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The difference between software engineering at large corporations and small ones will increase. Start-ups adopting practices of Google will look even sillier than before, because they can now build so much faster and with so much less constraints.
So it does not seem as though U.S. preferences in the Persian Gulf will be achieved - which means prices in general and energy prices in particular are likely to stay high.
The best way is to be strong, sovereign, hard-working and deeply competent. Ideally with an uncanny ability to start ambitious infrastructure projects and finish them on budget and on time. Shout-out to our nuclear energy sector for nailing that. Do that and every other problem melts away.
Google Workspace search no longer shows folders by default in its autocomplete - meaning I need to press "enter" even when typing out the folder name I want, just to see it as the top search result after I press enter
For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months).
the way you make a new Google is not by attacking them head on. You have to wait for things to change so much that their model is is obsolete and that's when you can do it. And that's what Open AI is.
Because solar has, broadly speaking, won the technological race. Intermittency was the last big problem, and batteries have gotten good and cheap enough to make solar reliable.
Whatever good he did with his early advocacy for electric vehicles has now been undone a hundred times over with his advocacy for the people who hate EVs and all the other things we need.
Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them. Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.
But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change-replacing oil and gas with sun and wind-that is our best hope for limiting warming.
This is a computer system made for pros, and I mean that in the sense of professional computer lovers. People who are willing to invest time and energy into learning how their system works, and reap the benefits that come from that investment.
Every decision has a cost in terms as we've seen the brain having to put in invest fuel to make that decision. So if you're having to do that every time you make a decision, that can seem very burdensome. Whereas if you did it once in a big way where you planned it out for the day or the week, maybe the costs in terms of the activation energy required for the brain is much lower for you if you do that.
It's showing us that apathetic people use more brain energy when they're making this decision. They have a bigger activation energy barrier to overcome because when they're making that decision, the brain is consuming more energy. It's consuming more glucose when it's doing that.
The supercomputer inside our own skull runs on about 25 watts, which hints that the minimum energy needed for intelligence might be small - and that the giant, controversial AI compute centers we're building now may turn out to be a temporary blip rather than a permanent feature.
Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount amount of deaths, um it's even safer than solar, which is very strange because how does someone die from solar? that actually most solar is installed on roofs and people sometimes die falling off of a roof installing solar and if you add those deaths up it is actually a higher death per energy than the totality of nuclear energy in the world.
But the problem of nuclear today is like the Toyota Camry problem, right? Like we don't want to make Lamborghinis. We want to make a very simple, very cheap, very safe reactor that we can make literally tens of thousands of. Um and actually that is going to make the cheapest energy in the world, right?
Energy is the fundamental input to uh the quality of human life. U if you look backward into time and say how did humanity go from one standard of living to the next, it's always unlocked by cheaper energy, right?
If you keep asking this question, what you realize is energy is the fundamental input. When we figure out AI and robotics that allows us to do semi-aututonomous manufacturing, energy will become the cost of all things, right? The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it.
Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right?
But um I think the whole point of that project and the graphics was it isn't really just about a grid of pixels. It's the metaphor and the idea and the meaning behind everything.
It seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth. And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.
Yeah, I mean it's a little different, but I think uh you're going to see more and more uh uh high performance and um low energy uh inference hardware systems because I think everyone is now realizing that inference is the key to making you know these agent-based systems be available to more and more people and that latency is really important and that specialization of the hardware is a really key way you can make uh things that are more energy efficient and lower latency than more general purpose uh computational devices like say GPUs or TPUs
Um because if you didn't have that thousandx difference then you know you wouldn't have to do batching but you have to do batching of you know many examples or maybe many tokens at once in order to amortize that data movement
Yeah, I mean I think if you looked at what is important in AI systems these days, you would want to know things like the bandwidth between you know your main memory system on your accelerator to the onchip memory to the um you know the multiplier unit or whatever. You want to know how much energy does it take to do a single multiplier operation.
but I can tell you with first hand experience nuclear power plants do not care about this stuff. They're actually just fine with with with thorough testing.
