Engineers From The United States

"Toast is bread made delicious and useful. Un-toasted bread is okay for children's sandwiches and sopping up barbecue sauce, but for pretty much all other uses, toast is better than bread. An exception is when the bread is fresh from the oven, piping hot, with butter melting all over it. Then it's fantastic, but I would argue that bread fresh out of the oven is a kind of toast. Because I'm an asshole and I refuse to be wrong about something."

"You could learn the language of almost anything. Once you learn the language, you can apply the language - and the application of language is generation."

"Everyone is a programmer now. You just have to say something to the computer."

"20 years ago, all of this [artificial intelligence] was science fiction. 10 years ago, it was a dream. Today, we are living it."

"We already work very deeply with end users and developers who do these things. We do that today and our engagement with the world’s leading important verticals that we focus on, whether it’s healthcare, automotive, of course all the AI startups, we work with some 10,000 AI startups. So industry after industry, if there are industries where we could add a lot of value, the video game industry, we have direct coverage on just about every developer. The automotive industry, we have direct coverage on just about every single car company. The healthcare industry, we’re working with just about every drug discovery company and so we already do that today. It’s just that the fulfillment of the system ultimately comes from somebody else. If you want your stack accelerated, you work with Nvidia."

"Ultimately every company needs to have diversity and resilience, that resilience comes from diversity and redundancy and in order to a achieve diversity and redundancy so that every company can have greater resilience implies building fabs in the United States and elsewhere, and those fabs are incrementally more expensive. In the grand scheme of things, those have to be taken into consideration. And so, there’s a price to be paid for diversity and redundancy and we invest ourselves in our company and every large company in order to have resilience. There’s power redundancy, there’s storage redundancy, there’s security redundancy, there’s all kinds of redundancy systems. Even organizations — sales and marketing are dovetailing each other so that they can have some diversity and some redundancy so that you have greater resilience, engineering does the same thing."

"If you were building a chip company and you were taping out a chip, the tapeout of a chip is around $100 million, just the tapeout. Not to mention the tools, which are probably another $100 million, and not to mention all the engineers, all the systems you’re bringing up, things like that. In order to build one of our chips, it’s a few billion dollars. And we’re just one chip company. There’s a whole bunch of chip companies. When they tape out a chip it’s no less than $25 million. Writing, developing a large language model–taping out a chip these days, what the software industry is learning is that building these large language models is kind of like taping out a chip."

"Moonshots? How about robots that will design robots that will operate robots that will design new robots."

"There’s a language to proteins, there’s a language to chemicals, and if we can understand the language and represent it in computer science, imagine the scale at which we can move, we can understand, and we can generate. We can understand proteins and the functions that are associated with them, and we can generate new proteins with new properties and functions. We can do that with generative AI now, now all of a sudden those words make sense and now they’re connecting and fired up and are now applying it to all of their fields of their own companies and see opportunity after opportunity for themselves to apply it."

"Your organization should be the architecture of the machinery of building the product."

"The inference, the scale of inference business has gone through a step function, no doubt, and the type of inference that is being done right now where you know that video will have generative AI added to it to augment the video either to enhance the background, enhance the subject, relight the face, do eye reposing, augment with fun graphics, so on and so forth. All of that generative AI work is done in the cloud and so video has generative AI. We know that there’s imaging and 3D graphics for generative AI, video for generative AI."

"The computing fabric that compute connects processors needs to be quite high speed. The faster the processors, the greater need for high speed computing fabrics and so it’s a matter of scale and the effectiveness of the scale. For example, if you want to increase to 1000 processors, the linearity of that scale up would be less linear and it would plateau earlier if the interconnects were slower and so that’s basically the trade-off. It’s just a matter of how far can you scale and what is the effectiveness of the scaling, the linearity of the scaling."

"You benefit from the kindness of all the people that support you."

"We build our entire system full stack, and then we build it end-to-end at data center scale but then when we go to market, we disaggregate this entire thing. This is the miracle of what we do, we’re full stack, we’re data center scale, we work in multiple domains, we have quantum computing here, we have computational lithography there, we have computer graphics here and this architecture runs all of these different domains, in artificial intelligence and robotics and such and we operate from the cloud to the edge and we built it in a full system, vertically integrated, but when we go to market, we disaggregate everything and we integrate it into the world’s computing fabric."

"Never start with a chiplet design; go for the biggest chip you can imagine and build it."

"Changing an industry requires a willingness to take risks and challenge the status quo."

"If we’re [kids] called creative, why can’t we use that creativity to solve some of the world’s biggest problems?"

"Master of ceremonies was Dr. Harvey J. Brudner of Highland Park, a retired scientist and physicist, who is an Alliance director and a long time aficionado of Kilmer. Since 1985 Brudner has been curator of the Kilmer birthplace house. He remains head of the Joyce Kilmer Centennial Commission, established to honor the 100th year of Kilmer's birth."

"I think the best artists aren't doing it for the prize, they aren't doing it for the fame or the money. They're doing it because they love the art."

"I worry that we humans will discriminate against AI systems that clearly exhibit consciousness. That we will not allow AI systems to have consciousness. We'll come up with theories about measuring consciousness that will say that this is a lesser being. And I worry about that because maybe we humans will create something that is better than us humans in the way that we find beautiful, which is they have a deeper subjective experience of reality. Not only are they smarter, but they feel deeper. And we humans will hate them for it. As human history have shown, they'll be 'the other'. We'll try to suppress it. It will create conflict. It will create war. All of this. I worry about this too."

