Speaker

Francesc Guim

CEO - Openchip

Biography

Cesc holds a PhD in Architecture and Computer Science. He spent 5 years at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center performing research on HPC. He holds more than 60 publications and has been tutoring multiple PhDs during his career.

After that, he moved to Intel. First, Cesc was in the Intel Product Group for 7 years working as a Hardware Architect (including CPU architecture, design, and performance modeling).

Afterwards, he moved into the Intel Data Center and AI division for 6 years. While continuing work on the product architecture, Cesc expanded his areas of work into Hardware and Software System Architecture focusing on things like Platform & Rack designs, Orchestration, Power management, etc. Cesc for his last years at Intel has been a Senior Principal Engineer and the Network and Edge Chief System Architect in the Network and Edge Intel CTO Office.

He led a global group of architects from various verticals (retail, transportation, industrial, network, etc.). While driving architecture he has been working with industry partners and business organizations for more than a decade. He was responsible for defining system-level designs across the NEX division and driving future Intel technologies and platform requirements for Edge (XPU, IPU, system architecture). His work included influence as well as working with open-source initiatives, partners, and end-customers to realize the system architecture. While driving revenue and business for Intel, Cesc has been having important focus on product definition, innovation, and technology design. He holds more than 500 patents, has been the lead architect in multiple Intel products, and has been top Intel Inventor during 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Last, but not least, Cesc transitioned as a Chief Executive Officer at Openchip with the ambition to continue his work in the creation and delivery of system-focused products and designs with the aim of solving end-users problems. In this new mission, Cesc is laser focused to contribute to Europe’s technology sovereignty while providing solutions that aim to help and improve European citizens’ lives. For example, one of the critical mission statements mid-long term goals for Openchip is to democratize access to AI with mechanisms that allow data privacy and protection.

Talk(s)

9:05 AM

After AI explosion ... what’s next?

We are at the inflection point where compute power is no longer the most important indicator for AI systems. Over the last decade, AI has been going through breakthroughs, year after year, with a focus on scaling from training to test-time compute. On the software side, models compute demand and sophistication has been growing with a factor 10 every year. On the hardware side, silicon designs have been required to grow from tens of billions of transistors to hundreds of billions. Similarly, power consumption has grown with the same ratio.

At this inflection point, we need to ask ourselves whether this path is sustainable, from an economical and societal perspective. In this keynote, we’ll present a vision for the future of AI semiconductors, rooted in concepts such as trusted technology, sustainability and scalability. We’ll talk how a systems perspective is needed to build sustainable AI and AI for citizens is. The current state of the art will be dissected. This will be followed by a critical, but constructive, analysis of what fundamental areas we are missing from technology and usage model perspective. Finally, a proposal on what are the main vectors that should be driven during the next decade in order to make AI and technology in general citizen centric.

We are at an inflection point where raw compute power is no longer the sole driver of AI progress. Over the last decade, breakthroughs have come year after year, driven by scaling compute—from training over post-training to test-time compute. On the software side, the demand for compute and model complexity has grown tenfold annually. On the hardware side, silicon designs have been required to follow from tens of billions of transistors to hundreds of billions. Similarly, power consumption has grown with the same ratio.

But now, we must ask: is this trajectory sustainable—economically, environmentally, and societally?

In this keynote, we’ll explore a new vision for AI semiconductors, grounded in trust, sustainability, and scalability. We’ll argue that building AI for citizens —not just for performance—requires a shift to a systems-level mindset. We’ll challenge today’s status quo, uncover the gaps in both technology and deployment models, and propose a set of bold yet actionable directions for the next decade. Because if we want AI to serve humanity, we must start designing technology with humanity at its core.