40 | FORBES ASIA APRIL 2018
ERIC MILLETTE FOR FORBESPAT GELSINGER SPOKE WITH RICH KARLGAARD, OUR EDITOR-AT-LARGE AND GLOBAL FUTURIST.
THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED AND CONDENSED. FOR THE EXTENDED CONVERSATION, VISIT FORBES.COMSITESRICHKARLGAARD.Is the progress of technology speeding or
slowing?
Both. Moore’s Law hasn’t stopped, but it’s
bending. We were on this doubling-every-
two-years curve. Now it’s more like dou-
bling every three years.
Why?
Because going from 14-nanometer chips to
7 nanometers is hard. You’re getting close to
physical limits. You need tons of capital to
manufacture them.
But you also said that technology progress is
speeding up.
Now, in the cloud era, give me a thousandbucks and a credit card, and I’ll give you
the world’s largest supercomputer for the
next two minutes, a larger supercomputer
than was ever assembled before. Entrepre-
neurs around the world can take advantage
of that.
What’s the meaning of your phrase “the four
superpowers of technology”?
he four superpowers are cloud, mobile,
IoT and AI. Cloud is supercomputing
power at unlimited scale. Mobile is unlim-
ited reach. IoT is unlimited access. AI is un-
rivaled intelligence. It really is the cascading
efect of those four things coming togetherthat ushers in the fastest technical evolution
that’s ever occurred in history.
AI amazes and frightens people. Why is AI com-
ing at us so fast?
he foundations of AI have changed very
little in 3 0 years. he extraordinary pace of
change is that you now have data at scale
and computing at scale. he core ideas of
the AI algorithms haven’t been changed all
that much.
It’s really about hardware.
I can take those same crappy algorithms,
just run at such massive scale against such
extraordinary data sets, that I can now start
to produce interesting results. hat’s what’s
changed.
Are business leaders outside of traditional tech
thinking about this?
I hope so. It’s existential for every business.
he largest car company in the world,
Uber, owns no cars; the largest hotel com-
pany, Airbnb, owns no hotels. he ability
to harness digital assets at scale changes
everything. CEOs and boards need to ask,
“Okay, how do I use my assets, industry
position and these new superpowers?” If
they don’t, well, good luck. Someone will
knock them of.
It takes a strong CEO to tell a board, “We’re
going to transform, but you’ll hate the short-
term results.”
What you say is “We’re going through a
three-year valley of death. If we don’t,
we’re going to get eaten alive.” If the CEO
goes to the board and it doesn’t support
him, then the CEO should think hard
about resigning.
Before VMware, you spent 30 years at Intel.
What did you learn from the Intel founders,
Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove?
Gordon is the humblest billionaire who ever
existed. One time my wife and I were at Ma-
cy’s, and I look up and there’s Gordon’s wife,
Betty, looking through the $1 bin [laughs].
The other two, Noyce and Grove, fought a lot.
How’d they put that aside?
If you were to watch Andy and Bob argue,
you’d say, “They’re going to kill each
other. They hate each other.” But Andy
loved the debate. Andy wanted somebody
with a point of view—and data to defend
it—and the willingness to defend that
point of view.Digitize—or Die
The pace of technological advancement has never been faster,
says VMware chief Pat Gelsinger, and every CEO in America
needs to seize the moment.
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