From Unicorns to Centaurs: Powering the AI Moonshot

Decades after President Kennedy stood at Rice University to articulate the moonshot of that generation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as the defining “space age” of our decade, transforming all aspects of our lives. In this talk, we will discuss the “rocket engines” necessary to power this moonshot, including the deep co-design required across the entire computing stack. We will present vertically-integrated innovations in AI infrastructure that have already birthed a new cottage industry of “unicorns”, ranging from physical data centers & hardware to software and cloud solutions, and identify the exciting opportunities ahead. We will then look forward to a future of “centaurs,” symbiotic partnerships between human ingenuity and artificial intelligence, highlighting the opportunities and challenges when we use AI to optimize AI. We will conclude by discussing how responsible innovation for this AI moonshot will need to go beyond codesign across technical communities to also require collective cross-community engagement and collaboration.

Speaker: Partha Ranganathan, Google