Silicon Valley’s Favorite Slogan Has Lost All Meaning

In early 2021, long before ChatGPT became a household name, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman self-published a manifesto of sorts, titled “Moore’s Law for Everything.” The original Moore’s Law, formulated in 1965, describes the development of microchips, the tiny silicon wafers that power your computer. More specifically, it predicted that the number of transistors that engineers could cram onto a chip would roughly double every year. As Altman sees it, something like that astonishing rate of progress will soon apply to housing, food, medicine, education—everything. The vision is nothing short of utopian. We ride the exponential curve all the way to paradise.

In late February, Altman invoked Moore again, this time “a new version of moore’s law that could start soon: the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles,” replied Grady Booch, the chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research. But whether astute or just absurd, Altman’s comment is not unique: Technologists have been invoking and adjusting Moore’s Law to suit their own ends for decades. Indeed, when Gordon Moore himself last month at the age of 94, the legendary engineer and executive, who in his lifetime built one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies and made computers accessible to hundreds of millions of people, was remembered for his prediction—and also, perhaps, for the optimism it inspired.