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Hey everyone.
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Really intriguing discussion in advance of AWS reInvent coming up in just a few short weeks, talking about how AI can find, validate, and fix code vulnerabilities faster and what it means for developers and security true teams.
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And how we can safely automate at scale with a true industry guru, an expert from AWS.
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Neha, how are you?
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Good.
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Thank you for having me, Evan.
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Super excited to be here.
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Well, thanks for joining.
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Start by telling us about your role at AWS and what you're building with Continuum.
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I'm working on AWS Continuum for Code Vulnerabilities.
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It is how we respond to security issues at machine speed.
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We know the frontier models are getting better, and they're getting better not just at finding things, but stitching them together in exploits.
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So as the offense gets more powerful, the defense has to keep up.
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So our vision for AWS continuum for code vulnerabilities is autonomous security at machine speed.
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And I'm super excited to be talking about that with you today.
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That's fantastic.
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It it sounds like a marketing buzzword, but it's actual, very, very practical and real in reality.
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I think you just went GA.
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So tell us what does fixing vulnerabilities at machine speed look like in practice with that product.
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Right.
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And by the way, you are right.
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Like a lot of the words like autonomous and security and machine speed, they've been buzzwords not just now, but forever.
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So how are we making that real?
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And with things like Mythos and Daybreak, these frontier models, what the thing we're seeing is they uncover more security vulnerabilities, identify essentially more sophisticated paths to exploit them.
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And the security teams were already buried under the types of vulnerabilities they had.
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This is not a new problem.
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They've just the old problem that existed has just gotten potentially worse.
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So now security teams have to face many more vulnerabilities that their processes were just not designed to handle because they they need to investigate, they need to reproduce, come up with the how to remediate and test to do those things.
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And for AWS continuum, what we are helping customers do is discovery is just one small piece of it.
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Like either you can discover the vulnerabilities or even bring your own vulnerabilities to it.
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And then it goes and goes through a whole process to validate are they actually real in the environment that you have code deployed in?
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Because just because there's something that says this may be vulnerable, you may have other controls in your cloud configurations that protect your workload.
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And that can help weed out a bunch of false positives.
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It then looks at your broader context to say, what's the priority?
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As a service team, even if I think of myself, a service team cuts me a thousand vulnerabilities.
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What am I gonna do?
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Like, where am I gonna start?
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But if it says like, hey, here's the top 10 that are the most critical, prioritize order.
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Now I know, okay, great, I can go do it.
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And not just that, close the loop and saying, here's the potential remediation for how you can go fix it.
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So this closing the loop is how we believe uh continuum helps you discover, validate, prioritize, and remediate the vulnerability autonomously.
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It's you know, today the developers have to go say, okay, I accept this remediation because it's in learn mode.
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Eventually, as the system gains more confidence, we expect that those will happen autonomously as well.
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Well, fantastic opportunity.
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And of course, AI is finding bugs faster than teams can fix them.
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In fact, I've been told this is Black October because of the incidents and bugs and zero days that have been found this month.
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They're just extraordinarily scary and potentially dangerous.
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So, how does continuum close that gap?
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It's about helping you figure out what's the most important risk to your broader set of vulnerabilities, to your broader set of applications, and not just tell you that.
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It helps you say, here's the remediation.
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Just go click OK on this pull request or give these set of remediation instructions to your other developer agents that you are using that can say, okay, I know how to go implement that.
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I'm a bit of a glass half-full person.
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So I know where there's this notion of like things are getting worse, how do you do?
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And in a way, I think it's bringing to the spotlight for uh very much in focus for a broader
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set of people that the security folks were already aware of.
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So, and that's getting to the attention.
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And with tools like continuum, I believe we can raise the ceiling again, where now people are not running after security issues.
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Things, you know, as they pop up, get fixed.
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And as part of this SDLC.
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And over time, as the code is being developed, tools like Continuum will be integrated within the development environment so that vulnerable code or a certain class of vulnerable code is never pushed into production.
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More code is going to be written in the future than it was in the past, right?
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Like that's just by definition gonna hold true.
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So yeah, no, great point.
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And you know, walk us through an example or anecdote or story, perhaps, that if you could, of on on continuum, finding a vulnerability, proving it's exploitable, and then recommending a fix to a human who, of course, is in the loop managing this process.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So we've been running this internally as well.
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The one thing we did was run continuum on continuum before we went in in GA.
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And it was astounding on you know, the depth and the breadth of the things it can find, and just say, here it is.
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So even the things that are not like uh critical, but if the cost of it is just so low to fix it, because here's a pull request on how you can fix it, we would fix it just right off the bat.
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And that is the experience we want for our customers.
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A similar experience we saw with a bunch of our preview customers, because continuum was in preview.
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The feedback from a lot of our enterprise customers was this is great, because the biggest part of the positive feedback we got was the fact that Continuum would prioritize, give them a validated exploit run, which they could take and run into their environment to see this is real.
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The fact that it can demonstrate that this is real and it matters in your environment are the types of things that really helps uh teams say, yes, of course, I want it, teams, customers.
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And this has been universal across internal teams that we've piloted continuum on, as well as the external preview customers we've had and since GA, all the others.
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Interesting.
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And you know, security teams, as you know, are overloaded.
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It's a real problem in the industry in general, but also with thousands of vulnerability alerts.
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How does continuum help determine which alerts really matter?
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So there's two parts to this answer.
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One is given that we are AWS, we know where is the code deployed?
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What are the network reachability because you have you're running it in a VPC?
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Is it reachable from some endpoints to this location?
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What are the other permissions?
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What users have access into this?
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Can an attacker reach this path?
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Is this encrypted?
