The big winners of the last 200 years of the Industrial and Information revolution were ones who created previously unimagined scale to win.
We went from many monks and scribes hand writing manuscripts to the printing press and eventually to the reel to reel newspaper presses. The circulation of daily weekday newspapers in the United States peaked in 1987 at over 62.82 million. There would be hundreds of large pages in each major newspaper.
Cars went from dozens of handbuilt cars to factories producing millions of cars per year.
OpenAI and Google scaled large language models by 1 million times over the past 6 years. The latest LLM have 100 billion and even a trillion tokens.
OpenAI exploded into the lead in AI by having silicon valley companies and venture capital fund a multi-billion bet to scale the compute behind the LLM.
Cloud computing became a multi-trillion business by successfully making big scaling bets. Much of the success and capabilities with computers and semiconductors involved pushing to lower marginal cost with immense scaling.
Tesla FSD version 12.X has gone to pure neural nets. It will be able to scale and improve performance purely with more data, training and compute. More compute will need more energy. 1000 AI Exaflops will likely need about 1 gigawatt of power.
2023 has been awesome for Optimus.
We’ve moved from an exploratory prototype (Bumblebee/cee) to a more stable, Tesla-designed platform (Optimus Gen-1).
We’ve improved our locomotion stack, frequently walking off-gantry without falls and with a faster, increasingly more… pic.twitter.com/yCnD0SThBd
— Milan Kovac (@_milankovac_) December 31, 2023
Winning new multi-trillion markets is just the beginning by pushing LLM, humanoid robots and self driving car and trucks to complete success.
The industrial revolution grew the world economy by 100 times over 150 years from 1 trillion to 100 trillion. An AI, humanoid bot and self-driving vehicle revolution can increase the world economy from 100 trillion to 10 quadrillion in 40 years or less.
The AI race will be all that matters.
The industrial revolution started with people using whale fat to light candles. There was no concept of powering factories because factories did not exist. The first factories and the trains that fed the supply chain used wood and coal power.
Coal power was mostly displaced with oil and natural gas and electricity.
The AI race and technology transformation will settle the question that Peter Thiel raised about the lack of true technological progress. The stalling out of technology for the last few decades is going to be swept away with rapid change enabled by AGI/ASI, trillions of humanoid bots and self driving cars and trucks. There will also be mass produced spaceships. This new technology age will need thousands, millions and billions of zettaflops of compute. This will need multiples of the current 30 terawatt hours of electricity.
More Energy ==> More Compute ==> Better AI ==> More demand for better LLM, humandoid bots and self driving vehicles
More Energy, more money, more technology ==> Scaled development and colonization of space starting with the solar system
True societal and technological change will be visible in a new 100X, 1000X scale of energy and compute infrastructure and society.
People look at movies about different periods. 0 AD, 1700, 1800, 1900 and think that people just wore different clothes and had different tools. But the scale of civilization was different. 190 million people in 0 AD and 600 million around 1700. In 1776, the US is formed and the whole world has about 800 million people.
WW2 used the amount of oil in a year that we now use in a few weeks or a month. The US was producing about 80% of the world’s oil in WW2. The Nazis, UK and Soviets were fighting with about 10-20% of the worlds oil. The total 1940 oil was about 15 times less than we use today. The Nazis, UK and Soviets were using less than 1% of the oil we use today. The critical battle of Stalingrad was to get a relatively tiny amount of today’s oil.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.