AI's single point of failure | Rob Toews

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2023

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"The world's most important advanced technology is nearly all produced in a single facility," says AI expert Rob Toews. He describes how one company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures nearly all the most advanced semiconductor chips — a crucial technology that powers everything from phones to electric vehicles to next-generation artificial intelligence — and breaks down how geopolitical tensions in the region could paralyze the global field of AI.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm at least Hugh, it's TED Talks Daily.
0:05.0	You might not spend much time thinking about computer chip fabrication,
0:10.0	but chips touch all of our daily lives
0:12.0	and reach across the global supply chain.
0:15.0	In his 2023 talk from Ted AI, venture capitalist Rob Taves explains why the future of artificial intelligence is hanging in the balance
0:25.0	because of chips and why we should care after the break.
0:32.0	The following statement is utterly ludicrous.
0:35.0	It is also true.
0:38.0	The world's most important advanced technology is nearly all produced in a single facility.
0:45.0	What's more, that facility is located in one of the most
0:48.0	geopolitically fraught areas on Earth, an area in which many analysts believe that war is inevitable within the decade.
0:56.8	The future of artificial intelligence hangs in the balance.
1:01.2	The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or T-S-M-C, makes all of the world's most advanced AI chips.
1:10.0	This includes NVIDIA's GPUs, Google's TPUUs, AMD's GPUs, the AI chips from Microsoft, Amazon,
1:19.3	Tesla, Cerebrus, Sambanova, and every other credible competitor.
1:26.0	Modern artificial intelligence simply would not be possible without these highly specialized chips.
1:31.8	Little wonder then that Time magazine recently described TSC as quote
1:36.0	the world's most important company that you've probably never heard of.
1:40.0	NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang put it more colorfully saying, quote,
1:45.0	basically there is air and T.S.
1:49.0	T.S.
1:50.0	T.S.
	...

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