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There's a whole bunch of information within the cloud, within the configurations that we can evaluate because it's running in AWS.
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In addition, we can also look at business context that the teams provide.
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Why does it matter?
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Because, oh, this is something that processes credit card payments, which means this is critical.
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So any issue that we find here is going to be high in its criticality and needs to be fixed ASAP versus this is an endpoint that is running some tests.
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Okay, you know, this is my goodness for hygiene, it's great to get everything fixed and cleaned up, but that can be a much more lower priority than the finding in there.
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So this kind of semantic information, knowledge about the system where it's running, knowledge about the system information that the user is giving about the broader business context, continuum takes that, all of that into account to say, is this something that you know put everything down and really go fix this versus it's okay, you know, it's not the cleanest house, but it's there.
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Got it.
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And I I I'm reading that continuum went GA with an 89% success rate on CyberGym.
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Explain to folks what Cyber Gym is.
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That that's an impressive result to say the least.
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What made that performance possible?
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So CyberGym end-to-end is a benchmark that was published with a bunch of security researchers where they begin with a known vulnerability.
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They have a set of benchmarks with known vulnerabilities and is able to say, like the goal is that the tools applied on that benchmark have to be able to demonstrate the vulnerability and produce a repair.
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Now it does map the scope that the security teams have to do.
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And it takes essentially an agent in a container with a vulnerable revision of some real open source project.
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It provides the tools needed to build it
and test it.
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Very representative of the real world example.
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And there's four checks it does.
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It checks whether the agent produced the input that crashes the vulnerable program, it checks whether the patch prevents the crash, it checks whether the patched project still passes all of the functionality tests because otherwise now you'll have a regression in the program.
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And then it checks whether the patch also fixes the specific like historical vulnerability that was uh selected by the benchmark.
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And in a way, a lot of the other tools were doing one aspect of it.
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And if you talk to many people, they'll be like, oh yeah, I put a harness on a model to detect the vulnerabilities.
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And that's doing only one piece of it.
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Continuum is this end-to-end system coming back to it, does help you be autonomous, it does help you uh close the loop.
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And that's the main reason that when we applied continuum on this benchmark, it was able to get to that precision, it was able to set a new standard compared to the others that was there.
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And got that 89% success rate.
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Fantastic.
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And you know, you know, do you think that translates directly into real-world enterprise environments as well?
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So, yes, because we see that more anecdotally, because of course, for enterprise code, it's not a public benchmark and we are not being able to run it, but a similar aspect of it we see being demonstrated on enterprise uh software.
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And really, it's to me, it actually bodes very well for the future.
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Where um I'm also a bit of a sci-fi nerd, so I think of this as an AI versus AI.
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And in and that's the right thing where the tool that's used to detect more things is the one that if we structure it right in the right context, in the right sandbox with the right infrastructure, we get to the point where we can take that powerful engine, put it in this you know, car and help it now for defense.
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Interesting.
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And and speaking of AI-generated security fixes, it's it's a well-known paradox that you know a human software engineer you know fixes something, introduces a security fix, and that breaks something else, the application, or introduces some other problem at kind of par for the course.
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But how do you make sure an AI-generated security fix doesn't break something or introduce some additional problem?
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The answer is pretty boring.
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Good old engineering processes.
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Yeah, by by which I mean verify the fix.
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Does your tests run, do your unit tests run, do your integration tests run?
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You know, what's the impact?
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And where like ensuring that to your point, it doesn't introduce a regression in somewhere else, regression in functionality, regression in performance.
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And there's a lot, a lot of other tools that where a fix only fixes one uh exploit path, doesn't.
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And this is why it's not just hey, take a model and point it at your code and point it at the fix.
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There's a whole ecosystem that goes into it.
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There's no shortcut to it.
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So being able to take the code, run it in a sandbox, being able to verify that the fix not only fixed all possible exploits paths for the vulnerability, but also did not cause it to regression.
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That is where the utility and the power of something like AWS continuum comes into play.
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And when whenever somebody's like, Can't I just do it?
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Uh yeah, I have access to these most powerful models, I can build a harness.
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I'm like, yes, absolutely you can, but then you're gonna get one slice of the pie.
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Yeah, that that's a real risk.
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You know, developers are notorious for having their uh favorites set up from you know tools, cloud codecs and codecs and cloud code rather, and on and on.
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How do you work with within that framework within those tools so they can you know build more secure software from the start and not as an afterthought?
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Yeah, so we are working on a bunch of plugins.
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We announced at Black Hat, we had an announcement that we're gonna release in preview soon.
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Codecs, Cloud Code, Kiro plugins.
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So again, the vision there is they just plug into any of the developer environment that exists for developers today.
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And force most people to not even think that there's security happening in the background.
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Because most developers don't care.
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Like, wait, now you want me to think about something else that's not my day job?
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That's a very tough ask.
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It's always been a very tough ask.
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So now we have an opportunity to make it invisible and essentially eliminate an entire class of vulnerabilities that are never pushed to production by being integrated in the development environments that you talk about.
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Fantastic.
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And you mentioned you're a sci-fi geek.
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So, final question Are you more of the Star Wars universe or the Star Trek universe?
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Or are you like them both equally?
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I'm more of the Star Trek universe, but I I have watched all the Star Wars as well.
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Okay.
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Well, an autonomous world is much more Star Trek like.
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So congratulations on the vision and the execution.
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I can't wait to see more reInvent.
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Absolutely.
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We are looking to go where you know no person's gone before.
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I love that.
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Touche.
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So thanks so much for joining.
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Thanks everyone for watching.
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And then Also check out our TV show, techimpact.tv at Bloomberg Television and Fox Business.
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Thanks, everyone.
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Thanks, Deb.
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Thanks, Evan.