Jim Keller: Moore’s Law, Microprocessors, Abstractions, and First Principles

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.

This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

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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