The Turmoil and the Bloat

Jensen Huang.

Have you noticed that things, from prose to the valuations of AI companies, seem bloated? There’s a primal reason why.

In case you missed it: Moore’s Law is dead. It’s been dead four years and it’s time we all noticed.

Even if you don’t know Moore’s Law by that name, you know the feel and rhythm of it. Moore’s Law holds that, year after year, technology will become ever lighter, cheaper, faster, and more powerful.

This idea has had enormous and unexpected consequences for our folkways, our culture, and our sense of time and meaning. It has meant that for 60 years it’s been an article of faith that each new generation will be exposed to more ideas and move more freely—socially, physically, culturally—than the last.

This idea was crystallized in what I have come to understand as the most influential essay ever written, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” by Gordon Moore. It out on April 19, 1965. Unlike every other essay, before or since, “Cramming” convulsed an actual paradigm shift.