The 2024 that didn't happen

this episode is supported by NatWest providing ease of mind when it comes to business payments NatWest pay it the bank's own payment Solution facilitates customer payments in near real time while allowing companies to track live spending need to collect payments without customer account numbers or process refunds without holding on to personal details pay it has your business covered pay it connects directly with each customer's bank account using an API which also allows data to be seamlessly and securely passed onto third parties that means you can provide the best payment experience on the front end while empowering your backend staff with the info they need for truly datadriven decisionmaking to find out more visit payit byn natwest.com itpro that's p a yit b y n a w.com itpro it's the end of 2024 and in just 5 days time we will Mark the start of the middle of the day decade as usual at this time of year we on the it pro podcast are looking back not at what happened in the last 12 months but what didn't what supposed Mega Trends have fizzled out which businesses made grand promises they couldn't deliver you're listening to the it pro [Music] podcast hi I'm Jan mallan welcome to a belated Christmas episode of the podcast joining me today are two special guests from the it pro team Ross Kelly news and Analysis editor and Bobby helard reviews editor welcome to the show guys Merry Christmas hello Merry Christmas Merry Christmas so this is normally the episode of the Year where Rory and I get together to talk about the year that didn't happen unfortunately he isn't able to join us this week but I'm glad that I have both of you on board so let's kick off with something really really easy nuclear power uh I mean I suppose at least we're not talking about fusion power because that is the one that really gets to me but we had a lot of talk about nuclear this year and uh the idea of modular power stations and so on from some of the big hyperscalers can we go a little bit more into what was promised and what actually happened yeah so nuclear has become the to of the town in big Tech um obvious VI ly it has deep ties to Ai and data center infrastructure um a lot of the big tech companies are obviously struggling with power demands at the moment it goes without saying that nuclear seems to be what everyone's hot on at the moment but you know there's been a lot of grand claims there's been a lot of movement in in the industry towards nuclear power especially smrs like you mentioned but so far it's kind of all pie in the sky and there's a lot of money being thrown around you know Microsoft looking to reopen one of the reactors at Three Mile Island and Oracle wants to directly integrate smrs within its data center sites I don't think this is going to be you know something we're going to see anytime soon we're talking about you know plans with decades in mind yeah I was going to say so I read earlier I'll leave a source to this in the uh show notes that power stations that came online in 2023 were actually started they broke ground 10 years before it takes a long time to build a nuclear power plant and yes these are like small modular reactors but still it's still nuclear power there's still a lot of safety that has to go around it or you know if you're firing up Three Mile Island again or one of the reactors that's got to be some fairly Antiquated infrastructure at this point there's going to be some work to do I mean it does slightly I threw some shade already at fusion power uh but it makes me wonder if there you if it's a similar thing perpetually Five Years on the horizon or that they are going to rely on AI to solve the problem of the small modular reactors which they need to power the data centers that are running the AI all while the energy problem continues yeah it's like a Russian doll of AI power consumption infrastructure AI power yeah it's you I mean you're you're completely on the money in terms of you know the the time scales we're talking about here and it's the safety issues they're obviously a huge consideration regulatory oversight and compliance issues around that we're talking about big tech companies having nuclear reactors embedded within their data centers you know there's going to be huge considerations there are major implications in terms of Public Safety and you know worker safety at these sites and the investment required as well is something I do I do wonder about you know we're talking tens of billions of dollars and we're talking about individual companies all having their own sort of idea of how they're going to achieve this AWS you know is looking to build data centers adjacent to nuclear sites in Pennsylvania for example and having you know direct links between the energy sources there that's raised serious concerns locally in terms of potential price increases um for energy for local residents Microsoft at Three Mile Island I mean we are a very long way off from this we are a very long way off but these are quite extensive plans Google wants seven facilities by the end of this decade so seven in five years the Microsoft free Island agreement it's a purchasing agreement for 20 years that's quite substantial it's going to take ages and if it goes wrong they're stuck into that agreement so it's there's loads of problems that could Beed I mean seven of these in five years seems like a crazy promise I look forward to getting to this episode in 2029 and looking back hey do you remember when in 2024 they said they were going to build all those nuclear reactors actually they cracked Fusion no I'll stop it but as a whiff of the metaverse about it is what I yeah absolutely and I you know when you look at Google what they're doing with one of the recent podcast episodes are in Quantum as well and they might have dual considerations there in terms of you know infrastructure