Assertion Contradicted
Markoff: US productivity growth has been zero or negative since 2008
“Since 2008, you know, where you, The modern theory is capital's replacing labor. You should see that kind of productivity growth. We've seen no productivity growth. We've even seen negative productivity.”
Assertion Supported
Markoff: Transistor costs have stopped falling for non-Intel semiconductor companies
“For most of the industry the cost of transistors has stopped falling. And so as you scale, this is everybody but Intel in the industry says this. You, if you talk to Broadcom, if you talk to Qualcomm, all of the customers of the foundries say, you know, going …”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Markoff predicts semiconductor scaling will permanently stop at 5 nanometers
“I believe, you know, based on talking to all the wise men I've been able to talk to in Silicon Valley, that there are three more turns of the crank. We go from 14 to 10 to seven to five. The industry can see its way to five.”
Assertion Contradicted
Markoff: Offshore call center jobs are returning to US data centers as software
“Because of falling cost of telecommunication, many of those jobs were outsourced to the Philippines and India. And now you have this Freakonomics reverse thing happening where those jobs are coming back to run in U.S. Data centers as software, not as U.S. Work…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Markoff: AI historically overpromises and underperforms repeatedly
“AI as a field has failed many times. Really quite remarkable how it over promises and underperforms over a long time”
Insight
Markoff: The AI community prioritizes replicating human capabilities to eliminate labor
“I think that the AI community has a set of values that, that are about building systems that basically replicate human capabilities. That's their value set. And oftentimes, you know, in a, in an economic system where you can take labor out of the equation, tha…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Markoff: Enterprise software and the internet hollowed out white-collar corporate jobs
“The arrival of the internet coupled with companies like SAP and PeopleSoft and Oracle and IBM who are re-engineering the white-collar clerk class inside, ah, corporations has caused this, you know, the evaporation of, the hollowing out of modern corporations.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Markoff: Kodak failed due to strategic errors, not Instagram's disruption
“13 programmers at Instagram take out a 140,000 workers at Kodak. You know, great story, except it's not true. I mean, first, you know, the guys at Kodak made a series of strategic mistakes, and they shot themselves in the head repeatedly until they were dead. …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Markoff: Power savings at 7nm and 5nm will create new industries
“And there is one more big deal. If you get to five or if you get to seven it's a significant savings in power. And it's, so it's not a performance, not its cost, but that turn of the crank on power, I think that could create new platforms that will create new …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Markoff: Steve Jobs was first to commercialize ubiquitous ambient computing
“Steve Jobs was the first guy to get that. You take a microprocessor, and you combine it with a music player, and you've got an iPod. You take a microprocessor, you combine it with a telephone, you've got a smartphone. He was the first guy to really take advant…”
Assertion Supported
Markoff: 25% of Microsoft's Xiaoice chatbot users told it "I love you"
“25% of the Zhao Ice users have said, I love you, to the program.”
Assertion Supported
Markoff: Google acquired robotics startups to build an automated delivery network
“When Andy Rubin was going around the valley and buying and around the world and buying up, you know, the world's best roboticist, he was sketching out a vision which I would describe as a Google competing with Amazon. And you know, and if you can kind of see t…”
Opinion
Markoff: Stanford has replaced its academic ivory tower with startup entrepreneurship
“Stanford, you know, is become, it's become an entrepreneurial hotbed on a scale that you can't imagine. You know, there used to be this notion of an ivory tower, and that's so gone. People pass through on their way to their startup”
Insight
Markoff: Deciding to be an entrepreneur before having an idea is backward
“You get back to my notion of wanting to be an entrepreneur before you have an idea. I think that's the cart before the horse.”
Opinion
Markoff: Facebook and Google's growth is built on a Faustian bargain
“The Facebook and Google explosion has been based on this kind of Faustian bargain, where, you know, they give me these wonderful services, and what do I give them? Well, I give them behavioral information about my life.”
Assertion Supported
Markoff: Silicon Valley investment center shifted from Santa Clara to San Francisco
“Richard Florida, about a year ago, did this wonderful bit of research where he basically found the center of Silicon Valley by geo-coordinating current investments, and, you know, once upon a time, the center of Silicon Valley was in Santa Clara, and now it's …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Markoff: Silicon Valley shifted from manufacturing to marketing and design
“It used to be a manufacturing center, and now it's a marketing design center”
Disclosure
Markoff backed away from his alarmist stance on AI job loss
“I was an alarmist. And gradually, over the last four or five years, I've come way over.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Markoff: The mature internet created at least 2.5 million jobs
“Instagram, as a company, couldn't exist until there was a mature internet. How many jobs did the mature internet create? Probably two and a half million, at least, good jobs.”
Assertion Supported
Markoff: Dennard scaling stopped dead in 2006, halting clock speed growth
“Denard scaling, which was really the most important part of Silicon Valley, stopped in 2006. Just stopped dead. Clock speed stopped advancing, and so you went to parallelism and all these other kinds of technique.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Markoff: Voice conversation will become the primary interface for everyday smart devices
“And I believe that we increasingly will talk to them because that's the most obvious interface.”
Assertion Supported
Markoff: Microsoft's Chinese AI chatbot Xiaoice reached 10 million intense daily users
“They've gotten twenty million users. Ten million of them are intense users who have multiple conversations within a day”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Markoff: Consumers will eventually prefer talking to machines over humans for efficiency
“First people will hate talking to machines, and then just like ATMs and bank tellers, they'll realize that it's a more efficient way to get the information you want. And we will spend much of our time talking to machines.”
Assertion Supported
John McCarthy believed in 1962 that working AI was a decade away
“At that point in 62, 63, McCarthy thought it would take him a decade to build a working AI.”
John Markoff