5 questions to Qualcomm’s Durga Malladi

Policy note: We will be away this Monday for Memorial Day, but we will return to your inboxes on Tuesday, May 30th.

Welcome to this installation “Future in Five Questions”. — This week, I spoke with Qualcomm’s Durga Malladi, senior vice president and networking expert who is leading the company’s 5G and IoT transformation. Durga spoke about the role of advanced seamless networks as augmented and virtual reality technologies proliferate, the impact of the CHIPS Act and science on the American innovation landscape, and how Tolstoy shaped his vision for the future. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity:

What’s one underrated big idea?

Making 5G the operating technology for low latency, high reliability applications. Augmented reality was one of our original goals – when you think about the workloads that are required for something like XR, you need to do most of the processing and rendering on the device, but you also need to do significantly more, and not all. of this can match the form factor and power consumption you expect from XR devices. You want a distributed architecture where some of the processing is done on the device and some is done near the device so that you can still communicate with very low latency.

To enable distributed computing architecture, it comes with 5G natively. Our focus is not only on ultra-high peak data rates of 10 gigabits per second, but also on reducing data rates to much lower values. They are specifically designed for applications with low power consumption, high reliability and low latency. When it comes to wearables and XR technologies, this will be a huge game changer.

What technology do you think is overhyped?

At Qualcomm, we are using AI-based algorithms to power our 5G technology, but we see its future in gradually moving AI processing to the edge. Just like we talked about distributed processing, we’ll end up with AI hybrid processing, where the workload is shared across devices with some help coming from the edge of the network. There is a certain element of hype around what we can do with AI and we are excited about this potential, but what we are seeing eventually is that this is becoming a hybrid AI model that is very far from what we have just described in terms of distributed computing.

What book has most influenced your vision of the future?

I’m a history buff, so I’ve always liked War and Peace.

If you remember, General Kutuzov is also known as “His Serene Highness”. The Russians, including the tsar, directly tell him what to do, to rush into battle head-on. And his point was that you don’t necessarily react immediately to the situation, you allow it to come to you and act on purpose. This is what I’ve always liked. The moment you see the hype cycle, you don’t immediately jump in and fall into it. tactics this, but step back from the situation and try to understand exactly where you are going and develop a strategy Around him.

What can government do about technology that it is not?

There’s a lot of good stuff in the Chip Law. I wouldn’t be able to tell what they are No at the moment because we are very grateful for the amount of work done in the chip sector in this account.

They can continue to work with the industry – for the first time in a very long time, the state pays so much attention to the technology sector, in particular the latest technologies, and this is very good, from our point of view. .

What surprised you the most this year?

The use of 5G as an operating technology to improve workplace productivity and how it has been embraced by the industry.

If I were to go back 10 years to the days of 4G, I would see that it was primarily a consumer-oriented phone-centric technology that fueled the rise of smartphones. Today, the number of industries that are interested in 5G as a technology ranges from manufacturing and industrial companies such as Siemens and Bosch to the automotive industry. It is no longer just a small group of network providers and mobile operators, but a much more diverse, rich and dynamic ecosystem.

How OpenAI’s Sam Altman follows his Washington Blitz as he tours Europe preparing AI law, he reassures skittish lawmakers that his company is not planning to leave the continent anytime soon.

Laura Kayali from POLITICO said this morning on Altman’s promise on Twitter that his company is “excited to continue to be here and certainly has no plans to leave”, after Reuters report this suggests the company could raise the stakes if the AI Act proves too strict. Laura points out that OpenAI does not yet have a European office, but an anonymous senior French official told POLITICO that the nation hopes to enlist their support.

As this official pointed out, “It wasn’t the French CNIL that blocked ChatGPT, was it?” nodding sardonically at the Italian regulators. temporary blocking of the program based on concerns that this may violate the European General Data Protection Regulation.

The European Union is determined to develop its own technological economy, so much the better to free yourself from the whims — and propensity to take liberties with personal data — of big American technology firms.

But one of his economic heavyweights makes it clear that there is a limit to what they are willing to spend on it. Louis Westendarp of POLITICO reported yesterday about Germany’s unwillingness to pay the bill for Large European AI Models’ attempt to create a competitor to ChatGPT that could be worth hundreds of millions of euros.

“The down-to-earth problem is that there is no money,” said Louis Jörg Bienert, chairman of the German Association for Artificial Intelligence, which is behind LEAM. “It’s actually very sad because right now we don’t invest in our future at all,” he added.

What does this mean in the short term? It is likely that, as in other areas where cooperation within the EU has ceased, individual countries will try to do it on their own: Louis notes that the UK is planning a “BritGPT”, for which they have already committed £900 million, and French startup Mistral AI is going raise almost 100 million euros.