From GDP to GDI: an era when total intelligence becomes national power

The growth story of NVIDIA, the first chip company to rank No. 1 in market capitalization (about 8,000-fold since its IPO; 1 year to go from $3 trillion to $4 trillion and 3 months from $4 trillion to $5 trillion), shows that the flow of capital has moved from energy and platforms to intelligence. The frame that emerges from this is GDI (gross domestic intelligence), which measures national power by the intelligence and compute a country has secured, and the diagnosis is that only the US and China will lead it. The AI industry is made up of five layers — models, chips, data centers, infrastructure and applications — and Korea's advantages are its dominance in HBM and a manufacturing portfolio that accounts for about 30% of GDP; a model of exporting AI data centers turnkey, much as heavy and chemical industries were brought in turnkey 60 years ago, is also being considered. Daniel Kokotajlo's AI 2027 scenario (self-learning AI in early 2027, AGI within 6 months) and the figure that AI capabilities double every 7 months are projections, so citing them requires the caveat that they are hypothetical scenarios. Jensen Huang's describing AI at CSIS as an industrial revolution as important as electricity, and his meetings with the CEOs of Samsung and Hyundai during his visit to Korea, are read as signals of an expansion into physical AI.

This is a note: my own write-up after reading several sources. It has no source link; events checked against a source are kept as records.