MongoDB Dev Ittycheria on how the AI boom could be impacted by rising rates

I think like many other technology trends, people tend to overestimate impact in the short term and underestimate the impact in the long term. Clearly there's a lot of noise about AI since OpenAI launched at GPT in the fall of last year. We're seeing a lot of customer interest in terms of AI, trying to figure out how they can use AI to either introduce new products, to seize new opportunities, to respond to new threats, to drive more efficiency and automation in their business. But it's definitely early days and we just made an announcement today where we introduced Atlas Vector Search. And let me explain why that's important. When you think about AI, AI is all about building smarter and more intelligent applications, right? And one of the key elements of AI is what's called semantic search. Can I discern what the real intent or meaning is of that query? And semantic search means like, you know, it's not like keyword or text search where you're just searching on a particular set of terms. It's really trying to understand the essence of the intent of your question. And that's where semantic search comes in, which is represented by vectors. So there's a lot of companies now introducing vector databases. But the problem is that there's another point tool that customers need to manage and something adding more cost and complexity to the data architecture. So you have a lot of large enterprise customers, including Verizon, Intuit, Toyota as well. What have they said to you about AI and their data needs? They're all very, very focused on AI. Again, it really comes down to a few buckets. One is what can I use with AI to introduce new products or capabilities for my customers? Two, how can I drive more efficiency, whether it's customer support, whether it's getting my teams to be able to work more productively, whether it's like, you know, how my teams collaborate. They're all looking in terms of leveraging AI to do that. And then the third area is really all about like servicing and providing better experiences also for their partners as part of the larger ecosystem. So we see, again, I would say it's early days. There's a lot of kicking the tires, a lot of prototyping, a lot of testing going on. But it's a very exciting space. And frankly, just to put things in perspective, we had 200 AI companies launch on Atlas in Q1. And roughly we see about 1,500 companies today. I also want to ask you about China. So you get about 11% of your revenues from Asia, the majority of that from China. You also have partnerships with Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud. Give us a sense of the demand coming out of China. We've seen a lot of big banks actually reduce their GDP forecast for China in recent days, including Citi, Goldman Sachs. Those revisions pretty sharply to the downside. What are you hearing from your Chinese customers and also demand for not only your services but just for tech spending in general? So MongoDB is incredibly popular in China. And so, in fact, when we look at the downloads we see of our platform, China is usually in the top one or two countries in terms of software downloads. Obviously, China has tons of developers. So I would say for Asia, China and India, we also see a lot of business in Southeast Asia as well as places like Korea and Taiwan. But I would say our business, our relationship with Alibaba started in 2019. That business has grown 8x in the four years. And that's why we announced a new deal in our Q1 earnings call that was a pretty significant expansion of that relationship. We also were investing more people in China. So we're hiring more capacity because the demand is so high. And we see a lot of Chinese companies who want to do business outside of China leveraging MongoDB because the benefit they get is they can run MongoDB on Alibaba. They can run MongoDB on AWS, Google and GCP as well. So they love that optionality where they can really run MongoDB anywhere.