Thinking About Compute and Armageddon
A hidden assumption underlies every optimistic AI forecast. It’s geopolitical, and it’s enormous.
A little bit of thinking aloud here this Saturday, turning to the physical currency of AI scaling and plausible U.S.-China conflicts.
For the past several years, the dominant framework for thinking about AI progress has been scaling laws: the empirical observation (though theoretically still poorly understood and increasingly contested) that model perfor …