Tim Fist

And cryptography is obviously a very widely used technique throughout the global economy, including in finance and internet transactions.

And so the combination of these two things is actually a really good starting point for lots of the verification applications that we'll talk about today.

Yeah, so there's many different classes of verification technology, right?

We've talked through a few of them.

I guess something I want to emphasize is that if you take the sort of set of technologies that exist on chips today, so we talked about encryption and confidential computing as two key ones here,

These give you the ingredients to create a workable verification regime today, but one that is extremely brittle and easily broken by someone who wants to tamper with the chips to remove the features that you have there.

NVIDIA has built a lot of these features and put them in already.

I think that if you're trying to do something within sort of like a 12-month time span, you could potentially get by by layering these sort of fundamental verification technologies on the chips themselves with a bunch of low IQ options of the kind that Janet mentioned.

One being human inspections, which is kind of like the lowest technology option.

So, you know, in the nuclear space, human inspections have played like a really big role.

So the New START treaty that governed nuclear weapons, human inspections have been used to do like randomized load notice time inspections of missiles to check how many warheads were actually deployed.

And the same thing is done by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA.

they do short notice inspections of like uranium production and usage.

So they do thousands of inspections a year at places like power reactors and enrichment facilities.

And you can imagine something similar going on in the chip supply chain.

And it turns out that through the principle of random inspection, you only need to actually do a small number of inspections to make sort of strong claims about like the overall stock and where it's located.

Yeah, so right now there's about 20 million AI chips in the world.

This is growing fairly quickly, but right now the total stock is somewhere around 20 million.

We did the modeling on this recently.

in order to have 90% confidence that they're all where they expect them to be, you'd need to do around 10,000 inspections per year.