The Great Acceleration is Here Now

This is the first part of a special two-part episode about what I call the great acceleration of our time. What exactly is accelerating? And why is that important? Several things are accelerating: one is knowledge, another is time, a third is energy, and a fourth is our cognitive brain capacity. So, let me break this down.Recently, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, sat down for an interview with Fareed Zakaria. Jensen is being called the Godfather of AI because his company pivoted several years ago from making GPUs for gaming to developing GPUs for AI. A GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, replaces what are known as CPUs, or Central Processing Units, semiconductor chips. CPUs powered the internet. GPUs are powering AI because they are faster and optimized for performing many simple tasks simultaneously, making them ideal for both image processing and machine learning, the heart of AI.That is as technical as I will get here. The point is that Jensen is a true visionary—some say he is the Da Vinci of our time. He saw what he had and how to utilize it to transform technology in our time. And the so-called hyperscaler companies in technology—Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—are investing many billions of dollars in developing their AI capabilities, as this is a race. Okay, so that’s another acceleration. The time between the release of the first AI chatbot and the “winner-take-all” race to create the best AI capability will be a fraction of the time it took for the early search engines of the web, the internet, to consolidate down to just one dominant provider, Google.The initial consumer-facing availability of AI for everyday purposes takes the form of these various so-called chatbots. As the name implies, they are conversational machine learning tools that generate and share knowledge. And the way they work leverages everyone’s skill with legacy search, like Google.The critical thing to know here is that this change from search to artificial intelligence knowledge generation and reasoning is happening right now, and you can tap into it with any of the major consumer-facing chatbots like xAI’s Grok, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claud, or Google’s own AI chatbot, Gemini. And I’m going to pound the table here. If you want to have any mastery of skills necessary to navigate what comes next, in technology, in our culture, in your professional life, you MUST begin NOW to learn how to optimize AI in your everyday life.