Podcast: Arm's Vince Jesaitis on How AI Is Moving from the Cloud to Your Pocket

In this episode, we speak with Vince Jesaitis (VP at Arm) who explains how AI is shifting from big data centers to everyday devices, and what that means for speed, security, and policy.

This podcast is sponsored by Arm. 

Key takeaways:

• AI will soon run on phones, cars, and earbuds without the cloud. This makes things faster, uses less energy, and is more secure. 
• Governments are racing to support chipmaking & AI but complex rules make building new products harder.

Episode Notes

(00:00) Introduction to Arm and Vince Jesaitis

(03:46) The Future of AI and Edge Computing

(11:22) Government Relations and AI Literacy

(16:56) Security and Privacy in Emerging Technologies

(23:18) Navigating Global Regulations and Standards

(27:40) Sustainability and Efficiency in Technology

(34:56) Looking Ahead: Trends in AI and Technology

(42:36) Career Reflections and Advice for Students

This episode is part of a series brought to you by Arm to show how the future of AI is being built today, from the chips powering it to the people shaping it. To go deeper, read Arm’s new AI Readiness Index and see where the world stands on adopting and scaling AI.

Enjoyed listening? Want to read more? Check out the links below:

• Arm’s AI Readiness Index technical report written with Wevolver
• Arm’s "Smarter At The Edge" whitepaper written with SCSP
• Arm’s Global Public Policy website
• Follow Vince Jesaitis on LinkedIn

Become a founding reader of our newsletter: http://read.thenextbyte.com/

Transcript

What most of us think about artificial intelligence today is maybe like a coding assistant or a chatbot. The next kind of aha moment in AI is when you no longer need to send something off to the cloud, but local AI processing is being done on these devices that you just couldn't imagine that are in the palm of your hand, in your ear, that you're driving around in, that sort of thing.

What's up friends, this is The Next Byte Podcast where one gentleman and one scholar explore the secret sauce behind cool tech and make it easy to understand.

Daniel: Well, thank you, Vince, for joining us on the pod. We're really excited to have you. First order of business, would you mind giving us a brief intro on who you are, what you do, and who Arm is?

Vince: Yeah, thanks. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me on. ah My name is Vince Chasitis. I'm head of global government affairs for Arm. Arm is a, I would say they're in the semiconductor space. They're not a traditional semiconductor company. They provide the building blocks that semiconductor companies use to produce complete chips. So central processing units, graphics processing units, peripheral technology that companies will then incorporate into a semiconductor chip and have that physically produced TSMC or Intel Foundry Services or Global Foundries or any manufacturing facility. It's an absolutely prolific technology that ARM provides. I'm guessing probably anybody listening to this is touching ARM technology in some way, either in their earbuds or in their phone that they're streaming this through or their laptop if they're on a personal computer. I'm not certain if this is on video or not, but behind me as a poster that says, Arm customers have produced 325 billion chips since the company was founded. So, just last year, our customers produced about 30 billion chips. So, to give you uh a perspective on the scale of how many chips that is, it's about 900 per second being produced somewhere in the world with ARM technology. So, it’s literally everywhere from earbuds, supercomputers and everything in between. I've been with ARM for about eight years. Before that, I worked at a technology trade association here in Washington, DC. And prior to that, I'd spent about 10 years in government, working for a member of Congress largely on telecommunications policies, so things like spectrum management and kind of other regulatory issues around telecommunications. But in Arm, a lot of what I do is educate policymakers on what the company does and not just what the company does, kind of where technology is going. The technology that we're working in today won't show up in your hand or in your ear or supercomputer for four to five years. So, we have a lot of visibility into the future direction of technology and policymakers are really interested in that they're, they're obviously trying to understand all this technology AI is obviously quite a buzzword right now, amongst policymakers, but they also want to know what's coming next and what they need to be thinking about. So that’s a little bit on me and a little bit on Arm.

Daniel: On that note, I think it's an awesome point to just start and get people really excited and maybe a little bit scared. I think there's probably a little bit of both to be like there's stuff to be excited about. There's stuff to be hesitant about. What is it that you guys are working on now that you've got visibility to that you think four or five years down the pipeline? How does that translate to real world impacts for folks who are listening to the pod right now?

