It is not Thanksgiving, but the Taipei Computex brouhaha makes me reflect on serendipitously aligned personal experiences. These blessed coincidences span academic endeavors, professional engagements, and hands-on experiences in global tech hubs, each contributing to a holistic understanding of the current GenAI era.
Firstly, I was among the rare few students with the opportunity to work on a project involving the manufacturing of circuits on silicon wafers. This experience at one of the only fabs in India in the early '90s allowed me to understand the semi manufacturing technically, which has become a cornerstone in today's tech.
The second pivotal moment during the academic phase was at the opposite end in neural networks. I excelled in an algorithmic design course, which caught the good professor’s attention. He introduced the first concepts and books on the fledgling field, sparking a lifelong interest in AI. This, combined with the philosophical curiosities around innovation, set me on a path to appreciate the cognitive and ethical/social aspects of today’s GenAI.
My third diverse experience was leading a team of equity research analysts in Taiwan. It immersed me in the heart of global hardware manufacturing and provided training in the countless subsectors within Taiwanese electronics, as evidenced at Computex. Who would have thought that the Taiwanese industry's crosscurrents would shape the GenAI era?
The fourth had come before in leading a team in South Korea, providing exposure to the other side of the equation: branded finished tech goods. Korea's decades-long dominance in electronics, from gadgets to appliances, could become as big a force to analyze as Taiwan's as we move towards endpoint computing and robotics.
Beyond these four unbelievable coincidences, I've been fortunate to start in software in Bangalore, build teams in other Asian innovation hubs, and learn from peers at top US tech firms and world-class investment professionals all my life. This all is capped by decades of financial market analysis in the company of the industry’s best analysts, leading to experiences in fields as diverse as accounting norms to investment restrictions, economic and political trends, valuations to financial statement reading – all that could prove invaluable in navigating the increasingly blurred lines between companies and technologies.
The world ahead in GenAI will require views on the intensifying competitive trends. LLMs and SLMs cannot keep soaring to new highs without coming in the way of each other. Nor do data centers and hardware gadgets that will begin eroding the dominance of the cloud era or all sorts of new chips introduced by the world’s largest that will compete heavily. For now, we can celebrate each of these as if that’s the only concept or product going, but soon, one will need to draw on every ounce of one’s experience to decide which ones to favor.
