Haas, ARM ceo discusses AI progress in a simple fashion
- Advent of reasoning
- Importance of cars and medical
- China market share continued but not growing
- Broad based growth leaning to exponential based on AI supporting interest development of new improved models (
If you think about the failure rates of drug research — 95% failure, 10 to 12 years to develop a new drug. AI is going to be able to shave those times down, potentially in half. It’s going to be quite, quite dramatic.
- Broad based growth leaning to exponential based on AI supporting interest development of new improved models (
- Growing shortages of data engineers
- Even with more efficient chips and infrastructure we still needğ hill
Arm CEO Sees AI Transforming the World Much Faster Than the Internet
Rene Haas, the chief executive officer of Arm Holdings, says AI’s impact will be ‘quite, quite dramatic’ and there’s no holding back smart cars.
By Christina Kyriasoglou and Anna Edwards
October 25, 2024 at 5:00 AM EDT
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Less than two years after becoming chief executive officer of Arm Holdings Plc, Rene Haas led the British chip designer to theworld’s biggest initial public offering of 2023, raising $4.87 billion. Since then, the shares have more than doubled, valuing the Cambridge-based company at nearly $150 billion.
Haas aims to put Arm — which designs chips for tech giants like Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. — at the forefront of artificial intelligence. The battle over intellectual property has triggered an escalating legal dispute with longtime-partner Qualcomm Inc.
Read More: Arm to Scrap Qualcomm Chip Design License in Feud Escalation
The California-based executive spoke to Bloomberg in London before the latest episode in the Qualcomm feud became public. The 62-year-old talked about AI developing much faster than the internet, the one-way development of the auto industry, and the books that help him make decisions. The transcript has been edited for brevity.
Bloomberg: Your strategy is to power the AI Revolution. What are the things that could get in the way?
Haas: One of the real limiters for our growth is talent. Our opportunity is broad. We’re in smartphones, PCs, cameras, automobiles, data centers — and all these solutions require more and more innovation. I need more engineers. We’re trying to expand globally.
Q: The news around AI can give investors whiplash. Cutting through ups and downs of Nvidia, ASML and the like, are you more excited now than you were a year ago?
A: 100%. In fact, I’m surprised it’s moved as fast as it’s moved. I had a chance to preview one of the newest OpenAI models, which now thinks and reasons. That’s a big jump. If you think about what ChatGPT had been earlier, it combs the internet and gives you a really beautiful, elegant answer based on searches. But it’s not reasoning. The new models can do that.
Q: Data centers are booming, but there are concerns about their energy needs. What’s the solution? More energy or more efficient chips?
A: We need both. We need much more energy-efficient chips, which is why Arm has been gaining a lot of share in the data center segment. That being said, I believe we’re going to need more and more access to energy, period, because we don’t generate enough electricity. So, it’s going to need to be a combination of solar, battery, wind, maybe even nuclear.
These large data centers that do the training for AI algorithms, they generate a huge amount of consumption of power. We’re nowhere near the ceiling of how smart these AI models are.
Q: You’ve said that AI now is like the internet in the mid 90s. So in 30 years, AI could be almost unrecognizable. What could that future look like?
A: The difference, I would say, between the internet of 1990 to now and AI to 30 years later is that it’s not going to take that long. It’s going to happen much, much faster, probably five to 10 years.
That’s going to simply be around AI helping things like drug research. If you think about the failure rates of drug research — 95% failure, 10 to 12 years to develop a new drug. AI is going to be able to shave those times down, potentially in half. It’s going to be quite, quite dramatic.
Rene Haas’s Career in Brief
Chief executive officer of Arm Holdings
Source: Arm Holdings
Q: The car industry has been running into headwinds. Are you concerned about this, or is the volatility immaterial because the big picture is still cars with more chips?
A: For sure the latter. That industry is going through a transformation for the first time in the last 75 years. From the combustion engine to electric, that is a gigantic disruption when you come down to how cars are designed, how they’re manufactured, and ultimately, how the product drives. Every automaker you talk to — whether it’s Mercedes, BMW, Toyota, Stellantis or Ford — they want to move in this area, but it’s very challenging.
Q: When you think about your operations globally, do you see China’s role getting bigger, smaller or staying the same?
A: Today, China is roughly 15% of our business. I see that staying about the same. There are markets where China continues to innovate and lead, like electric vehicles. Those vehicles are all Arm-based. And China’s doing obviously a lot in the areas of smartphones with Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO and brands such as that. Those are great markets for us. But the rest of the world is innovating pretty aggressively as well.
Read More of Bloomberg’s Discussions with Business Leaders:
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- The Health Tech Boss Putting AI in Every Single Product
- The Energy Boss Overhauling the Grid for AI and Net Zero
- AstraZeneca’s CEO Isn’t Distracted by the Race to Tackle Obesity
Q: The semiconductor industry has been caught up in geopolitics. Have the skills that are needed to run a chip business changed over time?
A: I think so. 10 years ago, the amount of interaction that my predecessors had with government leaders was not at the scale that it is now. I meet folks all the time, whether it’s in the UK, US, EU or China, and talk a lot about policy, strategy, etc. Two things drive that: The geopolitics are much more complicated, and there are a lot of things around export control. But also, our sector has become important again.
Q: And finally…is there anything you’ve been reading, watching or listening to that has left an impression?
A: I fly a lot, so I’m a podcast junkie. I like BG2, Brad Gerstner’s podcast. I listen to it a lot. I listen to Bloomberg podcasts. And we have our own, it was a little bit unnerving to be a reporter.
As far as reading, I’ve got 10 to 15 books on my Kindle. I like history books, and actually I’m reading a book called “The Upside of Disruption,” which is a little bit about chaos and how things run. I have to read “Too Big to Fail” by Andrew Ross Sorkin again, just to look at how decisions are made in times of crisis in unprecedented areas.
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