Vince: Yeah. So, I think what everybody in the semiconductor and technology space is thinking about is artificial intelligence. And I think what most of us think about artificial intelligence today is maybe like a coding assistant or a chatbot or something where you go to a desktop or maybe your phone and you're kind of interacting with the website that's logged into chatGPT or Anthropic or Microsoft 365 or something like that. The technology that we're working on that I think is really exciting is bringing artificial intelligence out to edge devices. So, obviously those are constrained environments. They're limited in the power that they have because a lot of them are running on batteries. They're limited in the computing capabilities just because more compute sucks up more batteries, so they have to be more efficient in how they do processing. But we're working with a lot of companies to actually both kind of scale down models from their side and freeze compute and efficiency on our side so that you can do a lot of these things, whether it's translation on your earbuds or, have more capability in your ADAS system in your car that can help keep you safer while you're driving, could maybe help with traffic congestion as I know you guys talked about on a previous podcast as well. So yeah, I think that's what's gonna be like the next kind of aha moment in AI is like when you no longer need to send something off to the cloud but local AI processing is being done on these devices that you just couldn't imagine that are in the palm of your hand in your ear, you're driving around in that sort of thing.

Farbod: I gotta ask. This is kind of an interesting shift of focus in terms of compute at least for me because it feels like every week, I'm hearing about um you know, these massive multi-billion dollar contracts to open new data centers and what new graphics card that Nvidia has made to pack more transistors in there and get more compute in there, and the water crisis to support these data centers and the power crisis. So, what is it that's making Arm be like, actually, we're not going to focus necessarily on the data centers, but we're actually going to shift our focus to the edge.

Vince: Yeah, so I would say ah it's not necessarily a shift. It's more of all of the above. There's still going to be a lot of AI that happens in the cloud. It's just, you know, training these massive models, frontier models, like needs that amount of compute. You're not going to be able to do that on the edge. But, I've read some reports over the last couple of weeks that 50 to 60% of AI computing is actually on inference now. So, what that means is you're using artificial intelligence and you're using a model that's already trained. The more you can distribute that, the more efficiency you're going to get. That's largely taking place in the cloud right now. That's probably not the most efficient place to do a lot of this. And so, if you can move that out of the data center onto local devices, you're going to cut down the computational usage in the data centers, create more efficiency. So, the more distributed this can be, hopefully the more we can kind of scale off that hockey stick curve of resource demands. So, I don't think it's going to be an either or. think you're going to continue to see investment in both for the coming years. But it's one way that that we may be able to partially address some of the energy demands and water demands that's being used currently.

Daniel: And then it makes it more useful and more exciting that you don't need a Wi-Fi connection to the cloud to be able to get the answer you need when you need it. There's interesting economies of scale there where because you're not sending data back and forth, it potentially is more efficient, but then also it feels like a faster, more exciting user experience as well.

Vince: That's right. That's right. And you're already starting to see this. mean, a number of handsets can now do on-device translation. So, they don't need to send you text to the cloud to have it translated into another language. There's other things I use artificial intelligence all the time to like run through my schedule, kind of what do I need to be thinking about for the day coming up? What do I need to do to prepare for the Next Byte Podcast? But all that information is on your phone at some point you're going to be able to do just so much more on devices locally and not need to have a connection or be able to do it more efficiently on your laptop as opposed to sending everything to the cloud.

Farbod: Well, one of the things I was going to mention is by offloading from the cloud and doing everything locally, you probably also get some security benefits. And given your position of interfacing with the government, how much of that is driven by their needs? And I don't know, what kind of an impact do you think it's going to have on the security front and adoption? Because now you're feeling better about not offloading your stuff to some cloud somewhere.

Vince: Yeah, absolutely. There's huge privacy benefits. There's huge security benefits. Obviously, as more capability is embedded in the devices that we're carrying around with us day to day, the more data it's going to be collecting on kind of what we're all doing. I just as a consumer would prefer that to be on something that I'm holding physically or on my body physically, or maybe I'm driving around in or whatever. On the privacy side, um you know, not sending that to the cloud gets around a lot of the issues that we've dealt with historically in privacy, whether it's in social media or online marketing, that sort of thing, targeted ad delivery. On the security side, obviously there's bad actors looking for every avenue to gain information either from individuals, from organizations. And the cloud is the centralized repository for a lot of organizations and individuals these days. And so, the more that that can be held out of the cloud closer to the user, the greater the security benefits as well.

