Jim Keller: Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles

About this episode

<p>Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He&#8217;s known for his work on the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5 processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect.</p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast.</span>&#160;If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to <a href="https://lexfridman.com/ai">https://lexfridman.com/ai</a> or connect with @lexfridman on <a href="https://twitter.com/lexfridman">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman/">LinkedIn</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@lexfridman">Medium</a>, or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman">YouTube</a> where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artificial-intelligence/id1434243584">Apple Podcasts</a>, follow on <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/2MAi0BvDc6GTFvKFPXnkCL">Spotify</a>, or support it on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman">Patreon</a>.</p> <p>This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cash-app/id711923939">App Store</a>, <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squareup.cash&#38;hl=en_US">Google Play</a>), use code &#8220;LexPodcast&#8221;.&#160;</p> <p>Here&#8217;s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.</p> <p>00:00 &#8211; Introduction<br /> 02:12 &#8211; Difference between a computer and a human brain<br /> 03:43 &#8211; Computer abstraction layers and parallelism<br /> 17:53 &#8211; If you run a program multiple times, do you always get the same answer?<br /> 20:43 &#8211; Building computers and teams of people<br /> 22:41 &#8211; Start from scratch every 5 years<br /> 30:05 &#8211; Moore&#8217;s law is not dead<br /> 55:47 &#8211; Is superintelligence the next layer of abstraction?<br /> 1:00:02 &#8211; Is the universe a computer?<br /> 1:03:00 &#8211; Ray Kurzweil and exponential improvement in technology<br /> 1:04:33 &#8211; Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot<br /> 1:20:51 &#8211; Lessons from working with Elon Musk<br /> 1:28:33 &#8211; Existential threats from AI<br /> 1:32:38 &#8211; Happiness and the meaning of life</p>