So, welcome everyone to the Brooklyn 6G Summit where value creation and AI are the two main themes and I'm with the new dynamic duo at Nokia CEO Justin Hotard and the excitingly newly named Chief Technology and AI officer Palavi Mahajan.
Thank you. Now, let's get them started by asking about what they think is interesting and exciting about 6G and AI. Let's start with Justin.
Thank you, Camille. It's great to be with you today. And let me just say, I think we've probably set a bit of a marker last week with what we think is exciting about 6G because ultimately it is going to be about AI and the AI super cycle which I've been talking about now since the day I was announced and why this is such a transformational opportunity for networks and particularly for mobile networks. You know, we're seeing a lot of the demand today in data center buildout and inferencing and applications. But what's less talked about is how much of the early AI traffic is actually on mobile. And again, if you think about what we're seeing today, it's largely large language models. So it's video, audio, text, but largely on a large language model format. And what's going to change as we look ahead is the opportunity for AI to be a bridge between the physical and the digital world. We talk about things like digital twins, but also robotics, autonomous vehicles. And that's why when we look ahead, we realize that, you know, for networks to be valuable in this world, they need to actually be different. They need to be designed from the start with AI and the work we're doing with Nvidia, of course the announcement we made around the investment from Nvidia into Nokia, the partnership around building an AI-specific AI RAN baseband hardware using Nvidia's ARC Pro Aerial RAN Compute product, that's really the start because there's so much more we're going to be doing around defining these workloads, shaping them and delivering a new type of network for the AI era. And that's why I'm thrilled that Ronnie from Nvidia is actually going to be giving a keynote here in just a few minutes.
Great. Now let's hear a little bit about what gets you excited about this dramatic and different combination about AI and 6G.
So Camille, you heard Justin talk about how he sees the AI super cycle. Let me just dial it down as to what we are seeing as we see more and more AI native traffic and what do I mean by AI native traffic? It is like video based inferencing, it is all the gen AI which is large language models, large video models and now we are onto a phase of physical AI where we are going to see more and more of autonomous cars, we're going to see more of drones, we're going to see more of robots, we're going to see more of these AR/VR glasses. And even with the trend that we are in which is just about the cusp of generative AI and physical AI, what we are seeing is that the network demands are very much changing. You know, we used to see that downlink to uplink ratio was 12 to 1, what we are now seeing is it's close to 4 to 1, it's close to 3 to 1. We are seeing that the traffic is more and more getting bursty and then at the same point of time there is a lot of demand in terms of lower latency because when you have glasses and you want to see and you want to get like instant inferencing results.
Have you got those glasses by the way?
I would love those AI glasses personally.
You know, I would love to invite you to my house where we have like a big AI lab but you know that's something for another time. But you know this is where the demands of the network is changing and if we keep on answering this question by just increasing capacity that's not the answer because at the end of it, you know, spectrum is finite. It's like real prime real estate. You cannot have more of it and this is where we need to make sure that as our networks evolve we bring intelligence into them. And that is what AI into networks is all about. And with the AI RAN partnership that Justin just talked about, you know, we are bringing in more and more AI into networks.
Now to that partnership. So you join on April 1st of 2025 and then suddenly in October this amazing $1 billion investment from Nvidia seems to have transformed everything. And in fact, you're saying that this is a fundamental rearchitecting of telecommunications. Bit more on that.
Yeah, first of all, I think we're at the beginning of a journey. So, I think it hasn't changed everything yet. But this is a company 160 years old, right? Most noticed, you know, known for its history of connecting people, mobile, mobile phones, right? During what was really the telecommunications boom 2G, right? It was a handy phone, it was messaging, voice, we connected the world. And if you think about where we're headed in AI in the future we're going to be connecting intelligence and that's the journey we're on. And you know, Palavi just summarized a number of examples of how we'll do that in real world and tangible applications and use cases. But this announcement is also as I said, is the start. It's not the destination. It's the start. And it's part of a broader transformation as we get Nokia back to what it does best, which is building really compelling technologies, great products that encapsulate that technology, and then being a phenomenal partner out into the ecosystem. And this is one of those partnerships that, you know, obviously knowing Jensen, knowing the team at NVIDIA, knowing their vision for leadership and realizing that also for them the next phase of progress will require this transformation in networks, this futuristic view into networks and that what we're doing, what we've been doing as an industry in 3G, 4G and 5G isn't going to be enough. We needed to build a true AI native stack and in fact if you look at where we've been in cloud, in our core networks we've modernized cloud native stacks, we're now adding agentic AI into that, we've got APIs and extensibility, a whole bunch of things that are necessary for this future but we needed the radio to take the next step and so that's why we're doing what we're doing on the radio with AI RAN and it's why it's such an important part of this whole journey because otherwise we'll have these incredible data centers, these incredible use cases, incredible applications, but they won't connect to where the world actually needs them, which is the physical world that we all live and play in every day.
And let's agree telecom is cool again, right?
I mean, always was. But you've been also coining this term, Justin, the AI super cycle. So, sounded like bad weather to me, but it's something else, isn't it? So why don't you describe what that actually means?
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, if you think about the internet, I'll use a little bit of history as an analogy. 1993 we start to see the early browsers. 95 you start to see applications, feels a little bit 30 years later like what we're seeing with AI. But think about what came out of that that we didn't appreciate. Early on, the internet was all about access to information and it enabled information at your fingertips. Well, at your fingertips when you were sitting at your desk at a computer, it enabled commerce. I didn't physically have to go to a store anymore. I could order things online. And those were some of the early applications that everyone got excited about.
And that was the last super cycle. That was the beginning of the last one.
