Just to add some 3rd party ‘juice’ to yesterday’s meeting in Sunnyvale Optica meeting. Dr. Geiser is a CEO of a reputable Swiss photonics company. This is his comment on LinkedIn:
#AI? Don't worry... we ran out of ice cream!
In my young career, I have never seen such a seismic shift within an industry.
12 months ago, at Optica's last cloud computing event at DuPont the world was still a different one: the hyperscalers Meta, Google, Microsoft ... were all cooking their own soup. Plugable, co-packaged or onboard #optics were topics of long and almost philosophical debates. All the other companies down the supply chain were requesting some kind of guidance on which direction to look at. Even just 6 months ago at OFC Conference 400G was still the main topic, with 800G slowly showing up on the horizon.
Fast forward to this years edition of Optica's #Photonics Enabled Cloud Computing workshop and into a post-ChatGPT4 world. Large language models scale with a factor of 2 every 4 months, by far outpacing Moore's law and growth of compute and bandwidth capacity. This hunger for bandwidth, leads to a complete realignment of the industry. M. Ashkan Seyedi of NVIDIA (thanks Ashkan for that great and energizing presentation), Andrew Alduino of Meta as well as Cedric Lam of Google all make clear that no one can wait for standardization anymore before implementing new technologies. The big debates of plugable, copackaged ... are all a thing of yesterday. This is not religion, was one of the most used sentences. Even interoperability was seriously questions, if a solution has clear advantages.
With all that in mind, Cisco's Anthony Torza painted some beautiful a pictures with his Spinal Tap reference, that we currently "crank it up to 11". and even more with his comparison of AI engineers to a 5 year old child: 'The amount of ice cream [bandwidth] they will consume if available is infinite'.
My conclusions of this conference is:
First, the dynamics of the market changed and it is not any longer a matter of having the best and most innovative technology but more a matter of scaling it quickly and getting it into volume.
Second, sorry Skynet there is not enough ice cream, yet!
Thank you Jose Pozo, Carmen Paños, Helena Diez-y-Riega and the rest of the Optica team for this great workshop and Juniper Networks for hosting us.
This post was written without the help of #ChatGPT or #BARD