Daniel: Talking a little bit more about the relationship that you've built with government officials and the relationship that Arm has with the government. I saw one example; I think you posted it a couple months ago around um creating an education coalition to try and help advance AI literacy for youth. Can you kind of highlight maybe that program or other ones that are interesting that people may not know about? Kind of understanding how, like I think it's an interesting paradigm we don't get to talk about a lot in this podcast is how technology leaders have to interact with and play with policy leaders to make sure that everyone's on the same page. Would love to hear more kind of about the work that you're doing in that space. And again, I keep saying it, but like the so what for people sitting at home listening to this, how do those interactions impact the way that they might interact with technology or with government at home?

Vince: Yeah, no, thanks. That's great question. I would say, just taking a step back, the role of governments is one to create an environment where their citizens can succeed, can make a living, and also create economic value for the citizenry. If you, there's kind of two aspects to the educational side. One is like, what is what is the direct benefit to Arm or the semiconductor industry? Obviously, I think you guys are probably familiar. I don't know how much familiarity your listeners will have with governments globally focusing on increasing um semiconductor manufacturing and design activity. There's a number of grants and tax incentives that have been implemented across the globe to try to attract more manufacturing and semiconductor design within countries borders. Here in the US, there's two or three leading edge fabs, which is like, low single digit nanometer chip production facilities that are coming online or have come online within the last 12 months. A major bottleneck to the US government attracting kind of more of that sort of investment and those sorts of facilities here in the United States has been the workforce. And so, it takes a very skilled workforce to one design semiconductors and to run these massive complex machines in these massive complex facilities. And we just as a nation have not uh invested enough in ensuring that the pipelines into those fields continue. So, whether it's manufacturing, whether it's design, there's a real shortage in workers who are trained in these skill sets to feed into the workforce and help Arm, help TSMC, help Intel, help Nvidia design these leading-edge chips and then physically produce them. So, kind of, on one side of the coin is kind of our own needs. So, we work with governments to ensure that they are working with the schools that they either fund or oversee through the Department of Education so that kids are getting interested in these fields, have the appropriate skills as they go through the educational system. On the other side of that coin is, I think we all recognize artificial intelligence is going to change the way people work. It’s obviously going to provide huge productivity benefits, but we're seeing kind of massive layoffs announced week after week. And, some of them may be AI related, some of them may be efficiency related decisions by companies, but it's clear that this technology is going to have some impact. And if students aren't aware of how to work alongside this technology or with this technology, they're going to have a difficult time when they reach the workplace. That was a bit of a long-winded answer, but to the program you specifically mentioned coming out of the White House, it was focused on both sides of that coin. We are focused more on trading the technical workforce. So, are what our commitments were around. The US government can provide massive scale to that, and so more than any one company could do. So, in partnership with them, we announced we're working with Purdue and a couple other nonprofits that can help distribute educational materials at scale across the United States. And then some companies' commitments into that White House AI pledge were on the other side of that, which was like, how do we ensure that students are gonna be prepared to work alongside or with AI, even if they're not in traditionally technical roles.

Farbod: That's great to hear. I remember I was listening to one of your interviews. It was about the Internet of Things. And you were talking about how in the early days of IoT, there was like this big disregard for security and how that started to change and that governments had the ability to like accelerate some of those changes, but they hadn't done enough. I was wondering if you're seeing any parallels with AI technology, either on the security front or anything else, or if you feel like there's been lessons learned that they're now applying to emerging technologies.