"I do think a good conversation requires [a duration of two, three, four, five hours], and I've been thinking a lot about why. I don't think it's just about needing the actual time of three hours to cover all the content. I think the longer form, with a hypothetical skilled conversationalist, relaxes things and allows people to go on tangents and to banter about the details, because I think it's in the details that the beautiful complexity of the person is brough to light."

"I think you have to try to walk in the middle, like, with the empathy and humility. And that's actually what science is about, is the. Is the humility."

"Things become easy once you learn them. The monster of complex STEM problems can be tamed with experiments and trying again one more time!"

"Every word between yes and no is B.S."

"I like to pioneer things, create a space that does not exist. If you can imagine it, you can create it. It is much more fun and challenging to create an industry, than to follow someone else"

"Nothing in moderation, everything to excess."

"Small mistakes kill big companies."

"So what? You keep going. We also made, we took a gamble on broadband, made a go. We made a gamble on being able to provide an IBM compatible Token Ring, and we're doing that, and we picked MAP, and we missed. So we picked three out of four, and that hurts, but so what? We're going to keep going."

"Compartmentalized knowledge is a mainstay of spycraft and necessary for any governmental information dissemination process."

"In the grand scheme of things, all human beings are part of the same family, regardless of origin. The divisions we have built between ourselves along the lines of race and geography are illusions. If our species is ultimately able to see past these biases, it will be our shared genetic stamp of humanness that will outlive the cultural contrivances that distract us in our day-to-day lives."

"“This is doable, isn’t it?” she asked. “Technically, it’s doable,” he replied, looking up at her. “It’s insane. But it’s doable.” “Then that will have to be enough,” said Vedala."

"Humans need technology. It’s the one thing that we do better than any other animal. We communicate, cooperate, and make tools to extend our reach. Every new tool changes us."

"“Most people are good,” says Jim. “But not when they’re afraid.”"

"I’ve heard it said that technology makes a good person better, and it makes a bad person worse. That’s okay with me. I say we keep building new versions of ourselves, keep exploring the unknown, and keep growing. We’re gonna be fine. Different, but fine. Because most people are good. Right?"

"It is a well-established Achilles’ heel of human civilization that individuals are more motivated by immediate private reward than by long-term, collective future benefits. This effect is particularly evident when considering payoffs that will take longer than a generation to arrive—a phenomenon called intragenerational discounting."

"Being young don’t earn you a damn thing in my book."

"It has been subsequently theorized that our species’ seeming inability to focus on long-term existential threats will inexorably lead to the destruction of our environment, overpopulation, and resource exhaustion. It is therefore not an uncommon belief among economists that this inborn deficit represents a sort of built-in timer for the self-destruction of human civilization. Sadly, all the evidence of world history supports this theory."

"Change scares people. Makes them dangerous."

"All the old men set to their jobs with the grim robotic work ethic that always belongs to the previous generation."

"Big Tech now faces the Big Tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth."

"Facebook is not interested in making significant changes to improve kids' safety on their platforms, at least not when that would result in losing eyeballs on posts or decreasing their ad revenues."

"The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation."

"Children of America are hooked on their product. There is cynical knowledge on behalf of these Big Tech companies that this is true."

"In the Silicon Valley, there is the view that is widely shared in the world. And it is materialist and reductionist, for which the human being is a machine and reality is describable by the classical physics of objects moving in space-time. It is also the deception of today's artificial intelligence, which is more 'logo' to sell than the real thing. In this view, consciousness and experience are classified as simple phenomena that can be measured and described mathematically, when in fact they are not. This is why the current description of artificial intelligence is actually misleading."

"Consciousness is the ability to understand, that is, to be able to have a sentient experience of sensations and feelings and to understand their meaning. This goes beyond what a computer can do. Consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from a deeper reality that cannot exist in space-time and cannot be explained by classical physics. Only the 'quantum state' can describe conscious experience, so by necessity consciousness must exist before matter, energy, space and time. Physical phenomena, which are more virtual than real, are the creation of a conscious field that observes objects moving in spacetime through the body controlled by the field. The quantum state of the field is the representation of qualia, i.e. the sensations and feelings that constitute a conscious experience. Qualia can only be known by the field that is in that state and go beyond what is representable by a mathematical concept."

"Artificial intelligence does not have the capacity to be creative. True creativity leads to what has never existed, it goes far beyond combining what already exists. If we ask it to redesign this theatre, the AI shuffles the chairs it finds in the room, but it is we who have to decide whether or not we like the way it does it, remembering that those chairs were derived from algorithms from data created by us. The computer recognises the correlation between symbols, but it does not understand and it is useless to pretend it does, because it will never understand nothing."

"Not even the most advanced form of artificial intelligence can ever replace man. Because there is something in human beings that is irreducible to machine knowledge: self-awareness, free will, doubt, feelings."

"L’intelligenza artifciale non ha la capacità di essere creativa. La vera creatività porta a ciò che non è mai esistito, va ben oltre la combinazione di ciò che già esiste. Se le chiediamo di riprogettare questo teatro, l'AI rimescola le sedie che trova nella stanza ma siamo noi che dobbiamo decidere se ci piace o meno come lo fa, ricordando che quelle sedie sono state ricavate da algoritmi che partono da dati creati da noi. Il computer riconosce la correlazione tra simboli, ma non capisce ed è inutile pretenderlo, perché non capirà mai un tubo."

"Wired Next Festa Trentino (September 29, 2024)"

"Humanity is at a crossroads. Either it returns to the belief that it has a different nature than machines or it will be reduced to a machine among machines. The risk is not that artificial intelligence will become better than us, but that we will freely decide to submit to it and its masters."