AI Is Growing Seven Times Faster Than Moore's Law

Image recognition abundance is growing 295 percent a year. At that rate you go from one to a trillion in 20 years.

Moore’s law suggests that computer transistor abundance doubles every two years. That would indicate a compound rate of around 41.4 percent a year. The cost to train an AI system to recognize images fell 99.59 percent from $1,112.64 in 2017 to $4.59 in 2021. This would indicate a compound rate of 295 percent a year. AI is growing over seven times faster than Moore’s law.

Nvidia is leading the development of these system and their CEO Jensen Huang has claimed that AI processing performance has increased by “no less than one million in the last 10 years.” This is a compound annual rate of 298 percent. He expects this rate to continue for the next 10 years. That would mean we go from one to one trillion in twenty years. We’ll be 976 million times ahead of Moore’s law. Quite astonishing.

If wealth is knowledge and growth is learning as George Gilder notes, we may have discovered a way to exponentially create new wealth if people like Jensen Huang are free to innovate.

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You can learn more about these economic facts and ideas in our new book, Superabundance, available at Amazon. Jordan Peterson calls it a “profoundly optimistic book.”

Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.