While I’m fond of the line from the old song, “things in this life change very slowly if they ever change at all” it isn’t really true. Many things, maybe most things, don’t change much at all. But some things change very quickly and in ways hard to even understand. I worked in tech and rode the big wave of semiconductor change for pretty much my entire career. But I even have a hard time with the numbers, because the scale isn’t something humans usually have to deal with. I’ve seen it explained lots of ways, but Azeem Azhar in his post Why AI, solar & batteries will keep getting cheaper spells it out in plan numbers. It’s pretty amazing. And it’s still happening, but only in a few places. Here is what happened to computing power in my lifetime.

From $190 billion for one gigaflop of compute power in 1961 to just 1.25 cents in 2023