A few weeks ago silicon guru Jim Keller reached out to me with a very simple question: shall we do an interview about his new position at Tenstorrent, alongside the CEO? After about 0.2 seconds of thinking, I said of course. However, interviews are typically initiated by companies who want to talk about their product, and so I proposed a two stage interview.
The first interview would be on the topic of Tenstorrent, the company Jim now works for, with CEO Ljubisa Bajic. Jim was actually the first angel investor of this AI startup back in 2016, which makes the whole thing very interesting, and now the company is supplying customers and showcasing silicon. As CTO, Jim is actively working towards the next generation product families, and his mere presence is certainly increasing the interest of customers looking at Tenstorrent’s solutions. We recorded that interview yesterday, a full 90 minutes, and are currently in the process of transcribing for AnandTech.
The second interview was at my request – a 1-on-1 with Jim Keller, discussing his role in the industry, as well as his thoughts and perceptions about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Jim has two very well produced interviews with Lex Fridman freely available, as well as a number of industry talks. As part of this our interview, which is taking place tomorrow (Thursday), I would like to canvas the thoughts of the AnandTech audience about what they would really like to ask Jim.
Jim’s talents are broad, from atom to device, but also the conceptual nature of how devices, corporations, and humans all intersect, as well as the research and thoughts behind what makes us tick. Jim has worked under a number of key revolutionaries, such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, making him better poised than most to talk about the parallels between abstractions in hardware compared to abstractions in the future of computation. This is a key opportunity to put questions to Jim beyond the simple engineering questions, which is why asking our readers what you would like to be talked about becomes such a broad topic.
What should we ask Jim about? Please put your thoughts down below, and I'll merge them with thoughts from social media as well. We've scheduled 90 minutes or so for some open-ended light hearted discussion. Jim isn't able to speak to anything he's still under NDA about, which likely means any questions about his full at Intel won't be answered.
The interview is taking place tomorrow, May 13[SUP]th[/SUP]. Deadline is noon May 13th UK.
The interview is likely to be published the week of May 24[SUP]th[/SUP].
I also interviewed Jim by telephone back in 2018 after he joined Intel.
Related Reading
- Jim Keller Becomes CTO at Tenstorrent: "The Most Promising Architecture Out There"
- An AnandTech Exclusive: The Jim Keller Interview
- CPU Design Guru Jim Keller Joins Intel; Completes CPU Grand Tour
- Apple A4/A5 Designer & K8 Lead Architect, Jim Keller, Returns to AMD
