From miles away across the desert, the Great Pyramid looks like a perfect, smooth geometry — a sleek triangle pointing to the stars. Stand at the base, however, and the illusion of smoothness vanishes. You see massive, jagged blocks of limestone. It is not a slope; it is a staircase.Remember this the next time you hear futurists talking about exponential growth.Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore (Moore’s Law) is famously quoted for saying in 1965 that the transistor count on a microchip would double every year. Another Intel executive, David House, later revised this statement to “compute power doubling every 18 months.” For a while, Intel’s CPUs were the poster child of this law. That is, until the growth in CPU performance flattened out like a block of limestone.If you zoom out, though, the next limestone block was already there — the growth in compute merely shifted from CPUs to the world of GPUs. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, played a long game and came out a strong winner, building his own stepping stones initially with gaming, then computer visioniand recently, generative AI.The illusion of smooth growthTechnology growth is full of sprints and plateaus, and gen AI is not immune. The current wave is driven by transformer architecture. To quote Anthropic’s President and co-founder Dario Amodei: “The exponential continues until it doesn’t. And every year we’ve been like, ‘Well, this can’t possibly be the case that things will continue on the exponential’ — and then every year it has.”But just as the CPU plateaued and GPUs took the lead, we are seeing signs that …
