Newsletter 12 - The Physics of Progress: Understanding Energy's Evolution Across Cosmology, Computation, and Culture
Focussing on energy as a determinant in AI progress and Leadership effectiveness.
This is my last essay for 2023. I wish you the very best success in your personal, philosophical, spiritual and professional endeavors in the next calendar year. It has been a joy to share this ideological mechanism with you.
It's fascinating to look back and see what was an inchoate idea in the late summer is now something with rapidly increasing readership. A community of folks who think and introspect – a good group of people for me to be associated with. I am grateful for your time and your attention to this medium.
For this next year, I recommend that you practice gratitude. Gratitude, as has been mentioned before, is a “causal” attitude. Several studies show that a grateful mindset positively affects biomarkers associated with the risk for heart disease. There are other scientific studies that prove significant social and health benefits of practiced gratitude. Easy to say, hard to do; but the payoff is massive.
Do you know - the underlying basis of our current understanding of the universe is energy? Further, through the years I have evolved to expect energy as a core component of effective leadership.
For everything to exist we need energy. For economic production, for AI, for leadership. Time just measures change in energy, energy is the basis.
In high school we learned that the sum of all forces working on a particle are equal to the change in its kinetic energy, as postulated in the work-energy theorem.
In Modern Physics we understand that our universe is made up of energy, how the energy manifests changes over time. In fact, to fully account for the energy in our universe we have identified that we don't know a lot of what is in the universe. It is also true that we don't know what constitutes most of the energy and/or mass in the universe.
In physics, we comprehend the universe, where it came from and where it is going using constructs that evaluate how energy is constituted. Today the standard model of cosmology is known as the ΛCDM or concordance model which describes a universe that began to expand 13.8 billion years ago. The early universe was smooth, hot and dense. As it expanded it became cooler and more diffuse and structures such as stars and galaxies started to form. So far we observe that the universe is built of four substances: radiation, baryonic matter, dark matter and dark energy. Radiation consists of photons and neutrinos and makes up 10-3% of the total energy. Baryonic matter is the ordinary, familiar material including all of the chemical elements and compounds that we find in planets, stars, gas clouds and plasmas, interestingly this is only about 4% of the universe’s energy budget. Dark matter is an exotic substance that does not emit or absorb light, and is not made up of any of the known elementary particles. Dark matter appears to require new physics. What we do know is that it makes up 23% of the total energy of the universe and comprises most of its mass. Finally Dark energy is the name given to the phenomenon responsible for the late time acceleration of the universe’s expansion. Like dark matter, this cannot be explained by existing physics but it makes up 73% of today’s energy budget. Dividing the building blocks of the universe into these four substances is convenient as each of these substances contributes to the total energy of the universe.
It appears that the universe was initially mainly matter-less energy mostly in a small bundle of light particles called Photons. As the universe expanded, it transformed into being predominantly constituted of energy in the form of matter. However, over time we expect that matter will again be replaced by pure energy, we just don't know in what form so we call it “dark” energy.
The early universe is dominated by radiation (photons and neutrinos). Photons lack mass but possess energy. During the universe’s infancy, most of its energy resides in its photons. This is the so-called radiation era. As the universe expands the energy density of its constituents decreases because the same particles occupy an increasingly larger volume. The radiation energy density declines at a faster rate than the matter energy density. After a period termed matter–radiation equality, the dominant contribution to the energy density of the universe comes from the matter sector. The matter sector comprises dark matter and baryonic matter. This is the start of the matter era. Although the energy density of the matter particles continues to drop as the universe expands, it continues to dominate the energy density of the radiation sector, which drops at an even faster rate. Eventually the energy density of the matter particles drops below the energy density of the dark energy component. After this time, the universe is dominated by dark energy and starts to expand exponentially.
With the broad economic implications of AI, it will be very important to understand its energy-use characteristics, given historical correlation. I will deep dive into this in my next essay, the first one in 2024.
As has been mentioned in this publication, AI and specifically Gen AI is a compute intensive activity. From exceedingly large numbers of computations during the learning phase of Gen AI models to answering each trivial request, the underlying chips, mainly GPUs from nVidia, consume a massive amount of energy. Consider this, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Hugging Face (a company I will deep dive on in a subsequent edition), every time an image is generated by a class of powerful Gen AI models the amount of energy consumed is the same as charging your smartphones. Similarly for every six thousand or so text generations. As all of us with low phone batteries know, that is a substantial amount of energy.
In AI, energy use is going to be a determinant. A secular line of investment and innovation is actively being pursued because energy is the ultimate lever in this universe. There is already intense research on finding power optimization techniques in chips used for AI, startups and big tech working on building special purpose chips that consume less energy per use and finally, model re-evaluation to reduce the compute requirements by moving away from general purpose large models, to vertical specific small models.
Energy use is already influencing how society and AI are going to evolve. However what is clear is that we are going to need a lot more energy and it cannot conceivably come from more fossil fuel consumption due to commercial and environmental impacts.
Further, we are seeing secular transplantation of commercial real estate including previous office space to data center space. It is anticipated that these data centers are going to consume 3-6x the amount of power as estimated to be used for EV charging.
