A private club on the Potomac Riverfront in Washington D.C.
The massive conference table was covered with complex technical diagrams and energy consumption reports. The air was thick with anxiety.
Seated on the left was Kevin Scott, Microsoft's Global Head of Energy Strategy.
He wore a white T-shirt with the Microsoft logo and held a Surface tablet.
Across from him sat David Chen, Google's Vice President of Infrastructure.
These two representatives from tech giants—men who typically held sway in Silicon Valley and couldn't stand the sight of each other—now wore the exact same pained expression.
Just last month, the Eastern Power from across the ocean had released three open-source large-scale models, each with over a trillion parameters.
The brutal speed of their algorithmic iteration and the staggering accumulation of computing power had left all of Silicon Valley feeling an unprecedented sense of suffocation.
