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?

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the ENIAC in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL).

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.”

JORDAN SCHNEIDER

AND

RYAN HAUSER

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.

https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jeff-ding-on-us-vs-china-ai-and-lessons-from-past/id1289062927?i=1000612569365

Midjourney: “Technological Diffusion in the Style of Traditional Chinese Art, City, Society, Schools, Different forms of Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Scrolls, the Printing Press, Computers, Smart Phones”

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.

Pages: 12

At this rate, even with 12 of the country’s best engineers working round-the-clock, IBM was never going to deliver its first computer prototype to Microsoft in a matter of four months. The parts were all new. The software. The hardware. Even the names “software” and “hardware.” They were treading new ground. There had never been a “PC,” a personal computer, until this group of programmers built the first one in that lab.

So, as you can imagine, there was a lot of frustrating rebooting going on as Dave Bradley tried to get the CPU – the central processing unit, which they named – to talk to a printer or a monitor for the first time, code he had spent months writing.

He needed a quicker way to restart, to refresh, to escape from a computer quagmire than just switching the computer off and waiting for it to reboot. So he wrote nine lines of code, a “10-minute job,” Bradley remembers. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t something you could just press by accident and wipe out your work. He wrote it so that with his left hand, he held down the keys Ctrl+Alt. With his right hand, he pressed Del.

The screen went black, came back to life and voilà: A cultural icon was created and some great one-liners from the creator, such as “I got to meet Bill Gates when he was only worth millions” .

Actually, about that meeting – At a panel discussion with Gates for the 20-year anniversary of the PC, Bradley was asked about how he created the keystroke. Google Dave Bradley and Bill Gates to see video of Bradley quipping, “I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.” The crowd rolls with laughter. Bill Gates, frozen in a smile-shaped grimace, is not amused.