Ask Paul: August 14 ⭐

Happy Friday! We're back in Pennsylvania after a too-quick and too-busy one-month trip to Mexico City. We're exhausted, but there's lots happening in the coming weeks, and this weekend is a great time to recoup. So let's kick things off.
"OpenAI loses its AI ethics lead"

That makes sense, since it has no sense of ethics
🌍 Balance of power
Will asks:

For decades, Intel and the x86 architecture have had an enormous influence over the Windows PC ecosystem shaping not only processors, but how Microsoft, PC manufacturers, software developers, and enterprise IT think about Windows devices. With NVIDIA entering the Windows PC market with RTX Spark and its Arm-based processors, do you think we’re approaching a meaningful shift in that balance of power? Could NVIDIA’s strength in GPUs, CUDA, and AI have the influence to push Microsoft and hardware manufacturers toward a more AI-first, Arm-based Windows ecosystem, or will x86 and Intel/AMD remain the center of gravity for Windows and PC hardware?

Honestly, I don't think so.

There are two sides to this, and both are tied to the legacy nature of Windows as a platform. The first is that Microsoft intended to make Windows cross-platform ("portable") with the shift to NT, which started out on RISC-based processors (made by Intel, go figure) before moving briefly to another RISC processor (MIPS) and then the Intel i386, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, and Itanium architectures. The second is that it just doesn't matter anymore.

Modernizing Windows was always a good idea and still is. And I will at least add the asterisk that AI might help make these cross-platform shifts possible, if not relatively easy. But the reality is that NT quickly became optimized for x86 in the 1990s with crucial bits of the kernel and low-level code written in x86 Assembly language for the best possible performance. Which, in the end, was one of the biggest concerns of that era along with software and hardware compatibility. Intel and x86 were just the mainstream winners at the time. And that was that. The only major change since then was the shift to 64-bits, which was done in the most backwards-compatible way imaginable because that's what really mattered then, too.

Since then, all the work Microsoft and Qualcomm did to make Arm64 viable in the Windows space was about backward compatibility and performance, go figure. And that paved the way for Nvidia-based hardware. Nvidia's unique strengths in GPU and AI acceleration make those efforts very interesting. But I'm curious what impact this could have on the mainstream market. On the one hand, Nvidia-based hardware is most attractive to small (and likely lucrative) markets for engineers, developers, and the like. And on the other, it's possible this will get the final frontier of Arm64 compatibility, games, a nice bump. But we'll see.

Will Nvidia do anything to move the needle on mainstream/volume PC sales? Ignoring the unfortunate timing of the component crisis and the...