I've never seen any commodity quite like this one but it seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped.
Google, which led on benchmarks not that long ago, has fallen behind where it now counts: it has no leading frontier model and it has nothing close to Codex and Code.
And what they found is there's kind of this um bell-shaped curve between energy availability and brain volume. And in general, brain volume, right, the more the better, right, we think. And so if you're chronically calorically restricted, your brain is smaller um because you just don't have the resources to invest in, you know, the structure um and to maintain it. At the other end, you see the same thing. So if you're chronically in a chronic state of chloric excess, you also tend to have a smaller brain on average.
I think of it like this: any person has an innate curiosity about life, and an energy toward it, that may manifest itself in all kinds of ways throughout the course of their life.
What is happening is that GenAI's climate harm comes from the system design, such as Google's AI overview triggering constantly whether users want it or not, in addition to significantly worse digital bloat tools dominating overconsumption.
To meet the global population’s protein needs through factory-produced bacterial protein in 2024 would have used more than the total global electricity generated using renewable (hydro, photovoltaic and wind) energy
Another is that it isn’t ‘food from thin air’ as is often claimed – as well as the high energy use, it’s food from a lot of tap water, minerals, ammonia and industrial infrastructure.
but I do think that in a future of probable energy constraint there will be a need for a more peopled agriculture, with populations spreading out to tap diffuse solar energy input.
a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.
I think Google has pretty much gone to on-sites at this point, back to the traditional whiteboard format. And they'll let you code on a laptop if you want to, as well, but it's going to be in person. Somebody's going to be watching you code, and you're probably not going to be able to cheat your way through that.
because a lot with electricity, a lot of the downstream benefits actually came to like the users of the electricity rather than the rather than the actual entity producing the electricity. On the other hand, with social media, it was the opposite case, right? Social media, you know, it was everywhere. Everybody uses social media, but the rents went to the platform.
So, I think there is a world where it is concentrated, in which case it's going to be really hard to index AGI. There is another world where it is not It's electricity, then like basically every company has access to AGI. So, you just buy you use buy the index. So, like, you know, Nigeria just needs to buy the index.
So you have a lot of smart Googlers. These people are brilliant. I mean extremely brilliant to the point where the hardest problem Google had in my opinion was what to build. Not how to build it, what to build.
Well, I love these markets and they're all around us where we think they're mature and over and they haven't even started yet. And that was search before Google. You know, Google was the 56th search engine. It was a mature, slow growth business. Google made us reimagine what search could be in our lives and obviously turned it into a trillion dollar company value.
What the current conflict in the Gulf - in particular the closure of the Strait of Hormuz - is going to do is to provide a further push to global attempts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
We are about to see the Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 - a discontinuity in energy markets as profound as the oil shocks of the 1970s, and one that could bring forward the peak in fossil fuel use and emissions to this side of 2030.
the joke I made was pre AI, I would spend 95% of my energy thinking about what to do and 5% of my energy doing it. Now I spend 96% of my time thinking about what to do and 4% of my time actually doing it. So yeah, it's like a 20% improvement, but dayto-day it feels as hard as ever.
Computing is not like that. There's a reason why the x86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems, these ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it.
What I see now is, well, "I'm a a programmer and I've got six agents. So, really I'm managing a team." No, you're not. You're using six tools at once, which is fine. But, it's that's very different than having a conversation with somebody who believes things that are a little different than what you believe.
we have a very clear definition and expectation of what it is at the staff engineer level because we benchmark ourselves to all the great company out there Google, Facebook and all that
And I feel like it's a very human way of doing web search, right? Because we enter things in the Google and we see all the like citations, the quotations part. But like why would we limit AI to that? If AI already visit a page, why don't just pull the entire page out?
