
Quest for AI Leadership Pushes Microsoft Further into Chip Development - rayuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-24/quest-for-ai-leadership-pushes-microsoft-further-into-chip-development
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hatsunearu
Protip: it's not hardware that wins the AI game, it's the software and
ecosystem. AMD generally has better chips but their software sucks butt so
they are behind.

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carussell
None of those mentioned in the article (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) are working
on chip development beyond the design phase.

I'll be brief: There's tons of low-hanging fruit in the semiconductor
industry, starting with manufacturing.

You might read about how competition among chipmakers is fierce, and ask why
any company from the Valley would make a foray into taking that kind of risk.
The thing is, that's only true if you ignore the obvious; which is to say,
take all the chipmakers and keep letting them do what they're doing, and sure,
that line about competition will remain true.

But there's a world of difference between how things operate in a fab versus
the environment that any software dev or executive will be used to. Things run
at an efficiency that no engineer from the software world would tolerate for
very long.

It's hard to say this without it seeming like bluster, but it's not, I
promise: Any of the aforementioned Valley giants could buy up some chipmaker
who's for sale, install one of their own executives at the top, and with a
team of, like, six people (junior-level, even) from the same parent company,
by the start of the fourth quarter following the buyout they would be
virtually guaranteed to be on trajectory that would eventually destroy the
competition.

You really, _really_ have no idea how low this fruit hangs.

> In a May speech [Nadella] touted the idea of using AI to track industrial
> equipment, telling the user things like where to find a jackhammer

Quaint.

