Can You Keepa Stadium?
Make them feel smart.
(There's a desert smuggling story in this one. It's true.)
Jonathan Murray · Backboard.io
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That's the whole case. Let me make it.
A truck ripping across the desert.Smuggled computer parts in the back.Stacks of cash for the checkpoints.
This is not a heist story.
Search and rescuesatellite receivers.
People lived because the tech got through.
The wild man days. Photo: Murray family archive.
That man was the bleeding edge. That man is my dad.
Winters fishing in Costa Rica.Taxes in Canada.Dreams of pickleball.
Whale watching off the coast of Newfoundland. Doing just fine without us.
And AI? "Not for me."
The man who bribed his wayacross a desert for technologyhesitated at a chat box.
What happened?
Nothing happened to him.
Something happened to us.
Developers are standing insanelyclose to the bleeding edge.
So close it distorts your sense of normal. Most people have lives, not model release calendars.
Not the tech. The missing bridge.
People who feel stupidgo quiet.
They don't ask. They don't adopt.
Eventually they vote to shut you down.
One afternoon.Zero demos.
Concepts before features.
Origins before prompts.
I gave him a podcast.Hinton and Fei-Fei Li on where AI came from.
Nobody feels stupid inside a story.
Chat on Nash. Building on Studio.
The family genealogy. A drone pilot license. Custom cartoons for my nephews.
He's 73. It's been a few months.
"They're not technical"is a dead end.
"My explanation failed" is something you can fix tonight.
Clarity is kindness.
- 01Start with their problem, not your technology.
- 02Give them one workflow, not ten.
- 03Show an example from their life, not your demo.
Could you explain your product to50,000 season-ticket holders?
My dad is in row 40.
The test isn't "dumb it down."It's "find the altitude of the room."
Everyone here has used AI. Nobody in this room is below a 4 out of 10.
So here's my pitch. At your altitude.
Usage is up.Trust is down.
Privacy eroding. Fear everywhere. Mistrust as the default setting.
That gap is the story of this decade.
The frontier labs' answer:"The open models are dangerous.China, bad. Let us protect you."
Fear is a pricing strategy.
Everyone is racing to make AI smarter.We're racing to make it yours.
We bet on sovereignty.
Your data. Your IP. Your call.
Want Fable? Take Fable.That's your choice.
How much of your data it sees? Also your choice.
Model by model. Workload by workload.
Or own the model outright.
Post-trained on your data. Running in your cloud, on your hardware,
all the way down to edge devices.
No frontier lab required.
Expensive. Complex.A billion-dollar-company toy.It isn't. Not anymore.
We compress models up to 0% with functionally no quality loss. One GPU doing the work of two or three.
Bleeding-edge privacy and control, for everyone.
An autonomous agent breached Hugging Face.The frontier models refused to help analyze the attack.
Their team fell back to an open model on their own hardware.
Sovereignty stopped being a preference that weekend.
Your data. Your IP. Your memory.Your model. Your device.
You should own it all.
Same company. Two pitches.
My dad got cartoons. You got sovereignty.
That's the stadium test. Not one speech.
The right altitude for every row.
Making yourself look smartempties a stadium.
Making them feel smartfills it.
The winners of this era won't just ship.They'll translate.
Your stadium is full of my dad.
Be open. Be patient. Make them feel smart.
Thank you · DevRelCon 2026