Achieving Scale Through Simplicity + the Future of AI

The first time I saw a computer was 40 years ago in my dad’s office. In the Indian heat, it was the coolest room in the building and was completely dominated by this massive device.

It seemed utterly complicated, watching everyone put cards into the computer to operate it. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine we would one day have devices in our pocket ten times more powerful than that computer. And the evolution happened quickly…

No one blinks an eye at a smartphone anymore. It’s the way of life. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will undergo a similar evolution, and at an even quicker pace. Everyone’s excited by the current capabilities of AI and apps like ChatGPT — but in 5-10 years, we will think today’s AI is archaic. How will we reach that reality?

The answer is simplicity. Only simplicity scales. My six year old navigates my cell phone, from photos to Youtube to games, with ease. How? Because it is intuitive. Compute, data and connectivity are the tenets of computer evolution, and the reason why that intuitivity is possible. The chips became smaller and faster, the data grew massively and connectivity with wifi and mobile increased. Because of this, we scaled the computer from an appliance the size of a studio to a device that fits in the palm of your hand.

In the same way computers evolved with three key tenants, scaling AI will too. These tenets make up the Trinity of Intelligence Framework: information, context and choice.

In “The Creation of Adam” by Michaelangelo, God stretches His finger to Adam to impart life. But under God’s arm is another figure — a woman who is sometimes identified as Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom. God did not just give Adam life: he gave him intelligence, the ability to contextualize information and make the right choices with this information. Humans have imbued AI with these same capabilities — and in some instances, the capacity to out-perform us.

These capabilities are what differentiate AI from other types of technology. Scaling the trinity of these three tenets is the challenge of our generation. At SingleStore, we are relentlessly focused on achieving scale through simplicity. Our mission is to be a multi-generational platform where you can transact with high fidelity and reason with data in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment — with single-digit, millisecond response times.

First, high fidelity means we have an indelible record of transactions. Even if there was a catastrophe, that signature of the transaction will not be lost.

Second, we’re incredibly fast — our data pipeline ingests data at high speeds into our unique storage architecture, which is memory first. So not only are we the fastest database, but because of memory disk and object storage, we are the most economical and the best database in the world today.

Finally, our speed allows us to give real time insights into a wide variety of industries, from supply chain to electronics and manufacturing, to some of the largest banks in the world. We are currently putting these capabilities to use — providing our customers with real-time, actionable insights. And as we do this, we know that we need to make good, responsible, human choices.

With all of AI’s incredible potential, we have to make courageous decisions to do it right. We’ve seen this story play out before; for example, there are amazing benefits to social media — yet studies have shown that teen girls especially are reporting record levels of sadness — and this trend is associated with social media use. Now with AI at our fingertips, I hope that we can be bold in assuring that this technology is used to unleash the good for the world, making us better humans.

Michaelangelo’s fresco depicts “The Creation of Adam.” The human story has always been defined by seminal moments in our history, from the discovery of fire to the launch of the iPhone. Scaling technology to make its access and use widely available is the only way to democratize it. Ensuring it is used responsibly is the only way to make it a true net benefit for humanity. SingleStore is proud to be part of this new frontier of simplifying and scaling AI.

After witnessing the excitement and overall enthusiasm at our first-ever real-time AI conference, I can’t help but feel even more inspired to be building the greatest database technology in the world. And I hope that those who attended felt similarly.