Vince: Yeah, that's a good question as well. I would say on IoT security, I remember I was doing several interviews on that a couple of years ago. We have seen a lot of progress in that area, both in the US and the UK and Europe, elsewhere across Southeast Asia. So, there have been kind of regulations or at least best practices put out there by governments to guide industry. And you're seeing a lot of progress through groups like Matter and others who have focused on both the connectivity but the security side of technology as well. With AI, it's really kind of a mixed bag. You're seeing different things out of Washington, DC. You're seeing different things out of like state governments. You're even seeing different things out of local governments to some degree, particularly when it comes to deployment of AI infrastructure in these massive data centers. And then obviously like Europe, the UK, China, the Middle East, they're all kind of doing their own thing. I will say from US federal government perspective, I think the, if I were to summarize it into a sentence, I would say the biggest priority right now is technology acceleration. I think the federal government does not want to lose this race, whatever that means. It does not wanna be dependent on technology from other nations to continue to run AI and develop AI. So, I would say that's their first order of business right now is to ensure that the private sector can innovate at pace. So, a lot of those safety considerations are frankly following on companies. And you've seen different companies’ kind of take different steps. That's not to say there's a complete vacuum. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is a real technical body within the US government, does have an AI safety institute. And they are certainly doing some work. They're engaging with industry. But right now, I think the mindset of most of the key policymakers in the US federal government is like, we need to get this technology out there. And the productivity benefits, economic benefits, far outweigh the potential safety implications that are coming along. I will say like the EU is looking at this kind of the other way. They released the European AI Act, which actually has a lot of more safety protocols that companies need to go through before they deploy technology in European states. At the same time, I've had conversations with a number of European officials who do also understand the need to deploy this technology at pace and ensure that innovation can happen at pace.

Farbod: So, what does that mean for a global company like Arm? Like you have different governments with different priorities. How does that shape the kind of product roadmap that you guys have, you know, if at all?

Vince: Yeah, it's certainly can be difficult. Obviously, there's efficiency in developing one product and delivering it globally, whether it's whether it's Arm or anybody else. And, when it takes like why Arm has people like me and why virtually every company has people like me is because you try to push these different approaches as close together as possible, knowing you're never going to get perfect alignment. And so, sometimes what it results in is um developing a product that meets the most stringent requirements and then that just becomes your global product. So, a good example of how these things proliferate out like across borders is the EU's GDPR global data protection regime, right? It was, I think it's probably eight or 10 years old now, but it was the first kind of comprehensive privacy law that really restricted what companies could do with data, how you had to protect data that you held. There was really kind of nothing like that anywhere in the world. And what you've seen is that companies that wanted to operate in Europe had to meet that. And that's just kind of become the de facto way that they operate across the globe because it's the most rigorous of any of the data protection regimes that are out there. So, it certainly complicates things from a business perspective. But from a consumer protection perspective, particularly with the GDPR, there can be benefits there and obviously companies have found a way to make it work and still be profitable.

Daniel: I've got an interesting question for you that I think I'm going to ask it two ways and ask for two answers. One of those is, you kind of sit in this interesting seat between a giant force and technology. I'm reading the banner behind you and so your chips touch 70 plus percent of the world's population. You've got this giant force and technology. What's your wish list for governments to make it easier for you guys to do the innovation you need to do? And then the flip side of that is internally speaking, what's your wish list to the technologists on how they can make it more palatable for governments to kind of accept the work that you're doing? Do you have maybe a sentence or two on each side, how folks can adapt the way that they work better to allow both to thrive?

Vince: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no silver bullet from a government action perspective, I worked in government and it's an incredibly difficult job unless you're a specialist at an agency like NIST, which I mentioned earlier, you have to be a generalist, you have to go from a meeting where you're talking about healthcare, to a meeting where you're talking about tariffs, to a meeting where you're talking about defense budget, to meeting where you're talking about artificial intelligence, right, and being able to being expert in all those areas is just virtually impossible. So, what I would love to see and we've talked to other companies and government officials about this is like ways to bring in technologists, even if just like for a short period of time, so you can have some level of expertise. I will say there was a great example of that in the US government recently. The chips program, which I mentioned earlier, it passed maybe four years ago, I think. And it was a massive sum of money. It was around 40 billion dollars that was going to go specifically to subsidize reinvestment, leading edge manufacturing capacity in the United States. When that passed, you literally saw dozens, if not hundreds of engineers, dozens, if not hundreds of people from Wall Street come in. So, you had this real brain trust that understood the technology, understood the financial side, and they were the ones like working out these deals with TSMC and Intel Foundry Services and otherwise that resulted in a really strong lasting program that brought three leading edge manufacturing facilities back to the United States and probably wouldn't have happened otherwise. From the government side, having that level of expertise with a .gov in their email is just, I think, invaluable. So, the more ways that the government can find to do that, the better. From uh the company perspective, it would be great if engineers were more willing to impart their wisdom to government officials. I think a lot of times, and I get it, like these guys are doing incredibly complex work. They're just trying to make the next CPU work, let alone like try to like explain that to a government official. But certainly, the space we're in, semiconductors, the technology space is becoming more and more of a focus of governments across the globe. And, our engineers spending a little more time kind of educating policymakers. Again, this is what I try to do day to day, but they can go a level deeper and explain where technology is going to go and kind of what the policy considerations are and what the positives and negatives of any policy action are going to be and the development of the technology would be a very valuable thing.