We may have a handful of genies, but that's different from having a handful of friends, right? In part because the energy's different, the conversations are different. Also, they just agree with us constantly.
Because Enthropic saw it before Google. And then Google had Nano Banano and Gemini 3 which caused their user metrics to skyrocket and leadership at Google was like oh and then they started making the statement of we have to double compute every is it 6 months or I don't remember the exact number that they said.
So, space data centers effectively are not li limited by, you know, hey, we have this energy advantage. It's actually just limited by the same contended resource. We can only make 200 gawatts of chips a year by the end of the decade.
In fact, innovation died on the vine like all together and since I don't know, 2008, there has been no innovation from Google. It's all been acquisitions. They have they've created nothing new.
Like, if you think more globally, we are, we copied Google for agents. You have, like, a prompt, and, and then you have a chat interface. That, to me, very much feels like when we first created television and then people recorded radio shows on television and you saw that on TV.
Immediately cease trying to perform meaningful work via a chatbot (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini on the web, etc.). Chatbots have real value and are a daily part of my AI workflow, but their utility in coding is highly limited because you're mostly hoping they come up with the right results based on their prior training, and correcting them involves a human (you) to tell them they're wrong repeatedly.
Laszlo and his team at Google reinvented the role of human resources. This book is a terrific overview of what makes Google Google, from culture, to hiring, to making decisions.
Claire has been a senior executive at Google and Stripe. Here she offers up a guide to leadership that is both practical and inspiring. Suitable for leaders of all levels.
Levy was given unprecedented access to Google, and the result is what I consider to be an accurate depiction of how the company operates. A good overview of how Google product managers work.
we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.
Their words now
Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.
While heat pumps can achieve higher efficiency, consumer uptake has been much lower than expected because fundamentally, a heat pump is a 20 year bet on future power prices that most homeowners are unwilling to make.
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing.
But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.
there are many people who still refuse to believe that renewables can be practical even as renewables keep growing around the world, in fact accounting for the bulk of growth in electricity generation
In general your body would rather use glycogen than fat, because glycogen loses almost no energy in the conversion from and to sugar and fat loses a lot.
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that state-level load growth from 2019 to 2024 — including growth driven by data centers, manufacturing, and electrification — was associated with lower average retail electricity prices, not higher ones.
I think especially if you have a product that has daily frequency like that's actually the retention that matters the most is that like of your existing user base that has developed a habitual pattern how sticky is your product and it's that retention rate that really compounds and build that builds that daily habit.
I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.
used to be let's say in the Google world right I knew you were interested in shopping if you click the shopping tab I know you're interested in maps if you click the maps tab, we can measure clicks. Today, it's just all conversation. And so, it's actually harder for us to tease apart what is the user intent.
They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life.
no one carries the full legitimacy inside of a company. Legitimacy is a currency in a companies. No one carries the full legitimacy in a company, even the CEO. The CEO just has a lot of input on the plan. The plan carries the legitimacy.
The average European and UK voter, once he or she moves on from immigration, will notice how Europe and the UK have made energy unaffordable, stopped its growth-exactly as degrowthers wish-and deindustrialized, on the altar of climate policies that do nothing to improve the climate.
This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.
I think it's actually the opposite which is that everyone's kind of using the same data which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that meta has is not actually enough to move to be a kind of fundamental difference in what you can train with.
Like it seems to me right now you could do like a double blind test of the same prompt given to Grock Claude Gemini um Mistral Deep Seek. Do a double blind test. I bet most people wouldn't be able to tell which is which.
I'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.
I initially started making Anki (well, Mochi) cards to keep track of Google DeepMind's LLM lineage—Gopher, Chinchilla, Gato, PaLM, Sparrow, Meena, LaMDA, Bard, Gemini, etc.
And it sort of fits with the way I think about physics in general, which is that I think information is primary, information is the most sort of fundamental unit of the universe, more fundamental than energy and matter.
