Technology is culture

We are experiencing one of the most significant technological breakthroughs of the last few decades. Call it what you will: AI, generative AI, large language models…

But where does it come from? Academics will tell you that it stems from decades of mathematical efforts on campus. But think about it: if this were the best model to explain what happened, where would the current breakthroughs have occurred? They would have happened on campus first, then propagated to industry. That’s the linear model of innovation—a rather indefensible one.

Technology is culture. Technological progress does not follow a path from the blackboard of a middle-aged MIT professor to your desk, via a corporation.

So what is the cultural background? Of course, there is hacker culture and the way hackers won a culture war in the 1980s by becoming cool enough to have a seat at the table.

But closer to us… I believe there are two main roots. The first is gaming. Gamers wanted photorealistic, high-performance games. They built powerful machines capable of solving linear algebra problems at very high speeds.

Powerful computing alone, however, does you no good if you want to build an AI. That’s where web culture came in. Everything was networked, published, republished. Web nerds helped build the greatest library the world had ever seen.
These two cultures came together to generate the current revolution.

If you like my model, I submit that it has a few interesting consequences. The most immediate one is that if you want to understand how and where technological progress happens, you have to look at cultural drivers—not at what professors at MIT are publishing.