COSM 2025 Archive

from George Gilder

Light, electricity, photons and electrons, water, and energy all converge in vibrations, from hertz to exahertz, that tell a story of waves and tides and transformations in reality. We are navigating a parallel shift in technology, as well as in culture.

This COSM is a “Vibe Shift.” We will be telling new stories, as we shift our tributes and testimonies, wavelengths and frequencies, and latitudes and temperatures to the good vibrations at Scottsdale Hilton Resort and Villas in Arizona.

With Arizona making a serious bid to become the global center of the wafer fab industry at the heart of the rise of an AI metaverse, our sensors reverberate relentlessly. They bear phase changes, new optics and oscillations, red and blue Doppler shifts, left and right, across the world technoscape and economy.

By the time we meet, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the lordly TSMC, will have broken earth for its third Arizona wafer fab, joining Intel’s multiple fabs at Ocatello, and more modest fabs of Germany’s Infineon, Holland’s NXP, and Microchip, Inc. of Chandler.

Expressed in the movements of electrons in the gigahertz, and photons in the terahertz, of nations over decades and centuries, of bullets and bombs, drones and missiles on the horizon over the weeks and months, ideas transforming minutes and millennia, vibe shifts change our relation to time. 

Gordon Moore’s logarithmic law of advance gives way to Nvidia’s millionfold exponentials and to Cerebras’ launch, way back in 2024, of four trillion integrated transistors on a single wafer. 

Vibe Shifts in time shift our notions of money, which measures the value of time and the rise of knowledge.

Converging at lightspeed, this COSM will explore such issues as the move of optical signals onto chips of ever more dimensionality and the eclipse of chips entirely in planar wafer scale platforms running at terahertz velocities.

Our vibe shifts will illuminate two visions converging in semiconductors — the vision of ever larger data centers, and the vision of data centers reduced to a single wafer. The vision of IBM mainframes of yore, singularities on the horizons of mind, seems to clash with the vision of ever-expanding multiplicities of minds, magnifying each individual’s impact on the world. Vibe shifts artificial intelligences toward freedom or control, knowledge or power.

As the vibes shift, we ask, “Are chips ultimately made of exotic materials, on ever more complex and dense shards and towers of multidimensional sand, threaded with rare earths and elixirs, trending toward a miner’s monopoly? Or are they made of ideas, with a bias toward the simple and luminous, that emancipate the universes of mind?”

Are we ourselves ultimately matter or mind? We believe that the vibes are shifting toward mind. And COSM, as always, will assemble some of the world’s leading minds. We welcome you to our fray of frequencies.