says, "is that if people look in the black box and realize there's no magic in there… then what happens to the industry?"

According to Hightower, some people might respond with a panicked "We need this excitement for the stock market!" There are certainly more than a few impressive company valuations based on the promise of AI, even if much of it tends to be more AutoComplete than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Hightower's take regarding AI appears at odds with that of Civo, which last week promoted the US launch of its Flexcore appliance and its sovereign Relax.ai. During the keynote and the company's US Navigate event, CEO Mark Boost said AI tools had the potential to allow engineers to describe their needs rather than using code.

In typical fashion, Hightower tells The Reg: "You are all free to do whatever you want. So, if you just want to be an architect that draws boxes, then so be it. I will not be participating in that. I will choose to continue to understand what's in the box."

Sadly not every engineer is as free to reject the demands of management fully engaged with the AI hype sweeping the industry.

Bringing the data back home

Civo launched the FlexCore appliance, a 2U chassis containing the company's software stack, in the North American market at its US Navigate event amid reports that enterprises are seriously considering repatriating cloud workloads in the face of increasing costs.

According to Civo commissioned research, 82 percent of senior IT leaders plan to shift more workloads over the next 12 months, with more organizations expecting to increase their private cloud spending.

Civo's CTO, Dinesh Majrekar, told The Register that cost is becoming increasingly significant in decision-making. "You're talking to CFOs who used to sign a check for hardware that lasted three or five years, who are now spending that much a month in the public cloud. And a lot of the conversation about repatriation is coming from that way."

AI aside, Hightower is using his advisory position at Civo to make suggestions regarding the company's approach to its FlexCore appliance. One resulted in a keynote demonstration of setting up a private cloud using the device, manageable from the same pane as the company's other services.

The FlexCore appliance was launched in the North American market last week and includes Civo's complete software stack. Civo is in the process of deploying the appliance in its own datacenters, meaning customers can have a private appliance identical to the hardware used by Civo's own cloud.

The private region concept is what interests Hightower as it closes a gap in the markt not served by the cloud giants. "If you're a small country on the map that no major cloud provider has on the list of coming soon regions, you're out; you're not even on the revenue projections. No one cares."

Hightower is looking to the future. Not only one where a FlexCore box can be connected anywhere to meet specific corporate or regulatory needs, or accelerate the region roll-out but one where owner/operators might even be able to make available spare capacity on their appliances.

"That would be an amazing possibility." ®