Welcome to this installation of The Future In Five Questions — this week I spoke with Qualcomm’s Durga Malladi, a senior vice president and networking expert who’s driven the company’s 5G and internet-of-things transformations. Durga described the role advanced, seamless networking will play as augmented and virtual reality technologies proliferate, the impact of the CHIPS and Science act on the innovation landscape in America and how Tolstoy shaped his conception of the future. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity: What’s one underrated big idea? Making 5G into an operational technology for low-latency, high-reliability applications. Extended reality was one of our original focuses — when you think of the workloads that are necessary for something like XR, you need to do a lot of the processing and rendering in the device, but you also need to do significantly more, and not all of that can fit within the form factor and power consumption that you expect from XR devices. You need to have a distributed architecture where some processing is done in the device, and some of it is done close to the device so that you still maintain a very low latency link. To enable a distributed computing architecture comes natively with 5G. Our focus is not just on the ultra-high, peak data rates of 10 gigabits per second, but going down to much lower data rates. These are specifically intended for low-power consumption, high-reliability and low-latency applications. Going into wearables and XR technology, that's going to be a huge inflection point. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? At Qualcomm we use AI-based algorithms to power our 5G technology, but we see the future of it as AI processing happening gradually towards the edge. Just like we talked about distributed processing, we’ll end up with hybrid AI processing where the workload is shared across devices with some assistance coming from the edge of the network. There’s a certain element of hype around what we can do with AI, and we are excited about that potential, but eventually, we see this becoming a hybrid AI model that’s very far from what we just described in terms of distributed computing. What book most shaped your conception of the future? I’m a history buff, so I’ve always liked “War and Peace.” If you remember, General Kutuzov is also known as “His Serene Highness.” The Russians, including the tsar, tell him exactly what to do, to charge into battle head on. And his view was that you don't necessarily immediately react to a situation, you let it come to you, and act deliberately. That’s something I’ve always liked. The moment you see a hype cycle, you don't immediately jump in and get into the tactics of it, but step back from the situation and try to understand exactly where you're going and strategize around it. What could government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? There are a lot of good things in the CHIPS Act. I wouldn't be in a position to say what they're not doing at this point, because we are really thankful in terms of the amount of work that went into the chip sector in that bill. They can continue working with industry — this is the first time in a very long time that the government has paid this much attention to the technology sector, and specifically state-of-the-art technology, and that’s a really good thing from our standpoint. What has surprised you most this year? Using 5G as an operational technology to improve the productivity of workspaces, and the way that industry embraced it. If I were to go 10 years back in the 4G days, it was seen as a primarily consumer-centric technology focusing on phones, which enabled the rise of the smartphone. Today the number of industries which are interested in 5G as a technology go from manufacturing and industrial companies like Siemens and Bosch to the automotive industry. It's no longer just about a small group of network vendors and mobile operators, but a far more diverse, rich, vibrant ecosystem.
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