It’s 9:34 on Sunday, October 25, and the first thing you see at the Las Vegas airport are slot machines.
After almost 17 hours of travel from Santiago – with a stopover in Atlanta – from the taxi on the way to the hotel appears The Sphere, the sphere covered with screens that opened in 2023 next to the Venetian hotel (its parent company, Sphere Entertainment, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a capitalization of about US$ 4.1 billion).
Already at the Palazzo hotel, in the elevator going up to the 45th floor, a gringo with a gold chain asks me if I’m just arriving. I say yes and he answers with a smile, “good luck” (alluding to casinos, I suppose).
The usual breakfast is at Five Guys with a double burger and Oreo milkshake at 11 am. The American Dream. There I met a group of Chileans who were finishing a bachelor party.
At lunchtime the Oracle press team took us to the third floor of the Venetian Expo, in the Grand Deluxe. BBQ ribs, ribeye, salads and pasta, all USA size and with plenty of drink refills. There I met Argentine, Colombian and Mexican journalists, and part of the Oracle team.
In the afternoon we were welcomed by Luiz Meisler, executive vice president of Oracle for Latin America (he has been with the company for 28 years). His thesis is that a transformation of everything is coming and that the challenge lies in the people, because technology already exceeds human capacity. He said that health will not be a big concern, that food will come very cheap, perhaps free, and that many of today’s jobs will not exist. He said that this year for the first time he took 20 days of vacation, something he had never done, and that he used them to study. And that Oracle started as the database of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, its acronym in English) and that is why no one is going to be better than them in security.
The next day I interviewed him along with Christian Delfino, country manager of Oracle Chile. We talk about startups, the cloud and Elon Musk, and also about his history.
His father lost all the money he had. Meisler finished his studies working as a hotel receptionist and carrying suitcases, and his first house was left without furniture for five years because he could not afford to buy it. His son asked him why his friends’ houses did have them. “Because here I want to have space to play soccer with you,” was his response.
According to the executive, Latin America accounts for 60% of sales in Oracle’s global marketplace, the showcase where startups and developers sell their solutions to the company’s clients.
He said that at 73 years old he continues to work because he has fun. And because if he stops doing it, his wife “is going to go crazy. When COVID happened, when she had to work from home, she couldn’t stand me. She says that I gave my opinion because the employee did this and I believed that we had to do that.”
He then spoke about Marcelo Christianini, VP of AI and Cloud for Latam, who is sitting to his right. “For me, Marcelo is a school. I go to a meeting with him and he speaks things that I don’t understand at all, almost every meeting. It’s a pleasure to understand that I don’t understand anything. It’s not a shame. On the contrary, I recognize that I have to study more,” he says.
Delfino recalled that Oracle opened its first cloud region in Chile in 2020 and that the second was in Valparaíso.
Simulators and smoking casinos
In the afternoon there was an artificial intelligence (AI) and sports panel with Jack Harington, head of technical and performance partnerships at Oracle Red Bull Racing, and Matt Lord, group technology director of SailGP (sailboat racing).
The official welcome was in the F1 Arcade, on the third floor of the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, with mini-burgers, an open bar, seafood and quite real Formula 1 simulators. I was a driver for a few minutes, I raced the tracks of Bahrain, Las Vegas and Monaco.
From there I left for the Bellagio fountains (famous for their light shows) and Paris. Casinos are labyrinths, with machines in all directions, everything huge, long routes and very easy to get lost.
There are people, mostly older, playing the slot machines from 9 in the morning and there are people offering massages to the players. And you can smoke inside.
The entire Oracle conference took place at the Venetian hotel, which has a mall that imitates the Italian city, with an indoor canal and gondolas, and the gondoliers sing in Italian as they row.
Monday at 9:30 was the first keynote of Oracle AI World 2026, the company’s annual technology conference focused on artificial intelligence and business transformation. A DJ started and then Mike Sicilia, one of Oracle’s two co-CEOs, took the stage, putting on an orange construction vest and explaining that thanks to AI he is now a “builder.”
There he interviewed a senior Burger King executive and then returned disguised as a doctor to talk about Oracle’s health solutions; While he was doing so, an ambulance entered the premises.
That Monday Oracle presented Fusion Companion and Fusion Agentic Home, two tools for an employee to ask the AI for an objective and it to execute the necessary transactions, approvals and agents on its own within Oracle applications, including from ChatGPT. “AI is changing the starting point of work in companies,” said Chris Leone, executive vice president of Application Development at Oracle, who that same day gave a keynote on applications with agents.
