LL Technology Office Seminar: Breaking Waves: AI’s Impact on the Computing Infrastructure Industry, and Beyond

Aaron will share insights about how the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence is influencing the world of silicon, systems, networks & interconnects, data centers, software, and the people and things that make or power them. He will elaborate on how Artificial Intelligence infrastructure development is breaking longstanding, reliable paradigms in each of those domains, encountering new and interesting challenges, as well as fundamental R&D and investment opportunities. He will engage in the question of what kind of infrastructure is necessary to create a brainscale computer, the pursuit of evermore sophisticated AI models, and ultimately Artificial General Intelligence. Furthermore, he will highlight a variety of innovations needed to make this pursuit more plausible, economical, and sustainable.

Aaron will also reflect on the possibility of these forces creating a new normal for the infrastructure world at large, or if changes will remain confined primarily to the hyperscale industry. Finally, he will speculate on where and how some of the exponential growth patterns in computing might slow or come to an end, and what might allow growth to continue.

BIOGRAPHY

Aaron Sullivan is a Director of Hardware Engineering at Meta. His work there has spanned complex systems engineering for machine learning and accelerated computing, design for operation, datacenter planning and design, thermal-mechanical engineering, high-powered systems, liquid cooling, open source, and commercial industry ecosystem development. He participated in the establishment of the Open Compute Project and has served in a variety of roles with the Foundation and community, including chairing the Incubation Committee, and supporting the development and launch of some of its major projects. Previous to Meta, he served as Vice President and Distinguished Engineer for Infrastructure Strategy at Rackspace, and has worked in a wide variety of hardware engineering, datacenter design, networking, security, and operational roles, since the late 1990’s. Including our ongoing AI paradigm shift, his career has spanned four major shifts in computing and infrastructure and their attendant impacts on the world. He considers himself a longtime observer and student of these phenomena.