Building the Next Generation of AI Infrastructure

Prologue

I still remember, with a certain touch of nostalgia, the endless nights in my youth spent exploring the personal computer that my parents bought us after years and years of my imploring them. At that time, technology wasn’t necessarily accessible and that purchase required investing the equivalent of one month’s salary. Other times, but such good times…

I would spend those nights analyzing every single piece of hardware and software on the computer—an Intel Pentium III 500 MHz processor. It fueled my first video games and long sessions of functional analysis and testing to understand all the details of the operating systems. For some reason, I found a lot of pleasure in trying to replicate in my Linux distros some of the OS features I saw in Microsoft Windows 98. It was a technical challenge that fueled my curiosity and helped me find tricks all by myself, based on trial and error, equipped with manuals and books in the absence of the DSL connection I would get some years later.

But I think that one of the most romantic things was the ability to get Ubuntu and Kubuntu distributions by mail. At that time, Canonical sent the CDs worldwide for free, as a way to facilitate the adoption of open source at scale. Their ShipIt program was discontinued in 2011 (you can download the images from their website instead), but that episode of our lives was a powerful reminder of how important easy access to technology is.

Now everything is different, but I still find some similarities. ...