live from San Francisco it's the cube covering micron insight 2018 brought to you by micron welcome back to the San Francisco Bay everybody we saw the Sun rise in the bay this morning of an hour so we're gonna see the Sun set this gorgeous setting here at Pier 27 Nob Hills up there the Golden Gate Bridge over there and of course we have this gorgeous view of the bay you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're covering micron insight 2018 ai accelerating intelligence a lot of talk on on on memory and storage but a lot more talk around the future of AI so we got a great discussion here on the auto business and how AI is powering that business Jeff Bader is here is the corporate vice president and general manager of the embedded business unit at micron good to see you again Jeff thanks for coming on and Simon and rigor is the vice president BMW and he's also joined by Vijay Nadkarni who was the global head of AI and augmented reality at Visteon which is a supplier to Automobile Manufacturers gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks so much for coming on thank you so you guys had a panel earlier today which was pretty extensive and just a lot of talk about AI how AI will be a platform for interacting with the vehicle the consumer the driver interacting with the vehicle also talked a lot about autonomous vehicles but Simon watch you kick it off your role at BMW let's let's just start there it will do the same for Vijay and then get into it research portion that we do globally in which is represented here in North America and so obviously we're working on autonomous vehicles as well as integrating assistance into the car and basically what we're trying to do is to get use AI as much as possible in all of the behavioral parts of the vehicle that uses have an expectations towards being more personalized and having a personalized experience whereas we have a solid portion of the vehicle is going to be as a deterministic anesthetic as we have it before like all of the safety aspects for example and that is what we're working on here right now Vijay Visteon is a supplier to BMW and other auto manufacturers yes we are a tier 1 supplier so we basically don't make cars but we supply auto manufacturers of which BMW is one and my role is essentially AI technology adversity on and also augmented reality so in AI there are basically two segments that we cater to and one of them is that almost driving which is fully our biggest segment and the second one is infotainment and in that the whole idea is to give the driver a better experience in the car by way of recommendations or productivity improvements and such so that is so my team basically develops the technology and then we centrally integrate that into our products so so not necessarily self-driving it's really more about the experience inside the vehicle that is the and then on the autonomous driving side we of course very much are involved with the autonomous driving technology which is tested with detecting objects are also making the proper maneuvers for the Waker and we're definitely going to talk about that now Jeff you sell to the embedded industry of fooding automobile manufacturers we hear that cars have I forget the number of microprocessors but there's also a lot of memory and storage associate yeah I mean if you follow the chain you have our simon representing the OEMs Vijay represented the Tier one suppliers were supplier to those Tier one suppliers in essence right so so we're providing memory and storage that then goes in to the car in as you said across all of the different sort of control and engine drone and computing units within the car in particular into that infotainment application and increasingly into the a TAS or advanced driver assistance systems that are leading toward autonomous driving so there's a lot of AI or some AI anyway in vehicles today right presumably yeah affected David who did a wonderful job on the panel he was outstanding but he kind of got caught up in having multiple systems like a like an apple carplay your own system I actually have a bit about kind of a BMW have a mini because I'm afraid it's gonna be self-driving cars and I just want to drive a drive on car for this take it away from me though but but you push a button if you want to talk to a Syrian yeah push another button if you want to talk to the mini I mean it's it's gonna use it for different use cases right exactly may I is also about adaption and is also about integrating so AI is is is coming with you with the devices that you have with you anyway right so your might be an Alexa user rather than a Google assistant user and you would have that expectation to be able to ask to chat with your Alexa in your car as well that's why we have them in the vehicle also we have an own voice assistant that we recently launched in Paris Motorshow which augments the experience that you have with your own assistants because it factors in all of the things you can do with the car so you can say there is a solid portion of AI already in the vehicle it's mainly visible in the infotainment section right and of course I remember the first time I'm sure you guys experienced to that the the car braked on my behalf and then kind of freaked me out but then I kind of liked it too and that's another form of machine intelligence well that out well that counts for you that had not that has not necessarily been done by AI because in in in let's say self-driving there is a portion of pretty deterministic rule based behavior and exactly that one like hitting an object at parking you don't need AI to determine to hit the right there is no portion or of AI necessary in order to improve that behavior whereas predicting the best driving strategy for your 20-mile ride on the highway this is where AI is really beneficial in fact I was at a conference last week in Orlando it's the Splunk show and it was a speaker from BMW talking about what you're doing in that regard yeah it's all about the data right learning about it and and in turning data into insights into better behavior yes into better expected behavior from whatever the customer wants so Vijay you were saying before that you actually provide technology for autonomous vehicles all right I got a question for you could it autonomous - could today's state of autonomous vehicles pass a driver's test no no would you let it take one no it depends I mean there are certain companies like way mo for example that do a lot but I still don't think way mo can take a proper driver's test as of today but it is of course trying to get there but what we are essentially doing is taking baby steps first and I think you may be aware of the SAE levels so level 1 level 2 level 3 level 4 SF and a 5 so we and most of the companies in the industry right now are really focusing more on the level 2 through level 4 and a few companies like Google or WAV or other and uber and such are focusing on the level 5 we actually believe that the level 2 through 4 is the market would be ready for that essentially in the shorter term whereas the level 5 will take a little while to get that so everybody Christmas and everyone we're gonna have autonomous because I'm not gonna ask you that question because there's such a spectrum of self-driving but I want to ask you the question differently and I ask each of you when do you think that driving your own car will become the exception rather than than the rule well I'd rather