Software development is in an absolute frenzy right now, Scott said. “You have very, very senior people, the best coders you’ve ever met in your life, who are just completely overwhelmed trying to keep up with the rate of progress that’s happening right now.”
Optimizing AI development for agents or humans?
Sam Altman, co-founder & CEO of OpenAI, suggested the future of software development will be directed more at agent use, rather than human use.
“How are we going to rewrite all software to be equally usable by humans and AI? There’s like, a bunch of weird quirks right now about trying to do that with the software. Does that change the architecture of the software itself, where you’re going to optimize it for agents more so than humans? It fundamentally changes how you build software,” Altman said.
“Maybe a lot of software will get rewritten so that it’s primarily or largely used by AI, but also still works for people using it the old-fashioned way. One of the most powerful things about AI is you can do this sort of always-on computing, where you could have an AI listening to your meeting or watching your meeting, and, you know, watching what you’re doing on your computer, and then, just like, add a lot of value and do stuff for you… Existing computer hardware is not really meant for that. Our permissioning system, and how we think about what an AI gets to see and do stuff with and what it gets to keep, is not really meant for that. Our legal system doesn’t really support that. Well, you’d like to be able to record a meeting and learn something from it and delete the recording. So I think there’s a lot of just usability things like that,” Altman said.
Related to Altman and OpenAI’s Codex platform, Cisco’s president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel said that 100% of Cisco’s AI Defense package will soon be entirely written by Codex. “We are moving toward what Altman called ‘full AI companies,’ where the model builds the product and the infrastructure to run it,” Patel said.
Intel: Memory is an AI killer
AI sucks up a lot of memory, said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel. “In terms of AI, the biggest challenge for a lot of my customers is memory,” Tan said. “And there’s no relief as far as I know.” In talking to a few key industry players, “they told me that ‘Lip-Bu, there’s no relief until 2028.’”
