Zero To One

no, this isn’t about the famous book Zero To One by Peter Thiel on how to build a startup. this is about computers

sometimes i’m fascinated to the people who invented computers and AI. somehow, they figured out how to make machine “learn” using nothing but ones and zeroes and it can process phrases, words, sentences and predict the next word.

i think most of the AI buzzwords we use today come down to something very simple. a computer predicting the next word using tokenizer. it looks at patterns and uses cosine similarity and goes like “hmmm, this next word probably makes sense”, then it passed through neurons, backpropagation, some linear algebra, mathematics, and statistics things that i don’t fully understand. all working together just to predict the next token.

and then fast forward to today, humans have built machines that can perform 72 petaflops per second. that’s 72 quadrillion (72,000,000,000,000,000) operations every single second. no wonder computers can “learn” (or predict) so fast.

for comparision, if you give a human basic math problems like addition, substraction, multiplication, and division, maybe we can solve around two or three per seoncd. but a computer can solve 72 quadrillion per second. and the craziest part is computer only understands 0 and 1. it doesn’t actually know 2, 3, 4 are (it understands 2, 3, 4 through binary. that’s just my oversimplification).

and yet, from just 0 and 1, we built all of this.

---

P.S written in 2025, published in 2026.