Zaharia is a legitimately smart and impressive guy, totally deserving of the award, but it is a bit depressing to see what’s traditionally been an academic hono

Zaharia is a legitimately smart and impressive guy, totally deserving of the award, but it is a bit depressing to see what’s traditionally been an academic honor turn into a sales pitch. To be fair he wasn’t very explicit about it, maybe not even trying to sound like a sales pitch, but that’s just what happens through osmosis when you spend all day at an enterprise focused on selling data governance solutions for the agentic era… also, he’s not wrong. The AGI claim is an exaggeration but the risk management implication is not. If AGI _were_ truly here today, it would be exceptionally dangerous to let it run amuck in your enterprise… and if it comes any time in the next few years, it’ll be a time when a good chunk of corporate America has clicked through every OAuth screen in their organization to grant full access to some AI inference machine.