I'm lucky to have lived through several eras of the ongoing revolution in
computing. I think you could argue that revolution is a bigger force shaping our
world now than it ever has been. Each era of the computing revolution has been
defined by boundaries and constraints. We overcome the constraints and push past
the boundaries and we then forget the boundaries existed as we accelerate
breakthroughs on the path to ubiquity. The great author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke's
Profiles of the Future contains a quote that I think embodies the spirit
of exploration and discovery perfectly: "The only way of finding the limits of
the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible."
There are a number of big-picture developments that are going to change
how we all approach technology in the future. The end of Moore's law, the
explosion of data, the evolution of the edge among them. We've been able to take
for granted that there's a PC on every desk and in every home for so long that
we forget how impossible of a goal that must have seemed in the late 70s and
early 80s. Bill Gates wrote his first commercial program on an Intel 8008
microprocessor. The most powerful GPU used for training AI models right now is
billions of times more powerful than this device. If you combined every 8008
ever made, that would still be several orders of magnitude less computing power
than you carry around in your pocket in 2020. And that wasn't all. The scarcity of
compute at the beginning of the PC era was just one of many obstacles that had
to be overcome before we could have personal computing so ubiquitous that we
all have the luxury of taking it for granted. And here's the interesting thing:
these impossible sounding constraints that Bill Gates and a bunch of other
personal computing pioneers confronted in the early days of that era seemed more
like challenges and opportunities to them than obstacles that should deter
them. None of those pioneers could have accurately predicted what personal
computing would become, but they had a pretty good idea of the trends that
would enable what they were attempting, as well as the technical challenges that
they had to overcome. They invested into those trends and focused their ingenuity
and creativity on overcoming those challenges.
So today I want to focus specifically on the trends and constraints that are
influencing one of the most significant developments in the history of computing:
the explosion of large-scale machine learning models and rapid advancements
in AI. Microsoft has been able to do some amazing things to drive this trend
forward, but none of the major shifts in our computing revolution have happened
just because of the efforts of one company. PCs became a phenomenon not
because of the PC itself but because of the breadth of things people did with
them. PCs are a platform for others to build on top of. The internet changed the
world not because of tcp/ip and HTTP but because it was a platform for
individuals and entrepreneurs and big businesses to create and innovate. Even
what you do every day on your mobile device isn't about the technology in the
device but more about the breadth of applications on those devices and the
people, content, and services those applications connect you to. At every one
of these inflection points, the leaps forward we made were because of the
contributions of developers. Any platform is only as good as the developers who
use it, so for AI to achieve its full potential it must be a platform, and this
platform will need to be powered and delivered at truly unprecedented scale
and democratized so everyone can innovate and build on top of it. That's where all
of you come in. The future of AI will be in the hands of the developers who can
harness its powers. And you won't need to be a data scientist or machine learning
specialist to do so. For any developer, the wildest dreams of what you can
achieve and create with technology will become accessible as we build AI at
scale. The reason that I wake up every morning excited about my job is not
because we get to work on these things, but because we get to work on them in
service of others. That's why I feel so fortunate to be speaking today with all
of you, the explorers who are going to help us expand
the boundaries of what is possible.