Azeem Azhar

Let's compare it to something else that I really like, which is donuts.

So I love donuts, but there's a marginal, diminishing marginal utility with donuts.

The first one is great.

I'm not sure I will ever eat number four in a single sitting.

And I can pretty much testify that I have never got as far as four donuts in a single sitting.

And the same is probably true for you, but that isn't true with computing.

What happens with computing is we have an insatiable demand for it.

And it also has a positive price elasticity, which means that if the price comes down, we buy more and more of it.

We use more and more of it.

And what happens with compute is that consumption continues as capabilities expand.

Now, we've got some empirical data for this, some real evidence.

So a few years ago, I went through the process of estimating the amount of computing capacity in the world every year from 2023 back to the 1950s.

I think I started in 1958.

So essentially, I counted the number of computers of different types and I estimated how much computing each one could do.

and totaled that up to give a sense of the stock of computing in every year, as I said, since 1958.

Now, the counting isn't exactly apples for apples, but it's directionally robust enough.

Now, the normal yardstick I use is to start in 1972.

It's a wonderful year.

It's the year I was born

And I estimate that the total stock of computing power available globally between 1972 and 2023 increased by 11 orders of magnitude, which is roughly a factor of 100 billion.