Excerpt from a panel-style discussion arguing that networks are foundational to modern business and AI. The speaker claims every company is becoming digital and will be AI-first over the next decade, and emphasizes that even on-device inference requires network connectivity for model updates (example: Siri).
You said that there's no AI without the network. For those people who may not understand this space very well, can you elaborate on why the network is so critical? Well, I would go further than that. I would say it would be hard for any business to live without the network. And so we went through this phase where if you're not a cloud company, you're not going to exist for very long. We have now moved on to software. So if you're not a software company and you're not going to be a company now, every company is a digital company. And I think for the next 10 years every company is going to be an AI first company. Everything I just explained, you can't do any of that without the network. If people don't believe it, everyone take their phone out, put it in airplane mode and then leave it that way till tomorrow. What about on device inference? Does that still need the same network? If you do on device, even there, you won't be able to update and change the models on a regular basis. You're going to still need connectivity to happen. So this is not AI related necessarily, but try using Siri when you're not connected to the network. It doesn't work too great. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
