Well, thank you very much for following a Next Wave speaker series. As you know, because of the pandemic,
we could not run our normal, face-to-face, large- audience communication, but in some ways actually,
the way we're communicating today, we can reach an even broader global audience because it is
available, it's in the cloud, and we can reach you. I'm so glad we also have spectacular speakers that
have joined me, from large CEOs of companies like VMware and Arm, all the way to startup companies
that are changing the world. And in between, we also have enablers, like venture capitalists and others,
that are trying to help these companies scale. So, we want to hear a diverse view of how we are
trying to change, you know, technology companies that are making our lives better – whether it's
AI technology whether it's data-driven companies that are changing the insurance market or the health
market, all the way to changing fundamental core technologies with the quantum compute.
So, keep listening to us. I'm happy and delighted that I am able to share these great ideas with
you going forward. There is a transition coming though. Over the last little while, we've seen
massive improvements in the field of artificial intelligence. And we look at the next generation
of computing being a combination of classical computing and AI-driven computing where data
is being used to make decisions and being used to make decisions in an autonomous
way through algorithms that are effectively using machine learning and AI techniques to
extract information and look for patterns within that data. So I think the nature of computing is
changing, we've been studying that, we've been expanding our own products to provide machine
learning accelerators, to provide software frameworks to allow applications to be built.
I think the next 15 years will go into the exact opposite direction and it will be the decade
of the content producers. The customer wants it. Fake news, certain developments of data
manipulation, political scandals, populism or the rise of autocratic systems based on false
information and propaganda – that all shows how important it is to have trustful sources.
Exoskeletons this is what we do so we want to support the humans
where they have some weak points, and actually,
most of the humans on this planet sooner or later get some back problems because of heavy lifting or
other related issues. And we have an exoskeleton which actually helps people to reduce
the pressure on the on the back and this is what we do with our CrayX exoskeleton device.
We, as the tech community, need to be constantly seeking 'how do we bend that
arc of technology and every day make it more good?' We must be shaping technology as a force for good
every day and I believe we need to be building that into our organizations.
We need to say 'how do we reduce the carbon footprint?', 'how do we handle privacy for the
individual?', and 'how do we participate in the policy debates to best govern the trade-offs of the
direction of technology, the needs of the people, and the business requirements at the same time?'
If you look at products today, there are two types of products.
One family product is very very sophisticated from a technological point of view but low
accuracy, which means they can fail often and it's fine like, you know, a PC, like a smartphone. The second
family of products is not so much sophisticated
but very very accurate, which means that they fail rarely and an aircraft, an airplane
is an example of such a product. The tolerance for failure is basically
zero. Autonomous driving is both, you have to be very very sophisticated – we're talking about
cutting-edge silicon, cutting-edge software, cutting- edge data-driven algorithms, cutting edge AIs –
so very very sophisticated but on the other hand very very accurate. The tolerance for failure is
almost zero and then this is where the conundrum – this is where the big challenge is.
And progressively, we move from not only being different
but celebrating the differences, of our people, not only respecting them for who they are,
their inclination, their color of skin, their cultures, their religion, but also
operating in a country and being a player in that country who recognizes all the
differences of that country from another one and being extremely respectful of those differences.
And this has created a corpus of values which is making us a very strong company
in a world where contrary to something where, when you create a product, you have a physical product,
we don't create a product. And our product is imagination and creativity,
it is about intelligence, and all this is something which is intangible. And honestly, this has really
set us apart from the competition and created human values which are paramount to our people.
Insurance is based on data right and what we believe is that, what we can contribute
is turning insurance into a really engaging product, into a product that people love
and that provides real safety. And what we see is that based on contextual data, so knowing much more
about customers in real time, we can understand what is their risk right now and we can also
help them reduce the risk that they're exposed to right now to prevent something bad from happening.
So we're talking about food waste and food waste solution.
And we all know, it's not just a local problem, it's a global problem, like
it happens anywhere in the world. And as you correctly pointed out, you know,
simply explained, it's an overcapacity of food which does not find
the right demand on time because food is perishable, so, you know, timing is an important
factor to say 'how can I redistribute this oversupply very quickly into the right channels?'
It's a very long (process) to get a drug
to treatment. It's very long and it's also complex, or let's say sophisticated, so not only do you
need people with know-how but we need to bring this technology – and I think it has
the positive thing of the Covid crisis is that it is accelerating the use of
these tools and this technology to do it better, optimizing and accelerating.
You're enabling anybody out there to enable banking-as-a-service capabilities, so
tell us about the disruption that is going on and how you are enabling these companies become
a what I call (a provider of) customer-centric services that are far better than what could be
done without having your service. From a Solaris perspective, we call that contextual finance
and that basically means that you bring the financial service into the context
of a bigger solution. And the driver of that solution is a change in consumer behavior.
The key objective of Solaris is to provide an infrastructure that allows the seamless
integration of financial solutions into other ecosystems, and what drives us
is, of course, that we want to have the best product at the best price with the best service.
I hope that we really become that, that we take advantage of all those efficiencies and, you
know, advances in technology and actually get back to becoming human and having that
human connectivity because here at Factory Berlin we've been operating through
the pandemic at a, you know, reduced capacity, of course, and then starting to scale as we can
because we have seen that our community members, especially the freelancers and
the early-stage startups that need this environment, the so-called third space,
you know, not their home environment, not the workplace, but this type of ecosystem
and network where you feed off of each other and where serendipity takes place, you know, the the
effect of having the water cooler conversation, which you can't have when you're on a video call.
And so, we've seen our community, you know, wanting to flock back to the space because they
feel that need to have human interaction because actually, you know, some things just
happen serendipitously or co-creation happens when you have the room for that
invention.