Daniel: Sounds like we need more cross-pollination of not just ideas, but also people, right? To sit in the right offices and help people understand what's going on and where things are headed.

Vince: Yeah, exactly.

Farbod: I was going to ask a question, kind of throw and get back to the sustainability topic. You were talking about the edge and reducing water consumption or energy consumption in general. I was just curious if you could explain to the audience what it is about Arm that makes you uniquely positioned to kind of like spearhead that initiative.

Vince: Yeah, no, thanks for the opportunity to discuss this. We as a company got our start primarily in mobile devices. So, kind of from the outset of the company developing technology, it was always envisioned that it would operate in an energy constrained environment because it had to run on a battery. It didn't have a dedicated plug into a wall. And because of that, the type of technology that we developed is unique and distinct from a company like Intel or AMD which primarily started in the PC server, I guess mainframe space back in the day. And so, I would say for the first 20 years of Arm's existence, we were having to operate and push as much computing capability as possible into these things that are running on batteries. And so, because of that, we were designing more efficient technology. We've since branched out from that and we developed CPUs for the data center, for the automotive space, for network infrastructure. But it's all built on that foundation of having a simpler computing instruction set. When ah companies take our CPUs and develop a chip for the data center and all the hyperscalers are doing this now, whether it's AWS, Microsoft, ah Google. They're starting with a piece of technology that is inherently more efficient. And so, what you're seeing is the chips that they develop are generally more efficient, delivering comparable computing power to others on the market who didn't start with kind of that origin for their technology. Does that answer your question?

Farbod: That's a perfect answer. Yeah. And, as the company's use cases have evolved, like you were saying, you know, now being in the server space and stuff, have some of those principles changed or is sustainability still like a core goal?

Vince: Efficiency is absolutely still like a selling point for Arm. There are kind of a couple things that drive our technology development. It's maximizing performance per watt. So that's how efficient do you get performance from a chip. Security, and we do a lot kind of at the hardware level. I think a lot of people think about cybersecurity happening at the software level, but we actually do quite a lot at the hardware level that will provide additional security features as our technology is incorporated into chips and that's incorporated into end devices. So, efficiency and security. And then the third is just this kind of computing platform. So, it's the same architecture that is used in your earbuds, that's used in data centers and everything between.  It's a common computing platform that they can develop on top of.

Daniel: We've had an opportunity on the podcast, reaching back to you saying secure hardware design is super important. We've had a conversation on the podcast before with a gentleman named Joseph Ravichandran, who is a lecturer at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He's been studying cybersecurity and physical security for a long time and I think that's what he's doing his PhD in now. He's told us while we were there visiting with him, cybersecurity is one domain, but he's like the one I'm most interested in is physical security of the hardware. That's where a lot of the exploits will be in the future. So, it's interesting to hear these common threads between you guys at the technology level and then also folks at the academic level kind of echoing the same future trend, which is like, let's make sure the hardware is super secure in addition to this large emphasis we've had for the last several decades on cybersecurity as well.

