Azeem Azhar

And the reason they didn't was a problem of knowledge.

We didn't know how to make them.

It was a 100-year journey from the basic physics to

through to the first transistors 50 years later in the 1950s and 60s through to the first red LED in 1960.

I was explaining to my team that the reason the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica in the 1970s and Knight Rider both have red LED things around their face, the kit car, is because those are the only LEDs we could make at the time.

And that was the future.

And we didn't get blue LEDs until the late 1990s.

And now it took five years for everyone to transition.

If you can compress any part of that process, you can deliver enormous consumer benefit, but it may not show up in GDP.

it may just show up in better services.

Well, I gave you the excitable bull case there, but there is also the bear case that you alluded to through the Ben Jones paper, which makes me think of a year or so ago, Microsoft had a foundation model look at catalysts.

And I think they

came up with 35 million materials in one afternoon.

And I thought back to Mitlach, who was Fritz Haber's co-worker on the Haber-Bosch process, who painstakingly looked at 2,500 compounds over the course of many, many months.

And so we moved from a

discovery process to actually a sifting and verification bottleneck, which those bottlenecks maybe require new skills, they might require new regulation, they might require sociological changes.

And so it might take quite a long time to work all your way through the system.

You know, you just essentially move the bottleneck from discovery or work done to

sorting or verification.

And that might just slow us down again, and it becomes not so much the burden of knowledge, but the burden of sifting.