The Half Life of Agent Infrastructure — Ben Kus, Box

An exabyte, and now a trillion tokens

00:12Hi everyone, I'm Ben Kuss. I'm CTO of Box and today I'm going to be talking about uh building for change and specifically around uh AI agents and how to continue to adapt uh your infrastructure as we are all in the middle of this journey. Um, so before I get too far, I will quickly sort of set a little bit of like who I am and uh sort of what I do.

00:28Um, for Box, I'm CTO and one of my jobs in my job for my whole career has been to build enterprise software. And so if today um you're from a consumer company or you're uh not involved in enterprise, I hope that a lot of it is still relevant.

00:43But in many cases um a lot of the lessons I've learned are enterprise uh specific. So um I sort of will highlight um when I'm thinking and talking about infrastructure when I'm talking about uh the kind of challenges that we face um I'm typically talking about things that are sort of in a scale of like uh like for box we have over an exabyte of data not a gigabyte not a terabyte not a pabyte but an exabyte um and then oftentimes we're I'm thinking in the tens of of millions of users uh the

01:20hundreds of billions of things in our case files or content or unstructured content um and then the new stat that is sort of the the one that we talk about is uh tokens. Um so we are now in the ballpark of trillion tokens probably will be 10 trillion tokens sometime soon.

01:28Um and this of course is uh uh some of the new and interesting challenges that this kind of scale brings. Um so in my career and um I think maybe many of us here um we've kind of lived through these this these technology changes. And so taking a quick step back um I started uh my career when the internet was sort of becoming a thing uh lived through mobile and sort of this idea of like you know carrying these different devices move to the cloud where you could kind of store and maintain all your data and then of

02:06course we're all in the middle of this AI change and I think when you see these kind of technology disruptions when you're sort of thinking about this idea of like all of these kind of have changed all of our lives um and then uh and you're thinking about it from the perspective of a technology leader or a startup or a engineer.

02:21Um, you kind of see that like these are where like major companies are born. Um, you see that

The advice that used to work

02:29like big companies adapt or die. Um, small companies are here to disrupt things. They're here to take bets. They're here to grow. Um, I've had two startups. I've been acquired twice. Once in IBM, once in a box. Um, and um, so that we're in the middle of this kind of major opportunity.

02:44Um but for um a long tu uh no matter what you kind of come from and what area you're at I uh t typically if you were to ask my advice um and about kind of what makes it you successful as an company as an engineering organization as a technology startup or as a like a company who has a a technology division um I would say no matter what there's kind of three things the first is you need to build scalable reliable uh platforms and select the technology that you care about.

03:07Meaning that like there's a lot of ways to do things, but get good at something. Get good at that technology, at that system, at that stack, and then and then keep going with that. Um, and then you leverage this technology so that you do more for your customers.

03:25Um, you build your better product, you develop the capabilities, and then you optimize it, make it better, make it faster, make it cheaper, make it uh more capable. And this was sort of the generic enterprise advice, uh, the generic energy advice that many many people would follow.

03:40And I think this works really well except now I don't know if this is good advice. It has been across all these major disruptive changes over time. Unclear. In fact, I don't think it's good advice right now because there's a funny thing happening right now which that didn't happen in those previous trends which is that the rate of change is dramatically higher.

04:03Um I and you might say look technology always is changing like you know there's other trends things change a lot but not that much um the internet is still based on HTTP the uh uh mobile devices are still um iOS and Android based and so on and so but nowadays um other than the fact that like uh generative AI exists most things that power it are changing and changing dramatically.

04:30So last year I was here at this uh at the AI engineering world fair and I gave a speech and I said uh after spending a lot of time on this and thinking through this I think there's a key to this which is a gentic uh uh graph-based approach.

