From Electricity to AI
A 20-article series tracing the physical foundations of AI, from voltage and silicon to data centers and neural networks.
- 1
The Tech Roadmap: From Electricity to AI
A 20-article guide covering the complete path from electricity to artificial intelligence, layer by layer, from hardware to reasoning.
- 2
AttentionElectricity is all you need...A beginner-friendly guide to voltage, current, resistance, and power, and why electricity is now the single biggest constraint on AI growth.
- 3
Semiconductors: The Material That Changed Everything
How a piece of silicon becomes a computer chip. From doping to transistors to AI processors with 208 billion switches.
- 4
Processors and GPUs: How Chips Think
How transistors become processors. The difference between CPUs and GPUs, and why parallel processing is the reason AI exists.
- 5
Data Centers: Where the Cloud Lives
What the cloud actually looks like. The physical reality of data centers, from power and cooling to the question of whether we will build them in space.
- 6
Power and the Internet: The Energy Cost of Everything Digital
Data centers now consume 460 TWh annually and could exceed 1,000 TWh by 2026. Explore the energy sources powering the internet and what it means for our planet.
- 7
How the Internet Actually Works
A clear, technical explanation of the physical and logical infrastructure that makes the internet possible - from fiber cables to routing protocols.
- 8
Software Fundamentals: How Code Becomes Action
From binary instructions to operating systems and compilers, how the software layer transforms inert hardware into the machines that run our world.
- 9
Algorithms: How Computers Solve Problems
What an algorithm actually is, why some solutions are fast and others are slow, and how Big-O notation measures the difference.
- 10
Databases and Data: How Information Is Stored
How databases store, organize, and retrieve data at scale, from SQL tables and B-tree indexes to vector search powering AI.
- 11
Machine Learning: How Computers Learn from Data
How computers find patterns without being told the rules. Supervised learning, gradient descent, and why data quality matters more than algorithms.
- 12
Neural Networks: How AI Mimics the Brain
How artificial neurons combine into networks that recognize images, understand language, and generate text. From perceptrons to transformers.
- 13
LLMs - How ChatGPT Actually Works
How large language models actually work, from tokenization and embeddings to attention mechanisms and next-token prediction.
- 14
AI Training: How Models Get Smart
How AI training works, from gradient descent and backpropagation to RLHF, synthetic data, and the emerging possibility of recursive self-improvement.
- 15
AI Inference and Scaling: From Training to Serving Billions
How trained AI models serve billions of requests through inference optimization, scaling infrastructure, and cost engineering.
- 16
The Frontier Labs: Who Is Building AGI
The companies racing to build artificial general intelligence, their approaches, breakthroughs, and what sets each apart in 2025-2026.
- 18
Hacking: How Cyberattacks Actually Work
The kill chain from first probe to final payload: how attackers move through a system, what tools they use, and why defenders are always fighting uphill.
- 19
Encryption and Trust: How Privacy Works Online
A clear walkthrough of TLS, public key cryptography, certificate authorities, and the chain of trust that keeps your browser sessions private.
- 20
AI Agents: Software That Acts on Its Own
From chatbots to autonomous software: how AI agents perceive, reason, and act, plus the legal and philosophical questions they force us to answer.
- 21
What Comes Next: The Near Future of Technology
The final article in the From Electricity to AI series: where technology stands today, where it is heading, and what twenty articles taught me about it.