Computation is Driving Intelligence
When you start a car and leave it in park, that’s called idling. The machine is on, but there’s no forward progress. Driving in stop-and-go traffic is similar—the car is not fully utilizing its capabilities. For many years, we’ve run our computers like a car in stop-and-go traffic. Its resources are running mostly idle.
Here’s a screenshot of my Apple Mac’s CPU utilization while running dozens of apps and simultaneously participating in a real-time video conference:
As you can see, even under all this relatively heavy workload, the vast majority of its resources are running idle.
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have changed this dramatically. We’ve essentially learned how to turn computing power into intelligence. And it turns out that intelligence is very compute-intensive. Rather than running the machine mostly idle, it’s pedal-to-the-metal nearly all the time.
This represents a profound change in the demand for compute. And while this change is partly recognized by the market—the world’s best supercomputer maker is currently the most valuable company in the world—it remains underappreciated.
That’s because there’s essentially no limit to the demand for intelligence. As Jensen Huang recently said, “What person, company, or nation says, ‘intelligence is basically optional for us?’” Since we’ve now directly linked computation to intelligence, the demand for computation will outrun our ability to produce computing machines for a very long time.
Earlier this year, this dynamic was grossly misunderstood. When a Chinese model called DeepSeek was released, it was more efficient at producing intelligence per unit of compute. There was a snap conclusion that this would mean less overall demand for compute.
But as we identified immediately, nothing could be further from the truth. As computation becomes cheaper, the demand for computation only rises. This has been true for a long time. What’s different now is this direct link between computation and intelligence.
The machines are no longer running idle.
Best regards,
Evan McGoff
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