The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
Bill Vass often sees more cutting-edge technology in government than Silicon Valley
“I see more cutting edge technology in the government often than I see in Silicon Valley and having been to Silicon Valley a lot as well.”
Linux would not exist if Sun Microsystems had open-sourced Solaris x86 early
“I think Linux wouldn't exist if we'd open-sourced Solaris x-eighty-six early, and that would have been a tremendous transformation, because there was a lot of amazing things in Solaris.”
DOGE's push for firm-fixed-price federal contracts benefits taxpayers and delivery
“And the shift back to outscum based that, that Doge is pushing is a really good thing. In my opinion, it's good for the taxpayers. It's good for delivery.”
Crowdsourced data from millions of users gives Tesla a major autonomy lead
“Remember, Tesla has this advantage very much like the Echo devices at Amazon, where they're able to crowdsource training from the users. So basically, they're learning and training their model based on all the millions of people driving Teslas every day. That'…”
The first 100 error-corrected qubits on fast architectures will arrive by 2028
“I think you'll see in 20, 27, 20, 28, the first hundred air created qubits on fast machines.”
Quantum computers will have enough qubits to break standard encryption around 2040
“In around 2040, we think there'll be enough qubits to start to break encryption, and secrets last longer than that.”
Intelligence agencies deliberately built opposite systems to avoid overlapping efforts
“When I used to work in the IC, one agency would sometimes do the opposite of the other agency just to avoid overlapping.”
Bad technology decisions in business and government are always driven by politics
“The way I view this in corporate, it's very true. And in government is very true. Whenever you see a bad technology decision, it's always politics.”
Booz Allen deployed Meta's Llama to the ISS for zero-latency astronaut troubleshooting
“So we just put Lama on the international space station on the edge on satellites, right? So that, that enables the astronauts who are working on international space station to have Lama to chat with in space with no latency to determine when things go wrong, h…”
Concerns that AI tools will cause human cognitive atrophy are overblown
“I think the, just like any tool you know, you can cut yourself with a knife in the kitchen. You know, you don't have to tear things apart with your hands. Right. It's, you know, oh geez, we've lost the talent of tearing things apart with our hands cause we've …”
Tesla Full Self-Driving cannot be fully trusted yet without risking trouble
“I have two Teslas and I play with a full self-driving all the time. It's entertaining, but I wouldn't trust it. Entirely, right? If you trust it, you're going to be in trouble. So it's not a hundred percent there yet.”
Real autonomous driving will start to emerge over the next five years
“I think you'll start to see real autonomous driving over the next five years. You know, maybe I'll be burned by that prediction.”
China is neither ahead of nor behind the US in robotics technology
“I don't think China is ahead, but I don't think they're behind.”
Achieving 1,000 error-corrected logical qubits will require roughly 7 million physical qubits
“The goal would be to get to a thousand error corrected qubits, right? But just from that perspective, that's going to be around seven million physical qubits to do that.”
Jeff Bezos believed two redundant systems were better than zero at Amazon
“Jeff Bezos at Amazon used to have this saying that two is better than zero. So he, we would have redundant systems at Amazon, but then work to consolidate them over time.”
Silicon Valley's ecosystem is built entirely upon government-funded foundational technologies
“I mean, look at all the things that came out of the government, integrated circuits, the internet, GPS you know, it goes on and on and on. Those came from government programs. All of Silicon Valley is built on top of it, right?”
The federal government will consolidate fragmented citizen payment and tax systems
“You know, I think there's a lot of places where citizen services could be much better. Through consolidation, making it easier to do your taxes, easier to make payments easier to get payments from the government those kinds of things. And I think you're going …”
US government purposefully archives records underground on paper to outlast tech cycles
“There are, there is the need for long-term storage at NARA and other places like that of data that is underground and that data is also stored purposefully on non-electronic formats, and the reason for that is we have legal requirements, but the government to …”
LLMs reduced Veterans Affairs claims research time from hours to seconds
“We have large language models helping the VA do claims processing. What used to take many hours for a person researching on the claim process happens in a few seconds through The use of a large language model.”
Amazon machine learning models achieved 98% accuracy identifying cancer from scans
“At Amazon, we did a lot of like cancer identification from MRIs and CAT scans. And, you know, the ML was about 98% accurate, which is tremendously good.”
High GPU training and inference costs raise ROI concerns for generative AI
“These models use a lot of GPUs. They are really expensive to train and they are really expensive during inference on today. So that's another area that, that we really question sometimes the ROI of some of these things because of the cost of all of it.”
Saudi Arabia is building significant tech brain trust to diversify from oil
“I think there's a tremendous amount of brain trust happening in Saudi Arabia and investment there in their movement to technology and their movement to you know Diversify their oil investments into other areas.”
Bill Vass left AWS over concerns about government AI adoption trailing China
“One of the reasons I left at AWS and I loved being at AWS. I worked on 63 of the services there and built a lot of them myself, worked on quantum computing and robotics and a whole bunch of things is I was worried a little bit about government adoption of AI a…”
Amazon successfully used manual-referencing LLMs to debug fulfillment centers without hallucinations
“We use large language models at Amazon to help debug things in our fulfillment centers. And it was very successful in those areas, but you still have, it references the manuals directly so you can avoid hallucination. You can see what it actually, you know, fo…”
The US government lacks sufficient customer obsession in delivering citizen services
“Customer obsession is one of my favorites at Amazon. I don't think the government is as customer obsessed as it should be, and they need to be thinking about that in citizen services. And I think that's an area that, that, that could be improved.”
Tech companies must cannibalize their own successful products before competitors do
“Whatever you do that's great technology. Celebrate it, get it working, and then replace it. If you don't replace it, then you're going to competition as well.”