In the News

When I was your age, the computer I worked on most was an IBM 1620. It had 10,000 decimal characters of memory. And you critically were dependent on punch cards because you had to run most things through and do intermediate storage and cache onto punch cards. And then we went on to the mainframe age. And I think what we're talking about today is equivalent for AI with the invention of the microprocessor. We lived in a mainframe age and that is where AI is today. Mainframe doesn't even begin to look at what Stargate is trying to do to go build its next generation model for Open AI. But it was a world, I actually used to teach a course on the social implications of the world when having it dominated so much by IBM and then later Microsoft. And as I agree with Dr. Diffie, decentralization is the key to freedom. Decentralization is also the key to getting the value out of the technology. I watch technology now. I started writing software 65 years ago. And so I've watched this over, you know, almost seven decades. And technology always finds its own level. But it's the ingenuity of people figuring out how to apply it to their day-to-day life problems that is what's going to make it valuable and where it goes. Yes, there are going to be some great things that are done, discovering new drugs, perhaps, that AI will enable that we haven't been able to do before. But what's key and what really changed the computer revolution was two things. One was the invention of the Internet. I actually built the first global IP network at SUN. and then the other things is distribution of computing. Today, I'm going to talk about the invention of the Internet. And as I said earlier, I think what's happening here today is the equivalent of the invention of the microprocessor. And it is the microprocessor which in the end enables some microsystems. Without the microprocessor, we never could have done what we did there. And then as those microprocessors got more powerful, we did more and more and more and more. And AI is going to do the same thing. Am I afraid of it? Yes. I mean, technology, you always have a two-edged sword. It always does things that are good, but people can also use it to do bad. And it has impacts on our society, which is the reason I wrote a book on that. But you're going to get the most value and assure the greatest value if we can distribute it and put it out there. And that is what microprocessor did. Everything we did today and the smart phones people carry all over the world. I mean, we have services with billions of users all talking to microprocessors. And it's going to be the same thing. And until we get the ability to use AI on CPUs and get it out so we can use the installed base, we're going to be hindered and we're going to have back to a world of IBM and Amdahl and a handful of other companies in a mainframe world. That's ending today. I think what you are seeing is this ability to broadly distribute inference and things so that we can have an use AI and everywhere in our lives and everywhere in our economies, everywhere in our societies. So I've been thrilled, I've been working with Ziroh Labs now for three years, and I think what they've done here and bring to market is profound, and we're going to see its impact for years ahead. Thank you very much.