so there's they've got a lot of work to do if they want this by the end of the decade I wonder how the people in the parallel universes feel about Google in uh Universe one sapping all their electricity to do Quantum parallel Computing presses I mean you mentioned about local community and increased prices that's just like mental to me as well because you would hope that given the amount of power that nuclear fishion releases you would really hope that they would actually be paying it back a little bit into the local grid rather than just having absolutely rinsed it in recent yes I think it speaks volumes about their expectations though yeah or what they anticipate they're going to need in terms of resources and power to run a lot of centers this is primarily in the US as well in the UK I mean we haven't really had this discussion yet we've had chatter about data center infrastructure and its impact on the grid National Grid Chief exec earlier this year said they're going to have to create some kind of super grid I think was the way they described it to to me grown demands but you know I feel like we're maybe slightly behind the US in terms of a lot of things it it might be an issue that creeps up next year I think that this is because getting slightly off the topic of it here in the UK we have pinned our decarbonization hopes on renewable energy in the sense of wind offshore and onshore wind uh solar to an extent as well and so this is an area where you talk about that kind of infrastructure closer to Data Centers potentially but ultimately none of that releases the kind of energy that a nuclear reaction does and that's a wider discussion about where we get our energy from in this country and our energy infrastructure but that's possibly why it's not really being discussed here although we're going to have to talk about it at some point because as you say it is a problem and will be a problem in other countries that have either never really invested in their nuclear infrastructure or turned their reactors off another thought that occurred to me is so you fantastic you'll bring online all of these reactors that you didn't get round to making actually in 2024 or even breaking ground on but what happens to the nuclear waste assuming they haven't managed to master thorium reactors in the meantime this is going to if they're just standard reactors yes they produce less waste than in the past but they still produce radioactive waste that has to be dealt with somehow it's a regulatory mindfield isn't it there's going to have to be a lot of close collaboration between regulators and these companies you know once they come online again it's all we're talking about things that are going to be happening years in the future here we will have to see how that pans out but you know I don't for a second think that a company like Microsoft or AWS or Oracle or Google haven't you know considered this this these are obviously extensive wellth thought out plans these sort of discussions will be going on in the background they'll be getting flashed out as we're going along but they're going to fire it into space yeah I mean maybe we can get Elon Musk involved I mean it's all about government efficiency at the moment isn't it that so over the next four years so you never know but again we're getting into the weeds of things I just I love the idea of nuclear power plants being killed by Google that would be the ultimate killed by [Laughter] [Music] Google moving on to another topic completely let's talk about Intel so this is something that didn't happen in the past 12 to 24 months in March 2023 the company laid out plans to become the dominant player in the AI Market by 2025 now I think a lot of people probably saw that as a fairly ambitious at the time but as things stand in December so this month 2024 CEO Pat ginger has departed and they are nowhere near AMD or Nvidia so was this ambition just too big absolutely was um I remember Pat Ginger coming back 2021 January because it was one of the slowest sort of news periods and then suddenly this big shattering news story prodical Sun returns but if you look at that point there they were so far behind in production for 10 nanometer process AMD had caught up really quickly and by the time Intel had got anywhere near developing that AMD were already on seven nanometer process so they'd lost so much ground and then we're coming out of the pandemic we're hitting supply chain problems skill shortages all these kind of problems that they face they just couldn't catch up so when it gets to developing AI they're they're just so far behind they can't catch up so just there was just no way gilinger would have turned that around yeah yeah so the ambition was just too big yeah yeah I mean it's it is a sorry state of Affairs and you have to feel for Pat Gil singer I mean you know they he came back tried to claw things back for Intel and yeah I mean Nvidia was just completely in the ascendency at that point I think you know a lot of eyes have been on Invidia over this period but like you mentioned Bobby AMD has been flying as well we're obviously on the ground in San Francisco for their advancing AI Conference in October and you know they appeared very confident and themselves moving forward you know in their ability to extend their lead on Intel but also to potentially claw things back from Nvidia so yeah AMD you know you look at their growth in you know the data center infrastructure Market that's huge yeah I was going to say like everybody talks about Nvidia um they have a very charismatic CEO Jensen hang you know when he does the uh reveals of whatever new product they've got and it and having seen him speak live as well he's just so engaging and I think that is part of it and also the company did genuinely make a massive technological breakthrough with the way that they use Computing on a GPU