A key theme at Semafor’s World Economy Summit this week in Washington, DC, was how quickly AI has brought dreams to fruition.
Sassine Ghazi, CEO of Synopsys, which provides software to chip designers, said the company’s technology supporting Formula 1 wasn’t possible just a few years ago. Rather than running the cars on the track with different tires, transmissions, and weather conditions to find the recipe for optimal performance, teams are creating digital twins of entire systems and modeling them with simulations. “From a cost point of view, it’s much cheaper,” he said. “From an ability to optimize at the system level — it’s possible. None of this was possible without accelerated compute.”
However, that level of innovation also comes with concerns we’re heading into an AI bubble — a debate frequently brought up during Semafor’s two-day event. “I don’t know that I would call it a bubble,” said Goldman Sachs President John Waldron. “I think the data center investment that we’re all watching right now is two, three, four years out, in terms of getting it finished and trying to determine how it all gets used.”
What he’s watching instead is the cultural change of legacy companies adopting AI. “The technology will move much faster than firms like ours can adopt it, because we have to go rewire the way we’ve been doing things for decades,” he said.