Vince: Yeah. And, I would add the OEMs in there as well. One of our biggest markets is smartphones and we have ongoing work streams with handset makers, same with other device makers, handsets, PCs, data center providers, like we work incredibly closely with them. So, they're able to one kind of give us feedback on additional capabilities that they would need to see in our hardware so that we can start to build that in and it permeates the supply chain that way. But I would say the other thing is that like, those features that we build in doesn't just benefit maybe the Googles or the Apples or the AWS's of the world. Like it benefits anybody that uses our technology. So, certainly we work a lot with universities, they do some really novel things looking at security vulnerabilities and hardware, but it's certainly a collective effort between industry both on the semiconductor side and the product side, on the software side and academia and, and frankly government a lot as well. This may be like getting two in the weeds for some of your listeners, but two, three years ago, the administration was looking at, what are the largest class of software attacks, which is uh memory vulnerability attacks and we worked with them. We actually have a piece of technology in our hardware that can protect against that entire class of attacks. So, like certainly the government highlighting that and pushing industry to take advantage of these things is like another great example of the government assisting industry to protect against hardware attacks or software attacks.

Farbod: Great. You told us early on that there's a lot of interesting things happening by you working in Arm, so you're trying to make sure that government officials know about it. Looking at the next, let's say, 12 to 18 months, what's coming down the pipeline that you think is interesting that the audience should know about?

Vince: Yeah, there's a couple things. I would say in the US, so much of industry's focus has been twofold. One, on ensuring that the regulatory environment is beneficial to artificial intelligence deployment, so domestically. The second is trying to proliferate that technology around the globe. And kind of on that first piece, we're seeing a lot of work being done, no actual policy yet. But I think like there's going to be kind of a comprehensive rollout of policy uh actions that help streamline deploying data centers or manufacturing facilities for chips or anything that's involved in AI infrastructure deployment. On the second one, on proliferating technology around the globe, the US government actually has an open consultation right now asking companies how they should help facilitate exports of US technology around the globe. So, some of your listeners may have seen earlier this year, there were a whole bunch of big artificial intelligence announcements coming out of the Middle East when the president and the administration was over there. I mean, you're talking tens, about hundreds of billions of dollar deals. And that was, that was great. I think a lot of those were done in kind of a one-off way. So, the government's trying to figure out how they can kind of create a structure where they can help deploy us technology in a much more organized and orchestrated way. So, we along with kind of all of our customers, all of our customers’ customers are all feeding into that right now. Another I would say really interesting thing is taking place in Europe. And not sure how much you or your listeners have followed what's been going on over there. But I mentioned the US CHIPS Act earlier, the EU has had a CHIPS Act as well, which has tried to promote more investments to my conductor sector across Europe. The first piece of the CHIPS Act or CHIPS Act 1.0 out of Europe was very focused kind of on manufacturing and not even kind of leading-edge manufacturing. They're in the process of developing a Chips Act 2.0 and they're trying to facilitate more investment in advanced design and advanced production. So, actually trying to grow their capabilities on the compute side that would feed into these leading-edge massive AI systems. So, something else we're tracking and engaging in as appropriately there.

Daniel: One question we like to ask a lot of folks that come on the podcast, and Vince, I'm particularly interested in your opinion on this, there's a lot of overarching, let's say, understandings of where technology trends are headed. But a lot of times folks who are in a specific space in that industry can kind of call that out and say, oh, that's not going to happen or it might happen, but it'll look different, it look like this. So, we call this our hot takes section.  Would be interested if you have any hot takes on where your field is headed and specifically if it's a little bit countercultural or maybe some people have a misunderstanding of where you think things are headed. This isn't a representation of arms official position, but just your own opinion Vince. Would appreciate some hot takes on where you think the puck is headed and maybe if people are looking in one direction and you think it's actually headed in the other.

Vince: Yeah, no, I appreciate this question because I was still in government when IoT really kind of started to become a thing. And I think technology companies were coming in and they're like, IoT is going to cook your dinner for you. It's going to like control all your lights, like all this sort of thing. And, I think that never really came about. I think a lot of what companies were presenting to us at the time when I was in government really needed kind of the technology that we're just now on the cusp of. So, back to my point earlier, I really think that artificial intelligence moving out to the edge is just going to like, I think we're just going to be amazed at some of the innovations that we see. I kind of nerd out. I'm a bit of an early adopter. I had the meta glasses before virtually anybody else. I would just walk around the house and see what it could do. My wife has a painting on the wall. And I would ask meta, like, who's this painting by? And I was freaking amazed. Like it could tell me it was a local artist and like, other works that she'd done or like, I'll open my fridge and be like, what can I make? Like with the ingredients in here and it'll give me a recipe. So, it's like, I just think we're going to see more and more of that. I think it's like, those are just some examples of like, and how I've used it and had been amazed. But, that was technology that was in the market a year or two ago. So, I think as more as more and more computing is baked into these devices that we're utilizing every day and interacting with every day, as models get more and more efficient, like, I think just kind of the use cases and the off factor of what these things can do is going to blow us away.

