Truth · 真
算
Algorithm
The procedure.
From Euclid to Transformer, an algorithm is a recipe a substrate can follow without judgment. The cleaner the recipe, the more independence it has from any particular cook.
← Atlas
Mind
智能Intelligence
Algorithm. Compute. Data. The three commodities of the new century.
Every intelligent system — biological, artificial, social — is some combination of three commodities. Algorithm is its truth: the procedure by which it transforms input into output. Compute is its goodness: the raw substrate-work that makes the procedure happen. Data is its beauty: the lived examples that give the procedure something to be about. The history of AI is a story of which of the three was scarce in each decade. Today, for the first time, all three are simultaneously abundant.
The Three Pillars
Goodness · 善
力
Compute
The substrate-work.
FLOPs, watts, transistors, silicon. Compute is what turns an idea into an event. The 21st century is largely the story of compute getting almost free in some regimes and almost priceless in others.
Beauty · 美
据
Data
The lived examples.
Data is the world's testimony, frozen. Without it, an algorithm is a recipe with no ingredients. With it — and enough compute — an algorithm starts to model the world it came from.
Evolution
How this trinity came to be.
- 1956
Dartmouth
AI is named. The dominant axis for forty years will be algorithm; compute and data are scarce.
- 2012
AlexNet
GPUs unlock compute. ImageNet unlocks data. Algorithms that had failed for decades suddenly work. The trinity rebalances.
- 2022+
Foundation models
All three axes scale together for the first time. The result is a phase transition.
Practical Applications
How to use this lens today.
- 01Score any AI project on which axis is binding: algorithm gap (rare), compute gap, or data gap (most common).
- 02National AI strategy is exactly a three-axis investment portfolio.
Future Trends
Where this trinity is heading.
- →Synthetic data and self-play start to break the data bottleneck; the binding constraint shifts back to algorithm.
- →Compute scarcity becomes geopolitics. Wars are increasingly about who can manufacture the substrate of cognition.
Related Triads