AGI Strategies

person

Cliff Young

Cliff Young

Google; TPU principal engineer

Google principal engineer; co-architect of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chip family that powers Google's AI training and inference at scale.

current Principal Engineer, Google Research, Google

Strategy positions

Compute governancemixed

Control flops via export controls, licensing, reporting

Argues custom AI silicon is reshaping the economics of frontier model training; views chip design as inseparable from AI capability progress.

TPUs were designed because we knew we needed orders-of-magnitude more compute for the kinds of models we wanted to train. Software-hardware co-design at this scale changes the cost structure of AI research.
§ paperIn-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit· arXiv / ISCA· 2017· faithful paraphrase

Closest strategy neighbours

by jaccard overlap

Other people whose strategy tags overlap with Cliff Young's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.

  • Catherine Aiken

    shared 1 · J=1.00

    CSET researcher; China AI talent and capability

  • David Patterson

    shared 1 · J=1.00

    UC Berkeley emeritus; Google AI hardware; 2017 Turing Award

  • Elsa Kania

    shared 1 · J=1.00

    CNAS adjunct senior fellow; China AI specialist

  • Jordan Schneider

    shared 1 · J=1.00

    ChinaTalk podcast host; Rhodium Group

  • Lennart Heim

    shared 1 · J=1.00

    Compute governance researcher at RAND

  • Pat Gelsinger

    Pat Gelsinger

    shared 1 · J=1.00

    Former Intel CEO; chip-supply geopolitics

Record last updated 2026-04-25.