04:45The idea was um uh you have a large language model and these nodes and then you sort of put them together and you have the sort of the AI traverse this

Retracting last year's talk from this stage

04:53graph that you set up you build the graph. This is the key approach that and if you use this this is going to really help you sort of build agents because what is anything that we do in life it's a agent it's a workflow um uh it's a it's a way and then if you have an intelligent uh uh a agent it can basically traverse this is the key approach and I believe that at the time and a lot of people did and I still love this approach but nowadays it's sort of a little bit out of date in fact I remember um uh a guy came up to me after

05:24my speech last time and he was like the problem you talked about the the answer is just this exactly you were speaking to me thank you so much and and I was happy I I you know I gave a good speech and gave somebody some good advice um and then I remember when we made a change I was like I wonder what happened to that guy I wonder if he's here uh it's uh uh so um but the problem is is that not that it was wrong that that was the best approach but a new way emerged

05:49um in fact I started to like look through like all of the last year's uh events and actually go to other conferences like what what did people

How the model choices kept moving

05:57talk about a year ago and most of them were again nothing much wrong all good speeches all all good ideas but most of them have now a better way there um and uh so um and this is be sort of the gist of of the challenge so if you look at our journey of the technologies the kind of things that we care about um I'll just kind of rapid file here like so let's say that you want to utilize AI models and let's just look the last couple years a long a while ago probably distant memory now like people would say train your own my models or maybe fine

06:29tune them like nah that doesn't that's too why bother just use a frontier model use something from openi use something from anthropic use something from from Gemini um and then that's great but it's kind of expensive okay great let's just use openweight models they're pretty close you can use them you can host them yourself you can get some good GPUs um but then uh some companies will come to you and they'll be like look we just did this big deal with open orthropic like can we use our own key or bring our own model like sure you can do that too but

06:53then nowadays is probably the best approach is to do an adaptive model selection where you basically are picking the big and smaller models what which model does well and this is kind of the cool new thing maybe I could give a talk on that um or let's say you're building agents like we lot lot of things here like um I mean the word

Agent design, from single calls to harnesses

07:09agent hasn't really been around for that long but in that time it used to be like a singleshot uh LLM response call that an agent if you feel like it then you have to say no okay we're chain of thought reasoning now we're going to make a graph-based agent system like I presented last year uh no then it turns that why are you bothering to make graphs when you could actually have an agent just figure out what to do?

07:25Make a plan. That's the new approach. That's kind of the way that um Claude sort of uh laid the approach there. And you're like, okay. And then now it's like, well, you if you want to use dedicated sub agents, maybe, but then maybe why not just make a generic agent and have it recursively work and then give it skills.

07:34Skills are very generic. They're super helpful. Um and then maybe now it's maybe the idea is not just to do that, but to do it with a agent sandbox so the agent can write code and execute it because that's super useful because agents are great programmers.

07:49I'd have them sort of just live in their own computer. Um, and then arguably now that's the best approach or maybe even we're in the world now of like don't even bother with any of that. Just bring your own harness like like like let people select if they want to use one of these other systems and then you know not even just building agents but the technology around context retrieval things like um you know in the old world we were like BM25 and keyword search that's the way to do things but that's like distant memory.

08:13Uh obviously the future is is retrieve augmented generation embeddings approximate nearest neighbor that's how we're going to find data. Turns out that doesn't

Retrieval, from keywords back to agents

08:22really scale well and it kind of almost mimics randomness as you keep going. So then maybe it's about graphs. It's difficult to get working well. It's probably not the best. Um so then it's about hybrid. You want a lexical and you want to do semantic search and rank fuse those together.

08:29Arguably not. Arguably agents are actually way better at finding data because they can find things and apply their intelligence to get to it. So each of these things I just mentioned is arguably the leading approach for that moment over time.

08:48If you asked me to give a speech right now on any one of these, I would pick the last. I'd pick the adapted models with dedicated RM style agent and agentic search powered by hybrid. But uh is this the end of this journey? This is not that long of that time here.

09:04And so um my guess is the stuff that you're learning today likely won't last that long. Not that it's not wrong, not that it is not the best answer right now, but probably something's going to change. The big thing that changed last year was in my mind Opus 40 to Opus 45.

09:23When you did that, suddenly you got to a model that could do instruction following and really high scale. This is kind of to me the beginning the epic of like the new agent models. Uh also uh hardware is getting better, faster, cheaper. Maybe we'll start to use more tokens.

