Geoffrey West

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

The number that broke my intuition was not large. It was not dramatic. It was three-quarters.

I had been living inside the twenty-fold productivity multiplier from Trivandrum, riding the exhilaration of watching engineers transcend the boundaries of their specializations in real time. I was deep in the writing of *You On AI*, trying to articulate why the AI moment felt different from every previous technology wave I had surfed across three decades of building. And then I encountered Geoffrey West's scaling laws, and the exhilaration acquired a shadow.

West spent his career asking a question no one in technology bothers with: Why does a mouse live two years and an elephant seventy? The answer turned out to involve the geometry of networks — the branching architecture through which