Opinion
Appenzeller: Intel-Nvidia partnership means AMD is 'fucked'
“I think AMD is fucked, right? I mean, they're, you're just, If your two arch nemesis suddenly team up, that's the worst possible news you can have, right? They were already struggling, right? Their cards are good, their software stack is not, right? They were …”
Opinion
Appenzeller: Capital moats in AI are shallow speed bumps
“If that assumption is true, I think this means that the moat that's created by these large capital investments is actually not particularly deep, right? It's more of a speed bump than Then, you know, something that prevents new entrants.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: Intel lacks competitive AI chips and its Gaudi effort is done
“They can't, they don't have anything competitive, right? There was the Gaudi effort that's more or less done, right? There was the internal graphics chips, which never competed really at the high end, right?”
Disclosure
Appenzeller: Intel's customer concentration allowed hyperscalers to push down prices
“One of the biggest problems we had was that our customer base sucked, right? I mean, we were selling to, most of the chips went to the large hyperscalers, you know, which they're way too concentrated, and they build their own chips, and so you can push down yo…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: High compute costs will force AI into usage-based pricing
“It'll push more and more to, I think, just usage based pricing, right? I think if you have a, if you have an underlying commodity that you're reselling to some degree that has, that is that large a part of your cost of goods, right? You need to go to usage bas…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: Novel coding lacking AI training data is only 0.01% of development
“I think the good news is that is 0.01% of all software development, right, for the, I don't know, you know, 100,000 ERP system implementation or so, right, that we have tons of training data, and I think these tools can be very, very powerful.”
Insight
Appenzeller: Guaranteeing LLMs never produce forbidden output is an unsolvable problem
“You're trying to have an LM that is very helpful and never even implicitly gives investment advice. That's sort of an unsolvable problem, right? You can get better and better and better, but you can never completely rule it out. And you can add a second LM tha…”
Insight
Appenzeller: Natural language prompts are the narrow waist abstraction of AI
“I think we have the waste, the narrow waste. I think it's the prompt.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: AI will enable one worker to replace two, rather than direct human elimination
“I mean, I think in few cases, humans will get replaced by AI. In most cases, you know, two humans will get replaced, one human that is more, by one human that's more productive with AI.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: AI model training costs will plateau as human data runs out
“Expectation at the moment is that the cost for training these models, you know, may actually sort of top out or even go down a little bit, you know, as the chips get faster, but we don't discover new training material as quickly.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: Well-funded startups will drive future LLM innovation
“Today, training a large language model is something that is definitely within reach for a well-funded startup, right? So, and for that reason, we expect to see more innovation in that area in the future.”
Insight
Appenzeller: $100M annual compute spend justifies building owned data centers
“If you're spending ten million dollars a year, you're probably still under critical, right? If you're spending a hundred million dollars a year on infrastructure, that, that maybe, A reason to look into options for your own dataset.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: Moore's law is still alive as of 2023
“Moore's law is actually still, as of today, alive and kicking, right?”
Opinion
Appenzeller: Intel-Nvidia alliance weakens Arm's core value proposition
“I think ARM is a little bit screwed as well, right? Because they are, their biggest selling point was sort of like, look, we can partner with everybody that doesn't want to partner with Intel.”
Insight
Appenzeller: Data centers are today's equivalent of Industrial Revolution oil
“If it was the Industrial Revolution, having oil was important, and now having data centers. It's important.”
Opinion
Appenzeller: A government-driven Manhattan Project approach to AI strategy will fail
“So I think basically having the government drive all of AI strategy, you know, Manhattan-style project or Apollo project, pick your favorite successful project there, I can't see that working. You probably need a highly dynamic ecosystem of a large number of c…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: Basic copilots boost enterprise developer productivity by 15 percent
“I think we, if I look at the data we've seen from some of the large financial institutions, they're estimating that the increase in developer productivity from just a vanilla copilot deployment is something like 15%.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: System architecture will supersede low-level coding as AI advances
“Explaining the problem statement, explain the algorithmic foundations, explaining architecture, and explaining data flows getting more important, and the nitty gritty coding, you know, what's the most clever way to unrule a for loop That's a very specialized, …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: Formal programming languages will not be replaced by AI
“I think formal languages won't go away because ultimately they seem complicated, but I think effectively a formal language is often the simplest type representation you can find to specify intent, right?”
Insight
Appenzeller: Creating specs first yields best results in AI legacy code migrations
“The most efficient way for them is to actually go first and try to create a spec, use the AI to create a spec from that code, right? And once they have the spec, then to re-implement the spec.”
Insight
Appenzeller: Building AI agents architecturally mirrors traditional SaaS software
“And I personally think that architecturally There really is no difference between your typical SaaS software today and Agent in terms of how you build it, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: Consumer websites are deploying anti-agent CAPTCHAs against AI
“All the consumer sites are starting with more and more complex anti-agent captures trying to keep out their agents because they only want the humans that have attention to come to those sites.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Appenzeller: All future state-of-the-art AI models will use reasoning techniques
“And I think looking forward, From now on, pretty much any state of the art model will use some of those techniques, and we've seen this already, you know, from models from OpenAI and models from Google that are structurally very, very similar, and this has hug…”
Insight
Appenzeller: Small distilled models use reasoning to overcome limited memory capacity
“On the right side, we have a distilled version of DeepSeq R-one. So this is a very, very small model. It can't actually answer this directly from memory, but what it does, it starts reasoning. And if you read the text, right, it really starts to hustle. It's t…”
