TLC #3: Future of Software Engineering 👩🏻💻, Gemini, Intel and Nvidia ⚙️
A speculation on the future of software engineering. Also, in the news are Gemini, Intel foundry, Nvidia, and more. (Issue #3, 27 Feb 2024)
Hey, Ashwin here! Welcome to edition #3 of Tech Lead Compass newsletter!
We start with Nvidia, which is undoubtedly the talk of town 📣
Future of Software Engineering - according to Nvidia’s CEO
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, is now the hero in town. Nvidia is printing money and is currently the third largest company by market cap, just behind Apple and Microsoft.
In his recent chat with UAE’s minister of AI - he shared his perspective on how children of the future should be educated. It is certainly worth a listen and it made me think!
Here’s the gist:
In the past and present, children are advised to learn computer science to be successful
But in the future, companies will design software and services in such a way that “nobody should program”
Programming language is human and everybody in the world is a programmer. This will be made possible by AI
For the first time, everybody in any company is a technologist. The technology divide is closed and the technology leadership of other countries is being reset
Kids should be educated to solve domain problems in fields like digital biology, manufacturing, education, farming, etc. Technologies to make this happen will be readily available to them
Computers will work to make you more efficient and produce great work
It is a fascinating way to think about how learning and education will evolve.
Software was always meant to solve business problems. But over time, we made it so complex, that requires experts to create and maintain it for an organization.
But the future in my opinion will be very different. I like to side with Mr. Huang.
Domain experts who understand the business context, identify problems, and solve them with the power of AI will be required everywhere.
I will let you ruminate!
Now on to the must-read news from the past week…
5 “Must-Read” Tech News for the Week
Google has paused the ability of its AI system Gemini to generate images of people. This comes after Gemini was found to generate inaccurate historical images by depicting racially diverse groups like US founding fathers and Nazi German soldiers. Google has acknowledged issues and is working to improve Gemini's image generation capabilities before re-releasing the feature.
Nvidia stock surge after bumper results (Marketwatch)
Nvidia’s better-than-expected results took the company’s market cap beyond $2 trillion, making it the third most valuable company in the US after Microsoft and Apple.
Intel revealed new chip technologies that will be released through its foundry services, where they will manufacture chips for other companies. Server chips named “Clearwater Forest” will be built using Intel 18A which promises to improve per-watt performance and latency using 3D-stacked technology.
Google releases Gemma open source models (Google blog)
Gemma open-source, lightweight models were released by Google in 2 forms - Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, each with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants. These are the same models that power Gemini, Google’s AI system which poses some challenges. Here are some promising benchmark results in comparison to Llama 2.
In direct competition with Facetime and WhatsApp, X is rolling out audio and video calling features to all users. This previous was previously limited to premium subscribers.
That’s it for this week. Until I talk to you next week, stay safe and have fun with tech.
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