MH

Matt Hicks

Things Matt Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Matt Hicks has been a guest on Ask Noah Show (3 times) , Eye On A.I. , The Stack Overflow Podcast , TBPN and A Beginner's Guide to AI .

Recently: “Episode 511: Ask Noah Show 511” on Ask Noah Show (October 2026); “Why AI Needs Its Railroad Barons - Matt Hicks of Redhat // Repost” on A Beginner's Guide to AI (February 2026); “Warner Deal Drags, H200 Exports Resume, Meta AI Chafe Gate | Joe Weisenthal, Ben Smith, Matt Hicks, Stephen Schwartz, Saam Motamedi, Nicholas Kelez, Antoine Tessier, Filip Kaliszan” on TBPN (December 2025); “Episode 389: Ask Noah Show 389” on Ask Noah Show (May 2024); “#144 Matt Hicks: Red Hat's CEO on Open Source, Linux, and the AI Revolution” on Eye On A.I. (October 2023); “Ask Noah Show 339” on Ask Noah Show (June 2023).

What They Said

“I think it will change all jobs, to be honest. So let's call it what it is: this is going to change my role. It's going to certainly change the coding world. I loved coding, and I think that craft is going to change fundamentally. … I call it diving board fear. You can't stand at the end of the diving board and never jump in. … So I usually tell people, just do not self-select out. That's the only bad outcome. If you sit on the sidelines and watch it happen, it's not going to be good, because your role will get changed. You don't control it.” — Matt Hicks, Ask Noah Show

Asked what he tells non-technical people who fear AI will replace jobs, Hicks says he expects every job to change, including his own as CEO, and urges people to engage rather than watch.

Ask Noah Show · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →
Ask Noah Show Around 42:59 into the episode
Speaker 4

…things that I can't easily program. And framed like that, I'm like, it's not magical. It doesn't replace all of humanity. It's just a really powerful tool for solving more open-ended problems. I don't think I'd be this deep in AI if I hadn't started with my Fedora-based machine learning doorbell.

Noah J. Chelliah

…like the normies, if I can use that term, that are walking around that you run in and they find out that you're the CEO of a software company that is focused on AI? What do you tell them to alleviate their concern of the threat of AI, replacing people, replacing jobs, those sorts of things?

Speaker 4

Yeah, I do. I think it will change all jobs on it, to be honest. So it's like, hey, let's call it what it is. This is going to change my role. It's going to certainly change the coding world. Like, I loved coding. I think that craft is going to change fundamentally. But an engineering mindset, if that's what you're driven by and doing, still applicable. For the people that say, but this is a techie thing and I'm not techie, I call it diving board fear. I'm like, you can't stand at the end of the diving board and never jump in. You'll be fine. In fact, that business curiosity I find is more powerful with AI a lot of times than engineers who still just want to code. I'm like, no, you have to get to an engineering mindset to shape new problems. And on the business side, it's like, this is going to be your best tool and coach. Engineers will know what it's doing better. They'll understand the code that it's writing. The business users will have to get closer to that. But it is a foot race. And I couldn't tell you, you know, I talked about how we've had contributions from every group in the company. I couldn't tell you the most impactful group at this point. Evaluations, absolutely. Engineering has been leading in that space. But just shaping a deep research agent wouldn't have happened without non-technical users making that…

Noah J. Chelliah

So one of the

Speaker 4

things that I think is really interesting is getting contributions from everywhere. And there's a difference between getting a code contribution from someone that doesn't understand more or less what the code is actually doing versus a contribution. Like I've been working to educate my wife on what…

Speaker 1

that same balance has played out internally. So one, if we rolled out clawed code to everyone and said, like, send us your code, it would be very hard to just take non-technical contributions on a very complicated system. But they still would have contributed. And so part of the engineering…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“We started with all Frontier models. They're great. They're incredibly capable. We use all of them. But when you get into a domain and a task, the big models are good at everything, but they can be beaten by models that maybe don't have the same world knowledge, but have enough to do my job really well. We watched this play out three times. Like when I brought up Nemotron Super, which was what we used for planning, it legitimately beat all the other Frontier models by two points on our evaluation, or we wouldn't have put it in production. And that's a 100 billion parameter model. So it's not tiny, but it's not huge.” — Matt Hicks, Ask Noah Show

Asked whether open source models can beat proprietary ones, the Red Hat CEO answers from Red Hat's own internal agent project, where a mid-sized open model won on a specific task.

Ask Noah Show · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →
Ask Noah Show Around 28:59 into the episode
Speaker 4

…of the world because you can shape them. And then that for me, that combination was the, okay, I think I'm unstoppable at this point. And I think there's a spark of that with that's AI to them. Powerful technology. I can shape it. I can put them into agents. I can solve any problem, I would.

Noah J. Chelliah

Could you make the case that open source genuinely beats the proprietary models, or could you address where maybe there's some opportunity for growth for them?

Speaker 4

I think there are two. In my case that I shared, we started with all Frontier models. They're great. They're incredibly capable. We use all of them. But when you get into a domain and a task, the big models are good at everything, but they can be beaten by models that maybe don't have the same world knowledge, but have enough to do my job really well. We watched this play out three times. Like when I brought up Nemotron Super, which was what we used for planning, it legitimately beat all the other Frontier models by two points on our evaluation, or we wouldn't have put it in production. And that's a 100 billion parameter model. So it's not tiny, but it's not huge. So in those cases, and planning for us is it's the me agent that you can ask any business question you can think of, and it knows how to talk to all the organizational agents, specialized questions. It's a complex task, and it beat Frontier models at that. Then if you take the long arc, I think Karpathy, I think it was, had brought this up, not credited to me, but was if you can distill just…

Speaker 1

highly biased participant on this because that's also in my budgetary approval. But for me, I use, let's call them like the 20 billion parameter models. To do things that I think most people would say, like that lives in the world of Opus on it. And it does take a little more work and effort, but…

Speaker 4

of them, but I see the same power down this path. There's so much you can do, and models just get better every year.

Noah J. Chelliah

Does AI, or does Red Hat have a story for the person who wants to take control of their entire AI stack, not just reduce some cloud costs?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Hands-On Engineering Podcasts Software Engineering & Infra Startups & Venture