but AMD when it comes to the data center and supercomputers AMD has a massive foothold of the top 10 supercomputers in the top 500 which is a list of as it sounds like the top 500 fastest most powerful supercomputers five of them is AMD chips three use Nvidia and just one uses Intel now admittedly the one that Intel are involved in is Aurora which is the third most powerful but still that's it's one in 10 uh they have 10% of the market versus AMD with 50% and Nvidia with 30 it is to make any progress from that point and to my mind very hard to then point to any kind of use cases when you're engaging with a company that wants to build some kind of AI infrastructure whether that is a company that wants to do some private AI or a hyperscaler or Colo or whatever whoever's doing it it's going to be much easier for say AMD to go we power l cap it's super fast it does AI we power Lumi it's super fast enery efficient it does AI for the European Union it models like a digital twin yeah it models a digital twin of the earth until it's going to be much harder and that you know it becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy Bobby am I right in thinking though that some of the AI laptops and desktops that are coming out recently have Intel AI chips in them yeah there is um it's quite a like little battleground of AMD and Intel and we haven't really seen which one kind of leads the way because I think as we've pointed out before the there isn't much to show for these AI laptops what they can actually do yeah but like HP Lenovo Dell they're all kind of using a mixture you getting sort of the same laptop with different offerings for a processor so it's kind of interesting but it's at the same time also to to tell what's what's the best what's not and that sort of those options there where you know you're getting certain laptop series that offer an AMD or an Intel option again that presumably will be having an impact on on Intel there potentially yeah but if you're looking at just everyday consumers or even it professionals who are rolling out AI infrastructure at some point in the near future maybe AI la tops to be specific or desktops they might just be more familiar with Intel as a good chip to have in like your end points in your Hardware or your office Hardware specifically not that data set aren't Hardware than you know taking a roll of the dice on AMD which is arguably less not necessarily less well known but has slightly less Prestige or am I am I talking nonsense because they do of course have Ryon no I definitely feel that Intel will benefit simply by the fact it's the oldest and it's been doing it for the longest but we can't kind of ignore the mess they're kind of in now like what now happens after gilinger goes what direction do they take do those plans change it will have an impact in some way but they can kind of rest on that L all that they are the the big name still yeah and obviously the search for a new chief executiv ongoing they have sort of like a co- CEO situation going on in the interim period I think you know realistically they need someone with first and foremost a cool [Laughter] jacket you know that has to be the first box Tech right Lads I'm on my way down to Zara now and uh regret to inform you that I'm leaving OT Pro to become the CEO of Intel um So speaking of AI here is another Trend that didn't really happen AI job replacement so we have heard a lot about how generative AI is going to spell the end of the creative Industries and then actually we started here it was going to spell the end of developers because you know the the machines can do it better than us and quicker than us and more productively and effic ly than human beings devs don't really seem to be quaking in their boots at this point yeah I again it's it's it's another one of those kind of pie in the sky sort of predictions that a lot of people have made and I think when you go back to the start of sort of like the Genera AI boom a lot of people were really worried about this about the prospect to job losses across multiple roles in multiple Industries Goldman Sachs had a big report out talking about you know 300 million jobs lost AI within you know the space of a decade we've spoken about this recently and when you look at a lot of these coding tools that devs are using at the moment there are you know big productivity benefits there and they are eeking out you know efficiency they're saving time they're able to focus on more rewarding tasks which is often the the big talking point about these tools but you know consistency safety in terms of the code produced there are still a lot of questions around that yeah I've spoken to a couple of it leaders one very recently within the past sort of six months another a few years ago and the one a few years ago was super enthusiastic you Chuck some stuff in to chat GPT get some code back or or maybe not chat GPT maybe one of the other Alternatives get the code back awesome and I was like really is like yeah I mean you know you have to hack a away it and make it like proper but it does make things faster I'm like okay well these are two very different stories it's not writing the code for you not really it's you giving you a framework to work with and then you still have to work on the code to actually be get it to go and similarly the person I spoke to most recently said that he had a more Junior person within their company come to him and say you know I've got this code but it won't work could you come and see what the error is you know he like yeah yeah sure fine only to discover that it wasn't like he had mistyped something or there was a small bit missing or you know anything like that some kind of syntactical error it was that they had just generated it with AI and expected it to work and it didn't and ultimately the way that any of these generative AI programs creates code