🔮 Exponential computing; basic income; plant-based meat; corona-tech; Ubuntu ethics, Greenland sharks & air gaps++ #269

I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies—and, of course, Covid-19.

To catch up on my previous writing on Covid-19, see:

• For startups, relevance matters

• Enthusiasm needs coordination too

• The three cleavages: shaping the post-pandemic order

• What Dr Doom told me about the coming recession

The near future

🧨 Algorithmic optimisation is driving exponential improvements in AI performance faster than Moore’s Law, argues AI research group, OpenAI. It now takes forty-four times less compute to build a neural net to the power of the breakthrough 2012 AlexNet. “Algorithmic progress has yielded more gains than classical hardware efficiency.” The critical point here is that we’re seeing performance improvements across four different axes in machine learning computation: increased algorithmic efficiency, improvements in hardware architecture (such as dedicated AI hardware from …