I think fusion and solar are the two that I would bet on. Solar, I mean it's the fusion reactor in the sky of course, and I think really the problem there is batteries and transmission.
Shoulder generation (in late summer) of any given year is generally a higher share of global electricity demand than the peak generation (spring) of the year prior.
Yeah, these are great work that shows what's possible. The approach doesn't scale currently. Three days of Google's server time can solve one high school math format there. This is not a scalable prospect, especially with the exponential increase as the complexity increases.
So I do think scaling laws are working, but it's tough to get, at any given time, the models we all use the most, this maybe a few months behind the maximum capability we can deliver because that won't be the fastest, easiest to use, et cetera.
Many years ago, I think it might've been 2017 or 2018, I said at the time, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I still think that's the case.
But the most important metric, and we carefully measure it is, like, how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI, right? It's tough measure, and we rigorously try to measure it, and our estimates are that number is now at 10%, right?
You can have AI give a lot of context, but one of our important design goals though, is when you come to Google Search, you are going to get a lot of context, but you're going to go and find a lot of things out on the web. So that will be true in AI mode, in AI overviews, and so on.
Look, I think news and journalism will play an important role in the future. We are pretty committed to it, right? So I think making sure that ecosystem, in fact, I think we'll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there.
LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google.
While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.
this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.
CCS can never be competitive in the sense of working economically in the absence of a policy framework to price in the cost of carbon, unlike clean electricity.
The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon.
I would say, multicellularity which is strictly an energy problem, I think. Again, it’s just like can electrons flow the right way. And is it energetically favorable for multicellularity to exist because if it’s energetically expensive, it’s not going to succeed.
And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite.
The all-in cost of operating the Google Play Store, stocking it, maintaining it, the software, the entire ecosystem is around 6% of revenue. So in a competitive market, would a company whose cost is 6% be able to charge 30%? Absolutely not.
Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.
You kind of Google and you try to solve a problem in the language based on all of your previous experience. And so you don't have what makes that language special. You have what all the other languages make special.
But Google has never had that DNA of like, "This is a product we should sell." The Google Cloud, which is a separate organization from the TPU team, which is a separate organization from the DeepMind team, which is a separate organization from the Search team. There's a lot of bureaucracy here.
So, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.
I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
Foundation, The Lessons of History, Unqualified Reservations, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Selfish Gene, Albion's Seed, War and Peace and War, Stalin's War, Energy and Civilization, Who We Are and How We Got Here, The Ancient City, The Fourth Turning, The Grey Lady Winked
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency.
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
There’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.
There's the first law of thermodynamics, which is just about the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy, Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don't get to use it all.
a good overview of SRE at Google. For those who worked at places with oncall, much of the first part of the book will likely be very familiar. Keep in mind that your mileage might vary: what works at Google scale, might not be the ideal fit for your use case.
Each shift takes its toll, and everyone has a limit of how much energy they’re willing to expend on a new platform that will eventually, like its predecessors, join the graveyard of defunct websites.
They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.
You can set out to build a good business and it’s still fine. Maybe the long-term business model of Perplexity can make us profitable in a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was. You have to remember that it’s still okay.
We would rather take a more dramatic position, that the best way to actually make a dent in the search space is to not try to do what Google does, but try to do something they don’t want to do. For them to do this for every single query is a lot of money to be spent, because their search volume is so much higher.
In Google, even though we call it 10 blue links, you get annoyed if you don’t even have the right link in the first three or four. The eye is so tuned to getting it right. LLMs are fine. You get the right link maybe in the 10th or ninth. You feed it in the model. It can still know that that was more relevant than the first.
What is the weakness of Google is that any ad unit that’s less profitable than a link, or any ad unit that kind of disincentivizes the link click is not in their interest to go aggressive on, because it takes money away from something that’s higher margins.
I think for me, the frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “This is going to be the newest deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.” It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization or a culture that’s going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don’t understand right now.
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