Naren Narendran is Aerospike's Chief Scientist with a strong interest in adapting novel technological and scientific concepts to practical applications in scalable and performant hardware and software. He has spent three decades in various activities, including fundamental research at Bell Labs, leading teams and launching new products at Google and Amazon. Narendran views the current state of AI as having reached a significant scale, with advancements in neural networks and large language models like ChatGPT bringing about increased public attention. However, he notes that there are still deficiencies to be addressed, such as understanding context behind generated content. Real-time data plays a critical role in AI applications, and Aerospike's low latency and high-scale capabilities can provide the necessary confidence in results. Vector search has significant potential, capturing semantics in a uniform way across media types and providing a universal tool for analysis and generation of language. Looking ahead, Narendran expects to see continued advancements in AI and ML, with the current notion of neural networks potentially being replaced or boosted by a technology that takes us to the next level of generalized intelligence.