Kenneth Fernandes

These experiments are super important to sponsor. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t but it’s definitely worth the pursuit. The thing that we have done here is thought of this 2 to 3 person team team as someone that catalyzes the movement and gets the core team to own the final product. What this does is gets everyone to see the benefit of a different way of working. This is also important to have more memory-safe language code migrations that by definition reduce vulns. Lots of benefits to this approach. The key is to make sure that we are constantly pushing ourselves to think of new ways to accomplish much more than wasn’t possible in the past. The thing that is not obvious here is that every engineer at Cisco will benefit from this experiment and when they are part of this modernization in areas of their code, it gives them an accelerant to build what they couldn’t in the past with the speed they wanted to move at. There is a world that is not discussed as much which is that the future could be infinitely more secure, more innovative and filled with a lot more possibilities than we’ve been able to imagine due to previous constraints.

As we enter into the phase of personal agents, the infrastructure requirements will continue to ride the exponential curve. Today, a tiny percentage of humanity (sub 2%) uses agents in any kind of power user capacity. I predict that in the next 12 to 15 months, we might have 30% of humanity using agents. If we live in a supply-constrained world with only 2% of humans using agents, we are gonna need to get far more creative when a much larger population becomes dependent on agents. The point being that the supply shortage on infrastructure for power, compute, memory, network bandwidth, and data center capacity seem durable. The answer to this is not just to build more datacenters, but also get the most out of existing ones. This is why USFP is such an important innovation. The demand will evolve to not just for a couple hundred thousand GPUs coherently clustered within a datacenter which is where we are today, but a future where we approach close to a million or more GPUs coherently clustered within a single datacenter. We at @Cisco are delighted to continue to keep partnering with @nvidia to push the limits of physics. We are also obsessed with combining the bandwidth density with the practicality of easy implementation. USFP scales bandwidth 4x with 16 lanes at 400Gb/s scalable to 32 lanes, coupled with 1.3x power efficiency. The other key point is that it’s built, deployed, serviced, and managed the same way as today’s pluggables. Thanks to all the members of both teams that worked tirelessly to making this happen. Read the details below on post from @ChuckRobbins 👇🏾

Three worries every CEO should have about AI 1. Agent security We need to rethink cyber defense. Attacks will happen at machine speed. Our defenses need to keep up and also operate at machine scale. Human scale defenses won’t suffice. 2. Token economics A company’s or country’s ability to produce tokens efficiently and securely will shape its economic strength and security posture. Every CEO should be thinking of building a muscle in their company for being token efficient. 3. Agents between brands and customers If everyone has a personal agent handling purchases and services, those agents could become the new gatekeepers. CEOs should ask whether customers will still come directly to their brands, or rely on their agents to decide what to see and buy. These are structural shifts, not minor side effects of AI. Companies need to think through what a world full of personal agents means for their business, then keep adjusting as that world takes shape.