America Is Way Ahead of China In A.I. They Just Don't Know It
China rocked Wall Street with a $6 million data center delivering A.I. Fractal does it with a 4-inch cube - every day.
Wall Street was rocked when China announced it ran a large language model on a $6 million data center rather than some gargantuan, energy consuming hyper-center.
The entire tech community woke up to the burgeoning reality that maybe the $500 billion data centers - eating up Virginia farmland - are not needed. They might end up as stranded assets.
Over a year ago, Fractal ran large language models - broken into small ones - so they can be run distributed - without a data center - out-performing the Chinese by about 1,000 to one, and none of the tech press noticed.
Now, we do it every day - doing advanced A.I. work, without a data center, on inexpensive, replaceable 4-inch x 4-inch cubes - about a generation ahead the Chinese.
Why doesn’t the tech press care?
The tech press is dominated by the 1980s tech vendors - Oracle, Palantir (I know they are not 1980s but they use 1980s tech, do not email me), VMware, SAP, NVIDIA.
These guys pay tens of millions of dollars a year - each - to get their point of view published - which it is - and you read it.
Their point of view is America needs huge data centers to do A.I. or anything related to A.I.
Their point of view is that A.I. is this new thing that popped up in the last 18 months and it will one day run our world.
Both are nonsense. Here we will only deal with the first one - data centers and A.I.
America does not need data centers for A.I. or any enterprise-scale application.
China does. The rest of the world - yes, but not America.
A.I. does not need large data centers.
Oracle needs large data centers because Oracle and the rest of the gang, using 1980s technology, are stuck in the past and cannot outrun their sunk costs.
Oracle, VMware, SAP, Accenture, KPMG, Booz Allen, E&Y - want customers to build systems using large, complex, 1980s components.
The resulting application uses less than 1/10th of 1% of each of those software vendors’ components. The other 99% require a data center - as they sit there and do nothing.
Many of you have been inured to believe this nonsense - about large data centers - because there is no counter point of view.
No Wall Street Journal tech reporter wants to go out on a limb, call the Fractal guys, have them demonstrate a massive A.I. - driven system running without a data center.
If they published it, the first call would be from the Oracle, NVIDIA or VMware telling them they were about to cancel ads.
Technologies, like companies, even countries and certainly fads - have a life expectancy. While each category differs, nobody will argue 1980s relational technology - as in 45 years old - is not at end of life.
In 2024, we did over 1,000 demos - to college tech professors, voter integrity orgs, Secretaries of State, to corporations.
In every case we showed A.I. running on data sets anyone would recognize as huge - but we ran each on a 4-inch x 4-inch computer.
Once, we ran the billing system for a major utility - which needs a full-blown data center - taking 70 hours of compute time a month to do its bills - we ran it on an iPhone and it took only 18 minutes.
Our engineers do show off from time to time.
Read that again - we are not kidding. We took an application that consumes an entire data center - a multi-million dollar Oracle cluster - for 70 clock hours a month, ran it on an iPhone and it ran in minutes!
We replatformed the application in a couple of weeks - not years.
We and thus America, are a full generation ahead of the Chinese - we prove it every day with live customers doing these types of applications.
Oracle and the thousands of companies who rely on relational database - and there are many besides Oracle - are using an end-of-life technology on which to bet the future.
Your future - as an American citizen - if you believe the tech press - will be significantly impacted by A.I.
Artificial intelligence, we are told, will make the difference in who wins future wars.
Yet, the legacy tech press is convincing America’s leaders to build that future on end-of-life, 45 year old technology - requiring massive data centers.
We called the Wall Street Journal tech guys, and women, plus over 100 other pubs - for a heads up. Not one responded. Not even an email saying “…screw off guys, we are too busy getting paid ads from Oracle!”
We had a fascinating demo with an internationally renowned professor who is a legend in the distributed processing field. 10 minutes into the demo, he said “…what you have would be absolutely mind blowing for the Chinese. You need to keep it out of their hands.
So we do - but the story gets better.
One of our friends introduced us to a government funded group at Carnegie Mellon whose charter is to find new technologies that may radically transform U.S. intelligence and war fighting.
We had a call showing them how innovations like ours eliminate the need for data centers for A.I.
They could not have cared less.
One would think if the Chinese can rock Wall Street claiming - not showing - they can run A.I. models in a $6 million data center, the Carnegie Mellon guys might think doing it without a data center at all is worth investigating.
Nope!
“Great that you can run a thousand to a million times faster than any current tech, great that you eliminate data centers, thanks for calling.”
It’s their job to find technologies like Fractal and they went back to their cushy offices, subsidized by the taxpayer - while we took security measures to protect our code from the Chinese.
Where are DOGE and Elon when we need them?
