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Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Nuclear for AI: Why Data Centers Want Reactors

Nuclear for AI: Why Data Centers Want Reactors

Nuclear for AI: Why Data Centers Want Reactors In September 2024, Microsoft announced it was restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Yes, that Three Mile Island—the site of America's worst commercial nuclear accident in 1979. The company signed a twenty-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy,

Neuromorphic Chips: Silicon Learns from Neurons

Neuromorphic Chips: Silicon Learns from Neurons

Neuromorphic Chips: Silicon Learns from Neurons If you can't grow a brain in a dish—or don't want to deal with the complications of keeping tissue alive—there's another option: build silicon that acts like a brain. This is the neuromorphic computing approach. Instead

Organoid Intelligence: Wetware as Compute

Organoid Intelligence: Wetware as Compute

Organoid Intelligence: Wetware as Compute In 2022, a company called Cortical Labs published a paper with an audacious title: "In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world." They had grown a small cluster of human neurons in a dish. They connected it to

The Brain's Impossible Efficiency: 20 Watts

The Brain's Impossible Efficiency: 20 Watts

The Brain's Impossible Efficiency: 20 Watts Here's a number that should make every computer scientist uncomfortable: 20 watts. That's the power consumption of an adult human brain. A typical incandescent light bulb uses more. A laptop uses three to four times as much. A

Landauer's Limit: The Physics of Erasing Information

Landauer's Limit: The Physics of Erasing Information

Landauer's Limit: The Physics of Erasing Information In 1961, a physicist at IBM named Rolf Landauer asked a question that seemed almost philosophical: What is the minimum energy required to perform a computation? The answer he found wasn't philosophical at all. It was thermodynamics. And it

The Compute Ceiling: Why AI Hit a Wall

The Compute Ceiling: Why AI Hit a Wall

The Compute Ceiling: Why AI Hit a Wall In 2020, OpenAI trained GPT-3. It took approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours of electricity—enough to power 120 American homes for a year. The cost: somewhere between $4 million and $12 million, depending on how you count. In 2023, GPT-4 training consumed an

The Intelligence of Energy

The Intelligence of Energy

The Intelligence of Energy Every thought you think costs calories. Every AI response burns watts. Every calculation, biological or silicon, requires energy—and that energy has to come from somewhere. This isn't a metaphor. Intelligence is expensive, and the bill comes in joules. We're used to