prefer actually to rephrase the question maybe to where not when because we're on a highway setting this question can be answered precisely in roughly two to three years the the functionality will kick in and then it's going to be the renewal of the vehicles so if you answer if you if you ask where then there is an answer within the next five years definitely if we talk about an urban downtown scenario the question when is hard to answer yeah well so my question is more of a social question it is a technology question because I'm not giving up my stick shift high example getting my 17 year old to get his permit was like kicking a bird out of the nest I did drive his permanent driver on staff basically with me right so why but I mean when I was a kid that was freedom 16 years old you racing out and there is a large generational group growing up right now that doesn't necessarily see it as a necessity right so not driving your own car I think car share services right share who bore the so and so forth are absolutely going to solve a large portion of the technology of the transportation challenge for a large portion of the population I think but I agree with the the earlier answers of it's gonna be where you're not driving as opposed to necessarily win and I think we heard today of course the you know talking about I think the number is 40,000 fatalities on the roadways in the u.s. in the u.s. yeah everybody talks about how autonomous vehicles are going to help attack that problem um but it strikes me talk about autonomous cars it why don't we have autonomous carts like in a hospital or even autonomous robots that aren't relying on lines or stripes or beacons you one would think that that would come before in our autonomous vehicle am I missing something are there are there there there systems out there that that I just haven't seen well I don't know if you've ever seen videos of Amazon distribution centers yeah but they're there they're going to school on lines and beacons and they are they're not really autonomous yeah that's fair that's fair yeah so will we see autonomous carts before we see autonomous cars I think it's a question what problem that solves necessarily yeah it's just as easy for them to know where something is yeah you think about microns fabs every one of our fabs is is completely automated as a material handling system that runs up and down around the ceilings handling all the wafers and all the cartridges the wafers moving it from one tool to the next tool to the next tool there's not people anymore carrying that around or even robots on the floor right but it's a guided track system that only can go to certain you know certain places well the last speaker today ii was talking about it I remember when robots couldn't climb stairs and now they can do backflips and you know you think about the list of things that humans can do that computers can't do it let's get smaller and smaller every year so it's kind of scary to think about one hand is that does the does the concept of Byzantine fault-tolerance you guys familiar with that does that does that come into play here you guys know what that's about I don't know what it is exactly so that's a problem and I first read about it with it's the Byzantine general problem if you have nine generals for one Oh attack for one retreat and the ninth sends a message to half to retreat or not and then you don't have the full force of the attack so the concept is if you're in a self-driving boat within the vehicle and within the ecosystem around the city then you're collectively solving the problem so there these are challenging math that need to be worked out and and I'm not saying I'm a skeptic but I just wanted more I read about it the more hurdles we have there's some isolated examples of where AI I think fits really well and is gonna solve problems today but this singularity of vehicle seems to be we have a highly regulated environment obviously public transportation or public roads right are a highly regulated environment so it's like it's different than curating playlists or whatever right this is not so much regulated traffic and legislation isn't there yet so especially and it's it's designed for humans right traffic cars roads are designed for human to use them and so the adoption to they the design of any legislation any public infrastructure would be completely different if we didn't drive as humans but we have it we have machines drive them so why are robots and carts not coming because the infrastructure really is designed for humans and so I think that's what's going to be the ultimate slow down is how fast we as a society that comes up with legislation with acceptance of behavioral aspects that are driven by AI on how fast we adopt it technically I think it can happen faster than yeah yeah it's not a technology problem as much as it is the public policy insurance companies think about one of the eventually you can think of from from let's say even level four capable car on a highway is platooning yeah right instead of having X number of car lengths to the turn fryer you just stack them up and they're all going on in a row that sounds great until Joe Blow with their 20 year old Honda you know starts to pull into that Lane right so you either say this Lane is not allowed for that or you create special infrastructure essentially that isn't designed for humans there is more designed specifically for the for the machine driven car right how big is this market it's it feels like it's enormous I don't know how do you look at the tan we can talk to the memory I can talk the memory storage part of it right but today memory and storage all of memory storage for automotive is about a two and a half billion dollar market that is gonna triple in the next three years and probably beyond that my visibility is not so good maybe yours is better for sure but it then really driven by adoption rate and how fast that starts to penetrate through the car of OAM lines and across the different car in vijay your firm is when were you formed how long you've been around or vistas be around basically since around 2001 okay we were part of relatively old spun out whiskey on that at work right okay so so alright so that's been around forever yeah for this Greenfield for you for your your group right where's the aw this is transitional right so is it is it is it you try not to get disrupted or you trying to be the disrupter or is it just all sort of incremental as a 101 year old company obviously people think about you as being ripe for disruption and I think we do quite well in terms of renewing ourselves coming from aeroplane business to a motorcycle business to garbage and so I think the answer is are we fast enough I'll be fast enough in adoption and on the other hand it's fair to say that BMW with all of its brands is part of a premium thing and so it's not into the mass transportation so everything that's going to be eaten up by something like multi occupancy vehicle mass transportation in a smaller effort right this is probably not going to hurt the premium brand so much as a typical econo type of boxy car exciting time so thanks so much for coming on the cube you got a run appreciate thank you so much okay thanks for watching everybody we are out from San Francisco you've watched the cube micron inside 2018 check out Silicon angle comm for all the published research the cube dotnet as 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