09:30Like token usage is off the charts of course and is that good or bad? What's going to change there? Enterprises are adopting things differently whether or not a company has decided to go all in on one agent to rule them all sort of like claude or maybe codec style agent um or maybe they want to utilize uh agents from different platforms and different systems or both.

09:55This is going to affect your lives um in addition to things like just the new techniques new interesting uh approaches new technology to power these things. So the fact that everybody in is working so hard on this trillions of dollars investment is actually leading to a lot of this change and again it's happening way faster than than I've ever seen for sure.

10:15Um, now if you look back, um, it's not this way with everything else. Like if you go see some of these other discussions, like I've given a speech on some of these topics. I looked at them come some of a few years old. They're pretty good. I still think they're very relevant.

10:23You want to talk about large scale databases about uh identity access

What does not change this fast

10:31controls, how to scale engineering teams, how to do multi cloud storage, probably um these are still relevant things today. These do not change as fast despite being high-scale uh interesting powerful uh technologies. So the previous wisdom of saying optimize for specific technologies go deep switch rarely right this what this the reason you do that is because switching is hard migrations suck whenever you migrate you break something every time no matter what um it's always

11:00harder than you think even if you know that um and uh and the switching cost is basically high so basically don't do it for most things you're kind of uh just because something's better out there that's not the answer for most infrastructure so typically If you say half life of an agent infrastructure, 3 to 5 years, reevali, see what's out there.

11:17We've been using databases like my SQL databases for a long time. It's still pretty good and probably need to replace it soon. But um but now with AI technologies, arguably the halflife is measured in months, meaning a few months after you've adopted what might be the best possible thing, there's a significant chance that you're going to

Who a months long half life hurts

11:39have to replace it coming soon. And this is I think shocking. Maybe I see from some of your reactions that like you're kind of like have experienced this a little bit. Um but this is a different aspect of the way that you build technology. So if you're an engineer, this really sucks because the thing that you just learned and that you're making is now probably going to be out of date soon.

12:02Uh no engineer I know likes this. Um uh as a startup, you bet on something. You're like, we're going to go all in. We're going to go on the technology this approach and then we're going to basically uh uh disrupt somebody which probably will but then you see and see now like the first phase of AI companies are starting to get disrupted by the next phase.

12:15If you're a technology buyer, you're a leader of a company, you buy technology, you you you select uh open source models, you select vendors, there's a significant chance that whatever you just bought is not going to be the approach you're going to invest.

12:33That's you know, good luck doing a three-year deal like on on things about about this kind of stuff. Or if you're VC, uh maybe the coolest best thing that everybody agrees is the greatest opportunity is no longer going to be the opportunity soon um because everything's changing.

12:49So here's my advice. Get good at changing. It's almost silly to say because you know obviously technology changes. Obviously it's something that is um you know built in. Of course we're all going to change. We've done this for a long time. Um it's hard.

12:58I think it's really hard and the faster that you do it the harder it is. Uh when I was going through that uh like oh yeah we switched from the graph based agent to a um to the more looping style deep style agent. I remember very well the conversation with the engineer.

13:16He just he's like, "I did it. I got a tic search working and this approach does deep research. It does all this stuff just like you asked." Okay, we're going to switch rebuild it again in this new technology. And he's like, "Wait, what?" Like, "It's working.

13:28You did what you're talking." Yeah, but it's not as capable as we wanted it to be. Like, what do you mean? You didn't tell me that before. Like, and then and then so convince him like, "Okay, this is a new approach." And then, you know, he does it and it's good.

13:34Two months later, uh, we we're we're actually shipping the product uh on on Tuesday. And then I was like, "Okay, uh, guys, on Wednesday we're going to rebuild it again on the new approach." And they're like, "What are

Rebuilding it the day after shipping

13:50you talking about?" Like, like, um, then they'll say, like, it's it's almost hard on everybody like, "Wait, wait, give me more time. I'll I'll make the new way the old way do it better." Um, uh, like, and then also they're skeptical. Like, now you say that, but like this is going to change again, right?

13:59Like, who are you to like make these choices? And the answer is, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's going to change again. So, this is, I think, a leadership problem. It's a technology problem. It's a morale problem. It's a team problem. It's a company problem and if you're not careful, it is actually can destroy you.