As this tumultuous year ends, we can accept without objection that the energy implications, its production sources and its use across social and economic sectors is undergoing fundamental change. This will be affected by and will affect AI development and use.
That is the norm of the universe, our species and our little enterprises cannot escape the propensity of nature and the laws of the universe.
Energy Phenomenon in Leadership
We all hear and indeed experience the notion of energy in organizations. We hear colloquially about “bad vibes”, “negative energy” or less often “uplifting or creative energy” from being a part of an organization. It's undefinable but it is a definite (de)motivator. Humans are affected and motivated to seek an energy of a particular kind and away from another. Professionally, we try to measure it in a roundabout way using engagement metrics, or satisfaction. It is hard to define, quantify and indeed measure. Sometimes we refer to this “thing” as culture.
It's real, it can be felt and we know it when we experience it.
Sometimes in our professions when we finish a day or week we feel depleted and drained of energy. It takes effort to replenish and build up our reserves to head back in. In burnout we are not able to get balance and our performance and attitude suffers.
Other times, we feel “energized” (there's that word) and uplifted from our work. In great organizations while doing great work we feel like our energy (or effort) is magnified because everyone else in the organization amplifies it.
There is therefore a totemic energy responsibility for the leader in an organization. For us when we are in a leadership position, we are quite literally engaged in an exercise to harness the energy of the group for productive output. To catalyze this and to get the organizational flywheel (A flywheel is a heavy wheel that stores rotational energy and helps smooth out the delivery of power from a motor to a machine.) to reach optimality, the leader has to put in their own energy. This energy is in the form of inspiration, effort, commitment, decision making and empathy. It is exhibited in behavior, activity and attitude. Initially the balance is lopsided with more energy dissipation by the leader into the organization and very little back, slowly it gets to balance between what is given out versus what is received and finally, when the organizational actualizes, all members get more than they put in.
Carl Sagan in the 1980s made an observation famous when he said that we, Human beings, are made from the same matter as the universe or more aptly, “stardust”. To cut a rather long and fascinating story short, we know this because we can observe the universe as it existed over time. When light from very old stars is observed we can see that they don't have all the constituent parts needed for life but light from other stars, which have gone through supernova, allows us to observe the creation of carbon. At this crucible of star destruction and formation, we see that the material that makes us (CHNOPS: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur) is the same as the material in these galaxies. We ARE in fact the same matter as the universe. As I mentioned, matter is really just way for the energy of the universe to manifest.
So it follows that we are influenced by the same energy dynamics as the rest of it.
The only difference might be that we can perceive it. Our small carbon-based life forms exist on a minor planet orbiting an unremarkable star, one among 400 billion in our galaxy, which itself is just one of the trillions of galaxies in our observable universe alone.
In these times when our collective energy is getting depleted through economic disorder, and creative destruction wrought upon by a pandemic affected investment cycle, AI and global geo-political power shifts, leadership energy demands are unprecedented.
I expect that leaders will have to continue to bring a disproportionate amount of energy to their jobs, as they have in the last couple of years. Those of us who are of a certain vintage know that eventually the flywheel will turn and true effort will yield energy expansion with great actualized teams who will produce great societal and economic output.
I wish you all the best energy in 2024 and hope what you are close to energy cycles that will be productive for society and for the economy.
Meanwhile the thrash in AI talent continues. Big tech, venture capitalists, relegated tech companies are in a melee and the scarce AI talent enjoys the spotlight. Those of us who are of certain vintage know how this movie ends.
As mentioned in Newsletter 10, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar were two of the researchers at Google in 2017 amongst those who wrote the now famous paper called, “Attention is all you need”. I had mentioned to you that these two were working on a “stealth” startup each after leaving Adept AI. I wasn't sure if they were working on different startups or the same one. Around December 11, 2023 we found out that the both of them are part of Essential AI, with admission to “To reinvent how enterprises work, we are developing full-stack AI products that quickly learn to increase productivity by automating time-consuming and monotonous workflows”. To pursue this mission which, if successful, would start attacking the installed base of ERP type systems, they’ve raised a $56.5 million series A round from stalwarts like March Capital and Thrive Capital, with participation from AMD, Franklin Venture Partners, Google, KB Investment, and NVIDIA. The total they have apparently raised so far is $65 million.
In conclusion, be grateful and be hopeful.
And so we come full circle, back to the physics of our universe and the leadership of our enterprises, bound by the same elemental forces. The transformation of energy across cosmic eras mirrors transitions in what motivates people amidst turmoil. Radiation begets matter begets mystery; and vision catalyzes teams catalyzes high-performance culture.
But just as dark energy accelerates cosmic expansion in ways we barely grasp, so too do the stresses of disruption drive unprecedented demands from leaders for direction-setting, empathy and a tenacious human spirit to maintain collective momentum when it is easiest to surrender. Yet if we remain rooted in first principles - conserve energy, unleash potential, uplift others - we maintain faith that our insignificant specks will continue making their mark on the universe’s endless energy landscape.
For true progress depends as much on quiet persistence as grand upheaval across all frontiers.
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