Daniel: I like the way you're thinking on this is like, I think for a long time, we've called things smart when they had just a connection to the internet or a screen on it or something like that. But I think we'll actually start to see things become smart, like with intelligence. I don't know that I really need like a smart toaster as an example, but like there are interesting parts where the way we interact with the appliances and devices in the world around us, when those have intelligence too, it can really change the way you navigate your way through the world.

Vince: Well, I'll ask you that next time you eat a piece of burnt toast, but yeah.

Daniel: Yeah, maybe. Maybe I do need a smart tester. I guess the penultimate thing we'll ask you before we wrap up, Vince, and it's something we also ask every guest we have on the podcast, looking back through your career, the trajectory you've headed, the different places you've headed, thinking specifically about the contingent of our audience who are students who have yet to start their career. Would appreciate if you can look back and think about any, I don't want to be so cheesy as to say life lessons, but kind some of the things you've learned throughout your career that you wish you knew when you were going back starting your career coming right out of school. There's an awesome portion of our audience that is kind of sitting in that position. So, I'd love if you can kind of reflect on your career and share some lessons for those folks to listen to.

Vince: Yeah, no. Happy to. And obviously, one that ah comes to mind immediately is like be curious, I think, kind of one thing I regret is I went to college, I got a political science and economics degree. And, now working at Arm, even when I was in the government, I was like, I wish I would have like, taken more courses, explored more technical fields, like I wish I'd just built kind of a broader understanding of the issues I was going to be working with. And so, whether you're kind of in the same trap as me and in a non-technical field, I would say like take coursework, explore kind of what you can in all these areas because obviously technology is gonna impact us more and more, year after year, if not day by day. So, and vice versa, if you're in a technology space, think about some sort of social coursework that gives you perspective on how this technology is going to impact society or impact your neighbors. So, yeah, I would say that's kind of one thing that I always look back and was like, man, I wish really wish I would have taken an engineering class or two. I probably would have brought my GPA down, but that's all right.

Daniel: I appreciate the perspective there and kind of the last thing from my end and then Farbod, maybe see if you have anything else, but this is our shameless plugs. So, Vince, folks who've made it this far in the episode, listen to everything you've said so far. There's a high likelihood that they want to see what you're working on or connect with you personally or see what's coming up next for Arm. We're going to have an opportunity for you to link a couple of things that we put in the show notes. What's your call to action? Where should people head next if they want to learn more?

Vince: Yeah, I mean, think the reason we'd first started talking to you guys was because Arm had released an AI readiness index, which is again, kind of a lot of this like forward looking analysis of where technology is going. I did a chapter in there on AI regulation and what we're seeing across the globe. That would be one thing. Arm has a public policy page. So, like we talk about the kind of issues that we are working with governments on. And then the third one, there's a group that's, it was actually founded by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google called the Special Competitiveness Studies Project, SCSP. We just released a white paper with them last week on edge AI and things that policymakers should be considering around that. So those are three I would happy to send the link and provide them in the show notes, but that I would recommend people take a look at if they're interested in this.

Daniel: Awesome. Thank you.

Farbod: Vince, I just wanted to thank you for joining us. It's always a treat when we get someone that's working in the interface of technology and some other entity like the government. Selfishly, I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts and hearing how those interactions go down and what's happening on that front. And I'm pretty sure our audience is going to enjoy it as well. And I'm hoping you enjoyed the conversation too. So, once again, thanks for being here.

Vince: No, I appreciate it. You guys are great interviewers and glad to actually talk with you as opposed to just listen to you. But I'll continue to do that as well.

Daniel: Sweet. You heard it here first folks. Vince is a listener of the Next Byte podcast. Next Byte exclusive. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time.

Vince: Thanks guys. Talk to you later.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.