After the keynote, we walked to the partner and customer expo. There Nvidia gave away pretzels, at the Fanatics stand you could customize t-shirts, there was a Tesla converted into an autonomous police patrol, a KPMG golf simulator, a pickleball court and a Formula 1 car that, we were told, Max Verstappen raced.
The Wizard of Oz y una Double-Double
At 7:30 p.m. we went out to the Sphere to see The Wizard of Oz. Admission cost US$114 and it was an entertaining experience. The wind blows inside with huge fans when Dorothy’s house blows up, leaves and apples fall from the sky and flying monkeys hang from cables above the audience in the scene in which the evil witch sends her minions to kidnap the girl from Kansas. After 75 minutes watching this adaptation of the original film, you come out with merch of absolutely everything you can imagine.
Leaving The Sphere we walked to another of the pre-scheduled destinations (by me) on this trip: In-N-Out, the hamburger chain founded by Harry and Esther Snyder in 1948 in Baldwin Park, California, and which is still in the hands of the family. It is, according to several experts on the subject, the best hamburger chain in the United States. I ordered the Double-Double and the bill for two was about US$25. For dessert, in front there was a branch of Ghirardelli chocolates.
I was on my way to the hotel, planning to go to bed, when a WhatsApp arrived from the Oracle communications team with tickets to see Steve Aoki at TAO. Aoki is the American DJ famous for throwing cakes at the audience (and obviously for having big hits and filling stadiums).
With “sorry”, “excuse me” and a half-forced smile I ended up one meter away from Aoki, jumping and recording with my cell phone, surrounded by Oracle managers.
On Tuesday at 9 am, the keynote was opened by Clay Magouyrk, the other co-CEO, who, laughing at himself, said he didn’t understand why they would have to be listening to a techie middle-aged in their 40s, and who were becoming the parents of the public.
After 10, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, entered. His presence had been rumored the night before, but it was quite surprising: it was just when some were commenting that the event lacked emotion.
He talked about security in AI.
That day Oracle and OpenAI announced an alliance to bring ChatGPT and Codex to Oracle applications and the cloud, with a package for SMEs that includes US$ 12 thousand per year in cloud credits. On the same Tuesday, Oracle announced that it will offer Google’s AI chips (TPU) in its cloud from 2027, and that it will be the first provider outside of Google to do so; that Snowflake will be available as a native service in its cloud, and that together with NVIDIA it will expand its supercomputers with Vera Rubin systems at a scale of several gigawatts.
At 1 in the afternoon we ordered an Uber to Fremont Street, the old Las Vegas. It was 16 minutes and US$21.98. We ate at Chick-fil-A, the fried chicken sandwich chain that S. Truett Cathy founded in Georgia and which, like In-N-Out, is still in his family’s hands. It does not open on Sundays, a rule that the founder put in place since his first restaurant, in 1946, so that his workers could rest. The bill for two was US$30.
On the way back, we were chauffeured by Christopher, who defined himself as “Indian American” and has been driving Uber for eight years. After three days of keynotes on artificial intelligence, we got a driver who hates it. He said he doesn’t use it or need it, and when a self-driving car passed by he laughed and said he would never get into one because they look fragile.
For lunch he recommended that we go to José Andrés, the founding chef of World Central Kitchen, who has Bazaar Meat in the Palazzo, because according to him he sent food for the earthquake in Chile (actually it was for the fires last January). He also told us that in Las Vegas the construction is done at night and that during the day the streets are empty because people go out at 8 at night. For him, Obama is the best President in history. The trip cost US$30.98.
On Tuesday afternoon, a candy bar with Skittles, Reese’s, Sour Patch and M&M’s appeared in the press room, just before the highlight of the event: the keynote by Larry Ellison, co-founder, chairman and CTO of Oracle.
We arrived as a group to the main hall and a guard told us that the presentation was going to be online. Around, people asked what had happened, and disappointment was heard among the journalists. We returned to the press room to watch it on the screen and there it was, connected from another room in the hotel, only with the VIP audience present, in a scenario similar to that of the other keynotes.
Sitting in a white armchair, Ellison announced a five-minute introduction, and ended up speaking more than 20. Only then did Seema Verma, executive vice president of Oracle Health and administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, the public health programs of the United States, interview him during Donald Trump’s first government.
The founder spoke about health, artificial intelligence, universal income and abundance. He said most cancers will be gone in five years, and certainly in 10, and it won’t just be for the very rich people in New York or California. He proposed stopping taxing human labor and charging them to the value added by robots. “We are all going to be very rich. Healthier, richer and hopefully wiser,” he said.
When Ellison finished, I had a lot of free time until the closing party at 9:00 p.m., with Maroon 5. I took advantage of leaving for the airport.
In three days in Las Vegas I didn’t bet a single dollar.
Source: www.df.cl
