Conference Presentation, Keynote
The Physics of Thought & Architecture of Intelligence | Amin Vahdat, Google | RAISE Summit 2026
- Predicts the current moment as the start of the largest societal transformation, marking the transition from the information age to an era of intelligence that will unfold over accelerated timescales rather than the 150 years of the Industrial Revolution.
- Foresees a "messy middle" period of disruption before humanity reaches a future with universal access to doctors, teachers, and disease cures, alongside a decade of scientific progress occurring annually.
- Anticipates the intelligence revolution will require a complete, radical re-architecture of the compute stack, driven by efficiency gains, model architecture enhancements, and algorithmic improvements.
- Notes that historical efficiency trends lead to unbounded demand, citing 10x annual growth in ML computer demand from 15 years ago and predicting the industry will pursue 20x annual compute capacity growth if deliverable.
- Highlights the 2017 Transformer invention as a shift in the efficiency curve by a factor of four to five and expects specialized hardware to provide at least 100 times the system efficiency improvement over general-purpose CPUs for specific workloads.
- Plans to prioritize energy and hardware as foundational AI stack layers, requiring hardware coordination in microseconds across hundreds of thousands of chips.
- Establishes a roadmap split into separate inference and training lines to meet demand, aiming for 2x or 3x annual performance improvements in new TPU generations with performance per watt as the primary metric.
- Targets 99.9% reliability to double capacity for customers instead of the traditional 99.999% standard while implementing gigawatts of demand response agreements to ensure abundant and responsible energy.
- Projects agentic computing will drive more than a 10x increase in compute demand, characterized by swarms of agents invoking models hundreds or thousands of times and causing computer-to-computer invocations to "explode" beyond human-to-computer interaction limits.
- Emphasizes the responsibility of all participants in defining the future, planning to ensure technology is delivered responsibly to uplift humanity amidst economic turbulence.