D2D: Three big questions around AI
A brewing fight in Open RAN and our proposal for the US's Technology Industrial Policy
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Highlights form our Blog
We think there are three big questions facing the AI semis industry - Will AI be additive to the semis market or just displace demand for other workloads and products? How will the competitive landscape for inference shape up? And can anything displace Nvidia from its perch? While we are starting to see hints of answers, ultimately these questions will have important implications for the next decade for the industry.
Fighting continues in the Open RAN Initiative. Ericsson has made a modest proposal for a seemingly small technical change, which may or may not be intended to fragment the project into irrelevance. Meanwhile Facebook made a generous contribution to efforts here, but looks like the only sober person standing in the middle of a dive bar fistfight.
If the US is going to engage in Industrial Policy, we have a suggestion. We think there is a big opportunity for a National R&D and Prototyping Center. A fully kitted out fab and packaging facility with all the latest tools but designed to produce in small volumes. This could reap tremendous benefits in spurring innovation in US Tech, in ways that the big companies are incapable or uninterested in providing. The key to its success would be a solid public-private governance model that prevents undue interference from either side.
Semis start-ups face two choices when picking customer targets. They can go after the hyperscalers who offer huge volumes but confound with lengthy decision making cycles. Or they can go after Enterprise customers who are much more approachable but offer much smaller scale and may lack the technical sophistication to evaluate new offerings. The sudden rise of Generative AI may tip this balance as the Enterprise looks for way to adopt AI without jeopardizing their data.
The average luxury car already has around 200 microcontrollers inside. The world of automotive semis is much more complex and diverse than processors and autonomous systems. Fortunately, the auto OEMs are waking up to the challenges of semis, opening new opportunities for the industry.
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Noteworthy Items
Semis and Hardware
Facebook announced a new version of its Llama AI framework with Qualcomm as a launch partner. Interesting from several angles. This new version of Llama brings some important upgrades in terms of access, and a pretty big move for the AI frameworks. Qualcomm’s involvement highlights the important role they can play in inference, and also another sign of the closeness of these two companies.
A good overview of “Why Nvidia Keeps Winning” on Jordan Schneider’s China Talk podcast with Doug O’Laughlin of Fabricated Knowledge.
Imax still runs on a Palm Pilot Operating System (OM). Platforms persist.
This developer reviewed his experience with Windows on Arm, Qualcomm Snapdragon specifically. For him, it was good for certain things and not others. But the list of shortcomings look very hard to solve, and he specifically calls out areas where Qualcomm needs to do some work. It is hard to read this and think that Qualcomm can make this a meaningful category any time soon (if ever).
Oh look RISC V attack vectors are starting to appear. The positive spin on this is that RISC V matters to enough people that some of them are looking at ways to attack it.
Wireless and Networking
3GPP, the organization that sets the wireless standards, has reworked its voting rules in what appears to be a move to prevent Apple from swamping the body with its employees. If true, they would not be the first to game the 3GPP’s rules.
DigiTimes (with their mixed track record) says Qualcomm and Mediatek are cutting wafer orders for the 2H of 2023. If true (a big if) it calls into question the story that we will see a recovery in handset demand this year.
The Register took a close look at a dispute raging over the governance structure of the global system for assigning IP addresses. At one level, this is a story about an important but somewhat rusty corner of the Internet. If you want to add a level of conspiracy story to it, the company that seems to be at the heart of the dispute is based in China.
Amazon is preparing to launch a large constellation of Kuiper satellites. There are many reasons to think they need this for their own purposes, but it is also likely a shot across the bow at Space X and Starlink. Alternatively, you too can compete with both of them thanks to a University in Guatemala which just released a complete set of open source designs for its Quetzal mini-cube satellites.
Scientists have developed a new protocol for sending high speed data over infrared light. Maybe remote controls do have a future after all.
A deep primer on optical networking.
Telecom Italia tried to buy Apple 25 years ago. Today, they are selling off their land lines in a bid to survive their heavy debt load. Worth reading for that weird historical junction.
Software and the Cloud
IEEE provides a good summary of AI reports from leading consulting firms McKinsey and Bain. The quick summary is they do not know any more than anyone else about how people will actually want to use AI.
A fairly sober assessment of what LLMs and Generative AI can and cannot do. Our periodic reminder that AI will be important but no one really knows exactly how. On a related note, this Github project, provides a tool for doing computational chemistry and drug discovery. Nvidia launched something similar a few months back. It is possible that “AI” will end up very siloed as the software workloads for every use case become highly differentiated.
IBM acquired one-time Linux flag bearer Red Hat last year. Many among the Linux community and IBM observers worried that this would not have a happy ending. It is too soon to tell if this deal will generate meaningful returns for IBM, but the latest signs are not promising. Red Hat seems to be ‘closing’ off many of its open features, and competitor Canonical (maker of Ubuntu) is apparently responding with a new marketing strategy of “Say Nothing and Just Let Red Hat implode.”
NIST released a good overview of cybersecurity frameworks. Good background material that will likely come in handy too frequently in the future.
Other Items We Found Interesting
A topic close to our heart - VCs are having a hard time raising funding from LPS.
The Maker Faire is returning to the Bay Area.
Photo by Alessandro Erbetta on Unsplash