But if you trace these advancements back to Moore’s Law and truly unpack how incremental doubling functions, the picture becomes clear.

Recall the parable of the wise man (sometimes said to be the inventor of chess) who asked a king for a single grain of rice, doubled on each square of the board 64 times. That story illustrates perfectly how exponential growth begins modestly—1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32—and then suddenly explodes into numbers so vast they defy imagination. By the final square, you’re dealing with 18 quintillion, 446 quadrillion, 744 trillion grains of rice—an incomprehensible amount.

It’s simple math, yet it feels like sorcery. And I love this footnote from Wikipedia about the tale’s origin: “Depending on the version, the clever inventor either becomes a trusted royal advisor or is promptly executed.”

This same principle is now playing out in today’s AI boom. In fact, AI visionary Ray Kurzweil coined the term “the second half of the chessboard” to describe the moment when exponential progress shifts from barely noticeable to utterly transformative. The first half looks manageable; the second half reshapes reality. That’s when the curve doesn’t just rise—it rockets upward, breaking through ceilings we once thought permanent.

The Breakneck Speed of Hardware Innovation

I’ve written before about Cerebras’ WSE chip—a silicon die the size of a dinner plate, packed with roughly 90,000 cores.

According to reports from sources like IEEE Spectrum, the WSE-2 (used in the Cerebras CS-2 system) achieves around 7.5 petaFLOPS of FP16 compute—7,500 trillion operations per second. The newer WSE-3? It leaps to an astonishing 125 petaFLOPS.

Holding one of these chips is like holding a piece of the future. It embodies the raw power of massive parallelism. Not long ago, we celebrated dual-core processors. Then came quad-core, octa-core—each step felt revolutionary. Now, we’ve entered a realm where tens of thousands of cores operate in unison.

Then there’s systems like Huawei Cloudmatrix, where exact specs are closely guarded, but the underlying message is unmistakable: computing power has gone beyond what most people can even conceptualize.

Hardware as an Ecosystem

At a recent TED event, young technologist Caleb Sirak delivered a compelling talk framing hardware as a kind of “silicon prison.”

He walked through the evolution of hardware acceleration—from early machines handling millions of operations per second, to today’s systems crunching trillions, even quadrillions. While gaming helped fuel early innovation, he noted, the real breakthrough came when platforms like Nvidia’s CUDA opened the door to general-purpose GPU computing.

Now, he argued, it’s time for a new paradigm.

“We need to rethink the entire architecture,” Sirak stated.

Claiming the Hardware Advantage

One key to unlocking next-gen GPU performance, he emphasized, is quantization.

For instance, a 4-bit multiplier is dramatically more efficient than its 32-bit counterpart—requiring less power, space, and time.

He cited chips like Cerebras’ WSE as prime examples of how minimizing data movement can supercharge AI efficiency.

“When parameters are smaller,” he explained, “we can move more of them across the system each second, drastically reducing bottlenecks in memory and network interconnects.”

He referenced xAI’s Colossus project and its ambitious “roadmap” to scale up to a million GPUs. Yet even at that scale, efficiency remains king.

“You can design a city with winding streets and mixed traffic,” he said, “or you can build an F1 racetrack. On that track, the F1 car doesn’t just go fast—it dominates.”

He highlighted efforts by several companies to create coordinated clusters of hardware units—what he calls “intelligent colonies”—working in concert like swarms of engineered brilliance.

“The capabilities we’re unlocking through AI chips and architectural leaps are transformative,” Sirak added. “And for this revolution to benefit humanity, innovation must be open, accessible, and globally shared. At the core of it all is a supply chain of staggering complexity: rare earth elements mined on one continent, refined chemicals from another, and final fabrication on a third.”

To illustrate global interdependence, he pointed out that a single chip may traverse over a dozen countries before reaching its final destination. This makes perfect sense to anyone aware that TSMC—Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company—produces the majority of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips.

One thing is certain: we’re now deep into the vertical surge of the hockey stick curve—a historic wave of hardware acceleration. The future isn’t just coming. It’s already here.

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