Much of economic growth of western
countries in the last many decades was riding on remarkable prescience of Moore’s
law- periodic increase in density of chip -doubling every two years. A few
years back people thought Moore’s law has hit a dead end -it is getting too
dense that it experiences quantum interference so on. The increased
computational power (apart from large data and neural learning) that led to AI
development has much to do with sophistication in chip -microprocessor. With remarkable
development and increasing computation demands of AI, CPU shifted to exponentially
powerful GPU – a massively parallelized processor suited to transformer parallel architecture. And just when you thought: how much
more can they squeeze in? comes the NVIDIA’s superchip Blackwell -B2100 is a
massive leap in computational power. If you saw the video of introduction by
Jensen Huang he slips in the worth -essentially money spent, that square piece
cost about 10b$. It however doesn’t really solve the problem of massive power consumption,
it is estimated that by 2030 Foundation Models will consume as much as 25% of
world power. Meanwhile Extropic is researching on Entropy computers -a paradigm
shift in basics of computer through unified AI and physics, working in natural
harmony with entropy thus scaling beyond constraints of digital computing and
substantially reduce power consumption. It is an attempt to emulate nature and embrace
chaos and noise into a symbiosis for a probabilistic AI algorithm.
The next AI wave is consolidating
on physical AI ie Robotics -access to multimodal data, which will understand
natural language and emulate movement by observing human action (Terrabytes and Exabytes of videos to tap on) to navigate, adapt and interact, meanwhile reflexive learning and dexterity.
Something akin to AGI is just around the corner. NVIDIA’s Project Grook is the foundational
model for humanoid robot. Let’s be quite clear ‘human like’ will no doubt need breakthrough
in quantum computing but nevertheless this is truly a remarkable achievement. Though
it is a technological breakthrough of many lifetime -that will have significant
impact much beyond work space, the social ramification will be severe. Surely, we
are living in the best of the times, we also have to accept the worst of times
with dangers it possesses. Technology so far is skirting a narrow balance
without major disruption but it sure is going to cascade very soon. Never has technology
so severely impacted society as also the meaning of what is to be a human.
