That doesn't matter. The statement wasn't "faster than AI right now", it was "will always be faster than AI". And that's just nonsense.

Current AI systems are extremely serial, in that very little of the inherent parallelism of the problem is utilized. Current-gen AI systems run at most a few hundreds of thousands of operations in parallel, while for frontier models, billions of operations could be run in parallel. Or in other words, what currently takes AI 8 hours will take it barely long enough for you to perceive the delay after you release the enter key.

For a demo, play around with https://chatjimmy.ai/ , the AI chatbot of Taalas, where they etched the model into silicon in a distributed way, instead of saving it in RAM and sucking it to execution units by a straw. It's a 8B parameter model, so it's unsuitable for complex problems, but the techniques used for it will work for larger models too, and they are working to get there.

And even Taalas is very far from the limits. Modern better quality LLM chatbots operate at ~40 tokens per second. The Taalas chatbot operates at 17000 tokens/s. If you took full advantage of parallelism, you should be able to have a latency of low hundreds of clock cycles per token, or single request throughput of tens of millions of tokens per second. (With a fully pipelined model able to serve one token per clock cycle, from low hundreds of requests.) Why doesn't everyone do it like that right now? Because to do this, you need to etch your model into silicon, which on modern leading edge manufacturing is a very involved process that costs hundreds of millions+ in development and mask costs (we are not talking about single chips here, you can barely fit that 8B model into one), and will take around a year. So long as the models keep improving so much that a year-old model is considered too old to pay back the capital costs, the investment is not justified. But when it will be done, it will not just make AI faster, it will also make it much more energy-efficient per token. Most of the energy costs are caused by moving data around and loading/storing it in memory.

And I want to stress that none of the above is dependent on any kind of new developments or inventions. We know how to do it, it's held back only by the pace of model improvement and economics. When models reach a state of truly "good enough", it will happen. It feels perverse to me that people are treating this situation as "there was a per-AI period that worked like X, now we are in a post-AI period and we have figured out that it will work like Y". No. We are at the very bottom of a very steep curve, and everything will be very different when it's over.