SVP/GM, Cisco | Lead @OutshiftbyCisco. (planet-scale systems) || (photography). He/Him.
San Jose, CA
Joined November 2008
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I sat down with @Kantrowitz on @BigTechnology to talk about multi-agent AI: Why not just build one capable agent? How do agents from different companies coordinate? And what happens when we connect AI agents to quantum computing?
We also got into guardrails, the future of networking, and why computer science is far from dead. Listen here: youtu.be/BHYTlgGB0iY?si=jGwQ…
Five-agent debate traces: accuracy held at 99% with no cognitive failures and 98% with one, then fell to 16% with three (n=73). My read is that the failures compound, so accuracy never slides gradually enough for a dashboard to warn you. Report at outshift.cisco.com/blog/ai-m…
Then join us Oct 27 at Shift.forward(), where we share more about cognitive observability and Layer 9 cognition-state protocols--> cs.co/9005BGV80v
Kids, listen to the BBC carefully. Never try anything in life if you aren’t already guaranteed success.
bbc.com/news/videos/ckly4mj1…
Anyone read Altered Carbon or watched the Netflix series?
The idea was you could take a Persona (identity, personality, memory, soul, social connections) and drop it into a different body/brain.
That’s exactly how I’ve been treating personal agents.
Most of life fits a simple 4-role loop: Hunter → Tracker → Critics → Curator.
Hunter finds new things. Tracker remembers everything I’ve done. Critics argue and propose. Curator has my tastes and makes the final call.
Works for restaurants, wine, music, travel, movies… whatever.
It is insane how valid these are even in personal agent situations.
Current harnesses (and boy have I tried most of them) are inherently inextensible to handle any of these unless you modify some of the open source ones drastically.
Plus you are dependent on the harness vendor which today is typically the model vendor.
Cool name: Matter Compiler. Maybe a Machine Compiler really. But super neat concept.
I guess the long road to retrofitting (or building new) manufacturing pipelines is the insertion problem to solve for success.
After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.
Outshift is hiring hardware engineers for quantum networking. New open roles: Hardware Tech Lead (Optomechanical), Principal Hardware Engineer, Tech Lead (Hardware/Embedded). Software roles coming soon. apply: cs.co/6048BGS6KY cs.co/6040BGS6Km cs.co/6041BGS6KW
See all those hands on the car? That's how quantum networks run today with physicists tuning every source, detector and switch by hand. Cisco's new Quantum Network Controller is the steering wheel. Tell it what entanglement you need and it does the rest. blogs.cisco.com/news/quantum…
Most of my day is spent within these two apps -
1. An agent harness of some sort (dictated by where I am - work or home).
2. @obsdmd - a way to browse folders, edit and view markdowns - souped up with plugins. The Vault being cloud storage.
The laptop of the future should only ship with these two apps.
Two releases proximate in time, worlds apart in distance.
(Screenshot from my phone. One I use every second, the other cannot be removed and is therefore just taking up real estate).
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have always been synonymous with Google in my mind. Their departure to start Discovery Loop feels like Google has lost part of its technical identity. For computing nerds, the Jeff Dean Facts were our version of Chuck Norris Facts. My fav -
HAPPY 1st BIRTHDAY, AGNTCY
A year ago this week, Cisco donated #AGNTCY to @linuxfoundation, joined by Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Oracle and Red Hat as formative members. Twelve months later, here are our grades.
The Linux Foundation's Insights page for AGNTCY states that “This project has exceptional forking activity, suggesting widespread influence and robust engagement.”
This is supported by -
- 1.7M downloads across PyPI and GitHub
- Nearly 150 members now sit inside the project, spanning 80+ organizations
- 6 working groups, 46 repos of code, specs and tools
- The first AGNTCY Summit drew 550+ people
- The first hands-on workshop sent 125 people home with badges.
And it’s been used in numerous multi-agent use cases as well. Swisscom created multi-agent systems on AGNTCY to catch production outages with a digital twin, 100x faster than the physical lab. ServiceNow integrated their AI Control Tower with Cisco’s agents using AGNTCY, SoftServe developed agentic video surveillance using this code, Digital Realty showcased their DRILL labs using this stack, Webex runs Directory, Identity and TBAC in production.
The Internet of Agents was simply a claim in early 2025 when we started on the problem. It now thrives within a neutral foundation. And the layer above it, the Internet of Cognition, is coming next.
agntcy.org/
11 orgs just agreed on one open standard for how AI agents find each other: Agentic Resource Discovery. The convergence was harder than the engineering. AGNTCY Directory is the first complete implementation, open source, 500+ resources live. Learn more and spin up a node: outshift.cisco.com/blog/ai-m…
