On Sat, Apr 1, 2023 at 10:15 AM David 'equinox' Lamparter <equinox@diac24.net> wrote:
Hi all,
as you are likely well aware, recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been consistently performing one quantum leap after another.
To leverage the new possibilities and avenues enabled by these developments, and not get left behind, we must join up and integrate these new technologies as soon as possible.
I would therefore like to present our plans for the immediate future:
- all SPF calculation and BGP best-path decision logic is to be replaced by a GNN (Graph Neural Network). In preparation of this, significant effort has been made to train such a network to produce results exceeding those provided by the previous hard-coded logic.
- all configuration interfacing is to be performed by Microsoft's Sydney LLM (Large Language Model) chatbot. Not only is this the obvious choice of vendor considering our SONiC integration, but we also believe Sydney to be superior in its capability to handle typical network engineers' outbursts of swearing and curses. In fact, we are confident that future networks may be configured by simply swearing at the hardware until it works.
- monitoring and other OAM functions will be handled by clippy, as provided in the original version of Office 97. The rationale for this is to ease the production of the appropriate curses necessary to affect the configuration changes needed to fix the outage at hand.
We understand some of you may be concerned about the reliability and availability of these new AIs. As an open source project, we will obviously not try to confine you to the use of our provided AIs. In fact, we will try our best to enable you to train up your own AI according to the needs of your particular network! (Cloud compute credits not included.)
I am happy to invite you all to join our path to this bright future,
-equi
P.S.: Please note that, despite the obvious connection, YANG schemas and configuration data exceed the limits of swearing we were able to train Sydney for. I am unsure we will be able to achieve this particular feat, but it's not quite time to give up just yet.
I do hope that this announcement is date specific - - - - if not H toledo Batman!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!