Vaclav Smil

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The number that broke my framework was not a percentage or a valuation multiple. It was a unit of power.

Fifty gigawatts. That is what Smil says the United States needs to add to its electrical grid — within five years — just to keep the AI revolution running. Fifty gigawatts is fifty cities of a million people each. It is a construction project on a scale the country has not attempted since the postwar electrification boom. And when I first encountered that figure, I realized I had written an entire book about the intelligence river without once asking what keeps the river flowing.

I wrote *You On AI* from inside the exhilaration. The twenty-fold productivity multiplier in Trivandrum. The thirty-day sprint to CES. The imagination-to-artifact ratio collapsing