Let the Sand Think

The best intelligence money can buy will soon reach almost everyone. What does that do to ours?

I remember taking apart the first PC we had at home when I was seven or eight. This magical machine I played games on had suddenly stopped working. My dad and older brother were on their way home, and I thought I could fix it before they arrived.

If I failed, I was in trouble. If I succeeded, I knew I would be hooked.

I obviously didn't fix it. But what I saw inside started a curiosity I am still chasing today.

Years later, learning that all of it starts with sand and energy felt like opening that computer again. Games, robots, and perhaps one day superintelligence.

Sand. Simple and marvelous.

After all, we are dust too.

Now it is starting to think. Soon it will answer questions for almost everyone. I think two things happen at once: we get more curious, and we get less practiced at thinking.

The marvel, priced for everyone

Demis Hassabis put the economic story in two sentences without meaning to. On stage at Google I/O he marveled that "we turn sand into thinking machines," and almost in the same breath talked about serving Gemini Flash to everyone who wants it at "incredible low cost." The wonder and the price cut are the same event.

Whatever counted as frontier quality a few years ago is priced like a commodity today, and cheaper again by the time you read this. GPT-3.5-level output, state of the art in 2022, now costs next to nothing per response. A strange scientific achievement is already cheap enough to hand to everyone.

The bottleneck moves

From a phone, intelligence looks weightless. From a data center it looks like substations, cooling loops, optical fiber, concrete, and a great deal of electricity. Silicon is abundant; frontier compute is not. Between sand and an answer sit the whole chip-fabrication chain (plants, lithography, packaging, memory), the power and cooling infrastructure it needs, and billions of dollars of capital.

We can build more of them, and as we do the cost of a useful answer keeps falling. Access never becomes perfectly equal, but the capability gap compresses toward the phone curve: a lead measured in months rather than lifetimes.

What stays scarce

Even judgment might not stay scarce. A model can propose several answers, pick one, act on it, and adjust based on what happens. Anthropic's Constitutional AI already runs a version of this loop: one model grades another's answers against a written set of principles, with no person reviewing the result. It can already pose a sharper question than I can and reach a better answer than I would.

Whose preferences is it serving, and who gave it the authority to act? A model can infer and balance preferences well, but it cannot answer either question about itself.

Not everyone who can reach the same capability will want the same outcome, carry the same responsibility, or be willing to stand behind a decision, even one a model made.

What optional costs

Making dangerous, exhausting work optional is mostly progress, and I am not defending hardship. Some human capacities stay alive only through use, and when producing an answer is always slower than asking for one, we can quietly stop building the ability to produce it ourselves. If choosing which answer to trust gets outsourced too, the risk just moves: we stop practicing how to set the goal, question the objective, and decide what is worth doing at all.

Take the things we say we want most: back to the moon, on to Mars, a real reading of the universe. The old framing for all of them was sacrifice, a career spent on one equation, a decade of training to sit on top of a controlled explosion. Losing that sacrifice is mostly fine, but losing the practice underneath it worries me, because practice is how the ability to think stays in shape.

I used AI to help draft and edit this essay. It made the argument clearer and the work easier. I honestly cannot tell how much of the thinking it extended and how much it replaced.

That uncertainty will become ordinary. Some abilities will weaken from disuse. When answers are cheap, the work left to us is choosing what deserves our attention, deciding what we want, and taking responsibility for what follows.

There may also be more room to sit with questions that have no useful answer. More conversation, contemplation, and prayer. A strange result of the semiconductor industry may be more rabbis and monks.

We are dust that learned to think. We took sand, gave it energy, and taught it to think too.

Let the sand think.

We have to decide what all this intelligence is for.

---

Related: The Control Room

Shai Magzimof

---