is the same way that it creates text it is just probability based on what you think should come next based on the word or phrase that came before and you're not going to get accuracy like that particularly and it's a type of situation where you think you know with AI code generation and we covered something on this in October or September I believe um around the time actually spent remediating issues and it's getting to the point with you know a lot of developers where the convenience of AI code generation you know those productivity benefits are offset by the time just fixing problems created by that so yeah it's interesting what you said around you know a junior developer you know having to sort of refer to a more senior colleague on on what the issue is when you switch over to the cyber security space this is something that one of our staff writers Soloman discussed recently around you know the potential Reliance on AI tools in the future and how that could actually you know have a detrimental impact on broader security teams and people entering the industry and the workforce how Reliant are they going to be if if you're going through College University now and you know so much of the sort sort of Industry narrative is around these tools and you're you're using them you're learning how to use them you get into your first job and then boom what's your level of expertise compared to a fresh graduate 10 years ago and ultimately what the person I was speaking to said to this younger colleague was I am happy to help you out with your work that you have created but this is not your work well this isn't really that much different from us and journalism and what we write we we don't want something writing for us we would just want some help with our writing and I don't think it's that much different from coding you're building something you're developing something and those are skills you've learned skills you've enhanced and that will all kind of just go if you're allowing the AI to do it and for those younger people that come in they're just going to allow automated text or automated code that they've then got to fix it's a bit Soul destroying it's bit boring you're really learning and those kind of skills will be lost and we already do have skill shortages I'm sure coding is the same that would just get worse if we use AI for everything yeah definitely around sort of like entry level people I won't name the publishing group but there's a publishing group out there earlier this year that got a a bit of flak for hiring AI assisted reporters how are you actually going to learn and refine your trade if you're using AI tools to to create content and then you're Essen a sub editor for an AI tool I'm not convinced so while we have a New Year's predictions episode coming up next week while I have both of you I would still like to hear what you if you could choose one thing that you think is going to happen in 2025 one Trend then I want to know what one Trend what do you think that would be potentially Within your respective areas so Bobby I'll come to you in a sec about Hardware Ross what do you think is going to be sort of the leading theme in news or a dark horse in terms of a story that's going to break going into the new year agent Ki it's already here but you know you see the cogs turning a lot of Big Industry providers Salesforce Microsoft we're going to see a lot of chatter about this in 2025 I think and the big talking point here is AI assistants and your co-pilots they're there to support the worker they're sort of an add-on to your human employee agenta Ki is going to potentially change the game you know you're talking about autonomous agents carrying out tasks on behalf of the human worker engaging with customers potentially in real time um that's going to be huge all you need to do is look at the you know the sentiment and the the hype in the industry around this already and I think yeah we're going to be spending you know we spent most of this year in 2023 talking about co-pilot and AI assistance next year it's all going to be a gent gii we are heading inexorably towards the butlerian Jihad I can only feel that about AI taking the place of of humans making decisions one for the June fans out there Bobby so with 2024 we had AI PCS everywhere and The Optimist in hopes that we get actual features in 2025 but what I actually think will happen is they'll just use npus in more devices so we may start seeing npu powered desktops and maybe mini PCS and that will just start the trend um I know HB already looking at one potentially for CES yeah that's basically where we're going to go is more and more AI based Hardware maybe not tablets unless you can't like the Surface Pro but definitely desktops and Min PCS more AI more AI here's us going oh no more AI please make the AI stop by the way in [Laughter] 2025 well on that note unfortunately that's all we have time for today but Ross and Bobby thank you very much for joining me thank you that was great as always you can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website at [Music] itpro.tv episode is supported by NatWest providing ease of mind when it comes to business payments NatWest pay it the bank's own payment Solution facilitates customer payments in near real time while allowing companies to track live spending need to collect payments without customer account numbers or process refunds without holding on to personal details pay it has your business covered pay it connects directly with each customer's bank account using an API which also allows data to be seamlessly and securely passed onto third party that means you can provide the best payment experience on the front end while empowering your backend staff with the info they need for truly data driven decisionmaking to find out more visit payit byn natwest.com itpro that's pyit by y n a west.com itpro