So here we are, a generation ahead of the Chinese in A.I. and we, and some very happy current customers prove it every day.
We took the entire Federal Election Commission database - 680,000,000 records - which requires the FEC to consume a data center and a cloud - and we run it on - you guessed it - a 4-inch x 4-inch cube!
Unfortunately the U.S. Government is being led around by the nose by those 1980s end-of-life tech companies - the ones who need data centers for that 99% of their system nobody uses.
Remember, every, or about every, U.S. Government employee in tech currently uses Oracle, Amazon, Mongo or some variant of relational database - for almost every application. That’s why those IT systems are so hard to fix and they do not communicate.
Elon published 10 days ago the government cannot make its systems communicate with each other.
We agree - neither can Elon.
Government legacy systems do not communicate because they are built with obsolete 1980s technology delivered by Oracle, Amazon, Accenture, KPMG, E&Y, Booz Allen and others who have not had a creative thought - unless it was about placing billable bodies - in 40 years.
With Fractal, we can take any government system, recreate it in Node.js full stack code and have it on a 4-inch x 4-inch computer, or a bunch of them, in a quarter.
Virtually no billable bodies.
Want to REALLY reform the DC swamp?
Get rid of the Beltway Bandits selling the government the crap that systems are so hard to maintain the taxpayer should subsidize thousands of “consultants” who are low level IT robots - paid 6 figure salaries!
Here is the real danger America faces.
America is moving to commit to the obsolete 1980s A.I. model, which will lock our country into a trillion dollar or more spending spree on data centers we provably show are not only useless - they are counter productive to best-in-class A.I.
Data centers - after you spend a trillion here and there - pretty much define your strategy. You are committed to delivering yesterday’s infrastructure in a world where wars will be won with tomorrow’s technology.
Look, we don’t care if you want to do business with us or not - we hope you do if you are looking to do big compute and A.I. stuff - but we do care that America does not adopt the A.I. compute model being sold by the PR departments at Oracle, SAIC and VMware.
We care heartily that the next war will be won or lost with software playing a major role. We are concerned the entire U.S. Government is being smoked by the legacy tech vendors on the cusp of obsolete.
When groups like us can take a government system - like the Federal Election Commission System - which takes up an entire data center, and we move it in 3 days to a 4-inch by 4-inch computer, we know the American A.I. future is a full generation ahead of China.
America is a full generation - as in 30 to 40 years ahead of any adversary - in A.I. because only in America, and pretty much only in Texas, can a large, enterprise-scale, A.I. enabled application, be moved to a 4-inch x 4-inch computer and run 1,000 times faster - using the energy of a vacuum cleaner.
Let’s keep that a secret so the Chinese don’t find out.
FractalComputing Substack is a newsletter about the journey of taking a massively disruptive technology to market. We envision a book about our journey so each post is a way to capture some fun events.
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Fractal Website: Fractal-Computing.com
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Fractal Government Site: TheFractalGovernment.com
Jay Valentine Site: JayValentine.com
Jay@FractalWeb.App
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Every single one of us, starting with myself need to write in every way possible to Elon (who won't listen to Jay) telling him to listen to Jay. Maybe if Elon got thousands of messages to tell him to put up or shut up, maybe he'll listen. We have to find a way to get this done, find out the real reason Elon won't listen to Jay.
Thanks for another great article, Jay. It's hard not to reserve a bit of skepticism about any technology that seems so miraculous. But then again, it wasn't long ago that I was completely unaware of how deeply and thoroughly our USA media is manipulated and controlled by and for the benefit of the deep pockets of the deep state.
It appears to me that you've clearly demonstrated the capabilities of your technology in numerous ways. Your examination of the voter roles is a prime example of this. I sure hope that you're able to get through to the folks in the government that apparently prefer to cling to their ignorance. I especially hope that you can open the eyes of Elon Musk. He seems like the ideal person to appreciate your technology and he's in the ideal position to take advantage of it. Could he be working behind the scenes to develop his own version of your tech?
I had suspected that Elon might already be using your tools and methods, but after you reported that he's not doing so, I've noticed subtle clues that convince me you're correct. One item was a statement from a deaf woman who's working for Elon, who spoke of the X hours she worked to create some kind of index list. That would seem to fit with the use of data bases and spreadsheets.
But I'm curious. You claim to not need or use databases. (Or maybe I've misunderstood things.) However, the data must come from somewhere. You manage to make use of multiple (time-separated) copies of voter rolls, tax records, etc. So how do you manage to access all that data? Perhaps through some means of indexing into it, in its natural, distributed form? Or perhaps you copy it into some hyper-compact, proprietary form? Is that where the "fractal" part comes in? Or is that part of the secret sauce?