20: AI

Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain Yuval Noah Harari’s study of human communication may be anything but brief, but if you can make it to the second half, you’ll be both entertained and scared.



The breakthrough AI needs A race is on to push artificial intelligence beyond today’s limits ........... The energy used to train OpenAI’s gpt-4 model could have powered 50 American homes for a century. ....... today’s biggest models cost $100m to train; the next generation could cost $1bn, and the following one $10bn. On top of this, asking a model to answer a query comes at a computational cost—anything from $2,400 to $223,000 to summarise the financial reports of the world’s 58,000 public companies. ........... fracking made it possible to reach oil and gas reserves that had previously been uneconomical to extract. As a consequence, America now produces more oil than any other country. ......... Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all designing their own ai chips. ........... Bigger models that rely on the brute force of computational power are giving way to smaller and more specialised systems. OpenAI’s newest model, o1, is designed to be better at reasoning, but not generating text. Other makers are employing less onerous calculations, so as to make more efficient use of chips. Through clever approaches, such as using a mixture of models, each suited to a different type of problem, researchers have drastically cut down on processing time. .............. If the trend towards smaller and more specialised models continues, then the ai universe could contain a constellation of models, instead of just a few superstars. ............ This means that investors are in for a rocky ride. Their bets on today’s leaders look less certain. Nvidia could lose ground to other chipmakers; OpenAI could be supplanted. ........... progress in ai is as much about having the right talent and a flourishing ecosystem as it is about amassing capital and computing power. Countries in Europe and the Middle East may find that the hard graft of cultivating ingenuity matters as much as buying in computer chips. America, by contrast, is blessed with chips, talent and enterprise. It has many of the world’s best universities and, in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, an enviable and long-established cluster of talent.