Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He’s known for his work on the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5 processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect.
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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
00:00 – Introduction
02:12 – Difference between a computer and a human brain
03:43 – Computer abstraction layers and parallelism
17:53 – If you run a program multiple times, do you always get the same answer?
20:43 – Building computers and teams of people
22:41 – Start from scratch every 5 years
30:05 – Moore’s law is not dead
55:47 – Is superintelligence the next layer of abstraction?
1:00:02 – Is the universe a computer?
1:03:00 – Ray Kurzweil and exponential improvement in technology
1:04:33 – Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot
1:20:51 – Lessons from working with Elon Musk
1:28:33 – Existential threats from AI
1:32:38 – Happiness and the meaning of life
