Will the Server Farms of today turn into Server Cities to supply the Fifth Industrial Age’s insatiable drive for more computing power?
Or will it be like the Main Frame Computer being overtaken by the PC?
But nowadays the PC in your hand, i.e. your cellphone, offloads it’s computing load to more powerful computers at a server farm. A server farm is actually a large number of PCs hooked up parallelly. All that data has been harnessed in Large Language Models (LLM) to train Artificial Intelligence (AI).
By winning the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Britain was able to produce the ships and tanks that powered their Empire. Whoever wins the AI race (the Fifth Industrial Revolution) will dominate this century and maybe beyond. This thoughtful interview will brief you on the implications of our ongoing competition with China and why we should win, except for one caveat –
this idea of “temporal claustrophobia,” where the Kaiser, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany all convinced themselves they were at a high watermark.
Jeffrey Ding
ChinaTalk
GPTs and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers
“Economic power is the most fungible and transferable currency.”
AND
JUL 10, 2023
Jeffrey Ding is a professor at George Washington University and the creator of the ChinAI Substack. He argues in a recent paper that great powers must harness general-purpose technologies if they want to achieve global dominance.
In this show, we discuss the historical underpinnings of that argument and apply it to AI today — drawing out policymaking lessons spanning centuries of technologically driven great power transitions. We also get into:
- Why long-term productivity growth is driven by the diffusion of general-purpose technology, and what makes this so crucial for great power competition;
- Historical lessons from the UK, Soviet Union, US, and Germany illustrating the cultural and policy roadblocks to tech diffusion;
- The importance of decentralized systems, and how this helped America win the Cold War
- Why China’s diffusion capacity lags behind its innovation capacity, and how America should avoid getting locked into any one technological trajectory.
Co-hosting is Teddy Collins, formerly of DeepMind and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Click on the 2 page to read the whole interview. It is worth your time to learn about what will undeniably will be the defining driver of our age.
IBM researchers, along with scientists at the California Institute of Technology, have discovered that the tiny components that run along a chip’s silicone surface will self-adhere to previously laid down DNA patterns.