14:19It can destroy a lot of things because people lose faith, they lose morale. It's a problem. So, um if my advice is change um and be ready for change, how are you going to do it? Three things to give you. One, um you just got to prepare people.

14:35Well, this is a kind of a people challenge. So when you build your teams, when you talk to them, when you prepare them, if they're in AI world, you got to tell them like expect change. It's normal. It's not a problem. It's not that you did something wrong.

14:44This is is weirdly like um like helps people like I have a a technology review team and and then and then they're like we can't like change. We don't know. We're not sure. We can't tell you that in two years from now this is going to be best.

14:55Like that's okay. Uh we're gonna we're gonna build these things that change. So just go with it. You have to pick something.

Telling teams that change is not a mistake

15:04Um, also whenever possible if you can build an abstraction so that it lets you swap out what's underneath. We have an agent extraction in box and you're able to go through and be like uh like select things underneath and the agent still works the same for the customers but it it's better underneath.

15:13Um, and the idea is that change is not a mistake and and I highlight like that's very hard for most people and and I and I would sort of just you just I tell them all the time change is not a mistake. You wouldn't nobody knew six months ago.

15:31Nobody today will know six months from now. It's Seems very true. So uh at Box we are now in the habit of reviewing every six months no matter what. This is great technology. We love it. Review in six months like because uh which is just completely crazy for everything else that we're doing.

15:39Everything else is like three years. Um also even though change is critical you um you need to define what you mean when change. If you just change all the time there's a new paper it's awesome. You know our CEO Aaron is very active on all the newest things.

15:54He's like check this out. Like don't change just because of that. Like don't change just because it's a trend.

Changing on evals, not on trends

16:05Change because you know it matters. And how do you know it matters? Probably pitch you on eval sets. If you're building agents, if you're building AI, make sure that you know what people have. You have the ability to give the same input, expect certain output.

16:14Grade that cost, speed, quality, capabilities. These are the things that you probably are going to to be wanting. So for us, it's easy. Does the new approach work better for our eval sets? What the customer cares about? If the answer is yes, strongly consider switching.

16:27If the answer is no, don't bother like or or keep working on a little bit of work to see if you can make sure that you you've fully explored it. Um and then so the idea is uh build a system that lets you be able to change. And then the third uh and final piece of advice here is um almost certainly none of us can keep up with everything.

16:51It is very hard. Um I think I heard uh Andre Kaparthy uh he he was like everything changes so fast I can't keep up. and you're like you're sort of quite famously good at keeping up and so like what's the hope for everybody else if if that's the case.

16:58Um and so but then so what you do is you rely on somebody else. You rely on a technology, you rely on a vendor, you rely on a platform. Um you when you

Judging vendors by how they handled change

17:13select it and um and then here I think very use I mean like whenever you whenever anybody's bought technology in the past I would had advised them like look at what they do now. Double check the road map. Make sure it's good. Make sure it's on the path you want but just focus on what's available now.

17:22But I think something else here is um should do that of course that's most important thing but like look back how have they handled change what's their attitude towards change how can what can you when you talk to them when you read about their stuff like what happened six months ago what happened a year ago how did they handle that transition many of the vendors that I really like right now have reinvented themselves three times in the last year and I now trust that if something else comes along they're very

17:55good at this they understand agent technologies they understand the the eval sets they understand the the observability systems and then you can say ah okay good I hope that they keep up and then I now my sort of thing I need to do is just evaluate whether or not that's a good platform so um making sure that you have this sort of platforms that do well is is is critical um and um if anybody's interested in unstructured content and AI associated with it uh Box has a booth

18:20downstairs happy to talk to you about those kind of things um and then um I I'll leave you with this is um I actually I fully bet and I believe that um a company that's born this year was born last year um will or maybe even a company a medium-sized company or a big company will will they they'll shoot very high the company that will dominate tomorrow is is is now born today.

18:43Uh but I kind of bet you that the technology approach that they have right now is probably going to change multiple times before they do that. So interestingly it's like the challenge the advice the thought here is build for change adaptability arguably that's the moat that you have until that changes.

19:05Okay thank you everyone.