You can judge the calibre of an organisation by the questions its people ask. Apple’s operating chief Jeff Williams at a live-stream speech to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) asked an interesting one, as reported by MacRumors: “When we look back a decade ago, the question we had was: ‘Do we have enough processing power in our silicon to match our ambitions?’
“The big challenge we had as we moved into the mobile revolution was this tradeoff between performance and power, and the view at the time is you had to choose – you have got one or the other. Largely as a result of what the fabless model has done, what TSMC has done, what many people in this room have done, we have reached a point where those tradeoffs are not necessary. We have performance in thermally constrained environments.
“We believe strongly in the cloud side, but the future will be a lot of on-device processing. We believe this is the best way to deliver great features without sacrificing the responsiveness and the privacy and the security. We see in our brand-new A11 Bionic chip, which is made right here at TSMC, every time somebody takes a photo, there are over 100 billion operations. That is just mind-boggling.
“So for the next decade, the question is: ‘Do we have the right ambitions to go utilise this technology in front of us?’”
So what are the “right” ambitions? Williams added: “Probably one of the most significant examples of this is our opportunity to use transistor technology advances and power scaling to revolutionise healthcare. We think the industry is ripe for change. We think there is tremendous potential to do on-device computing, to do cloud computing as well, and to take that learning, and through machine learning, deep learning, and ultimately artificial intelligence, to change the way healthcare is delivered.”
From an industry expressing absolute confidence in itself a few years ago when I presented to about 30 health sector corporate venturers at a Silicon Valley Bank-hosted event in California, the incumbent life sciences and care providers are facing multiple challenges from tech firms, such as Alphabet and IBM, keen to expand.
But healthcare just scratches the surface. The big ambition of some tech investors seems to be to change ourselves as the worlds of bits and atoms start to merge.
Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of Japan-based SoftBank, during his speech at the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, mentioned the now $97bn SoftBank Vision Fund. “What is my belief and vision for this investment? I have only one belief – singularity [the hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and machine and people effectively merge].”
SoftBank is trying to gain stakes in this generation’s defining companies developing the singularity around the ideas of data from sensors that artificial intelligence can help process. While concerns have been raised about how quickly the Vision Fund is being invested, Son expressed confidence he could raise multiple such funds, effectively every few years.
“This is the beginning,” he told last month’s Future Investment Initiative, a conference hosted by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, as reported by Recode. “No, I would not call this a peak.”
But it is hard to argue there is not some sort of peak, even if there might be sunny uplands ahead. The global economy is nearing 100 months since the end of the global financial crisis, a historically long period without a downturn, and corporations and others are mindful of geopolitical risks in a way they were not just a few years earlier. Unquestionably, prices are higher than they were last year, let alone in the golden age of corporate venturing from 2010 to the end of 2015. If an investor had to judge risk and return she might assume revision to the mean most likely.
But as Global Corporate Venturing’s team discusses internally, the global scope for innovation remains far broader once you take into account geographic, gender and ethnic considerations, and with more than $200 trillion of financial assets in stocks, bonds and other securities, there is plenty of capital available. White, male graduates from Stanford might be tapped out as a source, but there are others with good ideas and ability to run scalable businesses.
The prize for backing the exponential companies able to scale and deliver the fruits of singularity could be large indeed, unless governments are able to get their act together and support antitrust action to break up these network and data oligopolies.
The prize, therefore, seems worth the risk to those with dreams.
“Der Worte sind genug gewechselt, lasst mich auch endlich Taten sehn!”
Enough words have been exchanged; now at last let me see some deeds! (Goethe, Faust I)