At the Goldman Sachs tech conference today. Genevieve will be speaking on AI, after Andresseen and before Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. What a lineup for Valentine’s Day!
Here are my notes on some of the interesting talks so far:
o Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founder of Sun and the first investor in Google, prior to the company even being founded):
“AI consumes most of the compute cycles at Google, and it is growing.
I have been interested in AI for a long time. My first programming project was a neural network simulator in 1974, on a PDP-11 with 64kB of memory and we could only model 256 nodes.
And today, AI is the most exciting place in all of high tech. In normal IT, you might see 10-20% improvement per year. Here you see an order of magnitude improvement each year.
Analog AI chips would be the lowest power. The human brain is remarkably power efficient, and it is analog. [I agree. Go Mythic!]
NVIDIA has more software engineers than hardware engineers.
So much in life can be improved by 10%. Think about sales, CRM, insurance. Every vertical has something that can be improved with AI.
NVIDIA’s Huang: There is now 10x as much computer-generated code as human-generated code. [e.g., when you train a neural net; 90% of code is computer generated].
o Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter
“Twitter is not a social network. We moved from a people network to an interest network, a network of ideas. Our main job is to keep people informed on what’s happening in the world.”
To a question on political impact: “We serve the public conversation, but we see a lot of problems. We see abuse; we see harassment; we see misinformation campaigns; we see echo chambers and filter bubbles. To serve the public conversation, we need to make sure we’re understanding whether it’s healthy or not.”
“At our worst, we make people more reflexive and at our best it makes people more reflective. The more we can encourage deeper conversation, the better we are as a society.”
“We want to be a daily utility.
“We now leverage machine learning and deep learning. We had not done that before three years ago.”
o Brad Garlinghouse, CEO Ripple
“40% of all wire transfers in Australia result in a customer service phone call. And they can’t tell the customer what happened to their wire.
Xrapid puts a product wrapper on foreign exchange. To do foreign exchange, you convert from dollars to XRB and then from XRB to Philippine Pisos, for example.
Bitcoin costs $13-20 per transaction and takes 3-4 hours. We cost a fraction of a cent and take 3 seconds. XRB is 1000x faster and 1000x cheaper than BTC for payments. BTC solves a different problem. It does not solve the payments problem. BTC is digital gold, a store of value.
SWIFT takes 48 hours for settlement time. Even if XRB has high volatility, you are exposed to it for only 10 seconds, so XRB exposes you to less volatility per transaction than a fiat-denominated currency. SWIFT costs $10 or more, and has a 6% error rate. [!]”
o Chain CEO AdamLudwin: “Eventually every asset class will feel like or be a cryptocurrency. Why not run on crypto rails?”
Sometimes you get lucky and then people ascribe more meaning to what you have to say. It’s like that for Bitcoin now.
Bitcoin is washing out to be digital gold. What is the right price for gold? It’s a question for psychologists not economists. Only 3% of gold’s value comes from business use (like electronics)
Bitcoin is worse than VISA on all dimensions that VISA customers care about – cost, speed, efficiency, user experience. The only advantage of bitcoin is censorship resistance and VISA does not care about that at all. It’s like encrypted email used to be. 10 years ago, nobody in the room used encrypted messaging. Today, most of you use it, with Telegram or Signal.
Ethereum is a new type of computer, distributed. It is open and censorship resistant. VMware is not trying to create anything that is like Ethereum.
Ethereum is the internet counterculture. Like a cactus in a rainforest.
o Circle President Sean Neville: “Remittance is meant to be free. It’s a consumer app, like photo sharing.”
At #GSTech2018 in San Francisco
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