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Saturday, June 27, 2020

Jim Keller: Moore's Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles | AI Podcast [Lex Fridman]



Program notes:
Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He's known for his work on the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5 processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.

0:00 - Introduction
2:12 - Difference between a computer and a human brain
3:43 - Computer abstraction layers and parallelism
17:53 - If you run a program multiple times, do you always get the same answer?
20:43 - Building computers and teams of people
22:41 - Start from scratch every 5 years
30:05 - Moore's law is not dead
55:47 - Is superintelligence the next layer of abstraction?
1:00:02 - Is the universe a computer?
1:03:00 - Ray Kurzweil and exponential improvement in technology
1:04:33 - Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot
1:20:51 - Lessons from working with Elon Musk
1:28:33 - Existential threats from AI
1:32:38 - Happiness and the meaning of life
I found this conversation utterly fascination – though, truth be told, I also played solitaire while listening. Much of it just whizzed by, but that's OK.  Keller designs microprocessors, and has lived through revolutions in processor design. He actually thinks about transistor size in terms of numbers of atoms. Anyone who thinks about computing needs to think about it as a physical process, even if the conversation just whizzes by.

04:00 - 21:00: Starts talking about layers of abstraction at roughly 04:00 and continues. Interesting soundbite: you can execute a program 100 times and get the same answer each time, but have 100 different execution paths.

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