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Featured at Wired’s “The Big Interview” event December 4th were well-known luminaries and leaders in technology, culture and business…
Great interviews by Wired editors. I loved their next-day framing of ‘saving Silicon Valley from itself.’
Notably, the interviews offered a comprehensive view of a changing technology landscape owing partly to AI, but also more broadly about how technology is diffusing and being applied throughout the economy. The agenda was here.
The first interview featured Austin-based AMD's CEO Dr. Lisa Su; she dispelled the bubble notion for a number of reasons, many of which I agree with. Her extremely deep knowledge base of tech and chips offered a firm foundational perspective. Notably, this AI tech is really in the early innings. Their data center business is growing (as is their biggest competitor's).
Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei had a refreshing perspective about AI frontier model developments, focusing on training LLMs (Claude) around ethics, safety and human factors embedded in a constitutional training method. While many compare models, the landscape is broadening and different models are good at different things. Since even one year ago, observable differentiation is emerging.
I also popped into the Science Fair and marveled at the SMART tires, born out of a NASA partnership. They were originally designed for the Mars Rover, and meant for lunar terrain.
The energy and creative vision of Jon Chu, the filmmaker of Wicked, was really on display. I appreciated the thoughtful perspective of Omidyar Network's Michele Lawrence Jawando who encouraged more voices in the defining of what AI is and can become. It isn't destiny—it's a tool for people's digital lives.
This was Wired's second year holding the event. Last year, I was invited but unable to attend owing to commitments. Jensen Huang and Mark Cuban were keynotes I missed in 2024. We have observed much breadth and depth emerging in the AI space, so attending this year was interesting as the competition has stiffened. Hats off to Cloudflare thwarting 416 billion AI bot requests, helping safeguard certain areas of Internet traffic.
