this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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AI
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which involves consciousness and emotionality. The distinction between the former and the latter categories is often revealed by the acronym chosen.
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On the other hand, Moore's law only applies to silicon. We already know a number of other viable substrates, and some are already being put into production as we speak. A substrate with different physical properties has the potential of making silicon look like vacuum tubes going forward. On top of that, architecture is evolving as well. Huawei's tau law being a great example. Turns out the scales we're dealing with are so small that the time it takes a signal to travel from one end of the chip to another becomes significant. So, if you fold the chip you can dramatically improve its speed by connecting the opposite ends together. And these things are obviously mutually reinforcing. So, there's little reason to think that the current plateau we're hitting is permanent.
No, I agree, there is huge potential to get back on the curve or even blow right through it, but currently and over roughly the last decade, moores law has been dead. At some point in future compute will grow massively. Humans have only been around for 10,000 years, and silicon tech isn't even a blim in that history. Give it another 10, 100, 1000 years, we will be able to brute force anything we currently think is out of scope. But in the short term, the here and now, it's worth exploring more elegant solutions that don't require compute beyond our current availability
Yeah, I'm not arguing against efficiency on the software side. The way I read the article isn't really that it advocates for brute force, but rather that we should be focusing on general solutions because they scale. The work on efficiency should focus on how to make search and statistical inference more efficient. Incidentally, we see a lot of that work happening in China right now precisely because they don't have as much compute to work with.