On 4th October 1957 a sign appeared in the sky which caused empires to fear they would fall. It was tiny: 58cm in diameter. Its emissions were trivial, and they stopped after just three weeks. The sign then vanished out of the skies after three months. Yet it changed the world, triggering massive government spending in the pursuit of dramatic new technologies. What was this sign? Sputnik 1: the world’s first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union using missile technology.
Marc Andreesson tells us that AI has just had its ‘Sputnik moment’. Marc should know a thing or two about dramatic moments of technological history. Today, he’s a billion dollar venture capitalist. But in the early nineties he was one of the computer programmers who worked at America’s National Centre for Supercomputing Applications on a program which would be a key stage in a worldwide revolution: the Mosaic web browser. Not that Mosaic was the first browser to be built, but it was the one which popularised the web. After graduating, Marc went on to develop the highly successful Netscape browser which dominated the scene for a large part of the 1990s. So what does Marc think is AI’s ‘Sputnik moment’? It’s the release of Chinese company DeepSeek’s R1 open source large language model. DeepSeek claim that their model matches, or surpasses, the best of OpenGPT’s ‘reasoning’ models but was trained for a far, far lower cost. Its quality, cost and open availability has stunned the big American organisations that had hoped to control the AI market with their vast resources. The financial markets have reacted by dropping share values in companies like Nvidia. R1 has caused empires to fear they might fall.
Link: DeepSeek R1 Release
Technological shifts causing economic and national shake-ups have happened at various points in history. For example, you could think of the telegram, the printing press or the steam engine. But as I thought about them, I found I couldn’t recall any recorded in the history of Israel in the Old Testament. There are innovations occurring in the wider world which the Bible notes, such as the rise of metal tools (Genesis 4:22). There are some highly skilled Israelite technicians such as Bezalel and Oholiab (Exodus 35:30-35). Famously, the Bible tells of King Solomon’s involvement with some remarkable building projects and whose scientific knowledge was notable and whose wisdom surpassed all others (1 Kings 10:23-24). But I couldn’t think of any technological changes driven by Israel. And this is rather unlike their much later history in which the descendents of the ancient Israelites, the Jews, have played key roles in all kinds of remarkable developments for humanity such that between 1901 and 2023 over one fifth of Nobel Prize winners were Jewish.
That’s not to say, of course, that the ancient Israelites didn’t produce any significant technology, just that, if they did, the Bible didn’t bother recording it as notable. But if that’s so, then why? Why would the Bible, for example, record long lists of names we know almost nothing about (e.g. 1 Chronicles 2) whilst ignoring leaps forward in human innovation? The answer is that the Bible’s aim is to present the glory of God through the long history of His saving actions with His sinful people – it’s about people not stuff. And when God launched His ‘Sputnik moment’ into history changing everything and, literally, causing empires to fall, it wasn’t a piece of soon-to-obsolete tech. It was his eternal Son joining himself to humanity to give us life without end (John 1:14).
Photo by Музей Космонавтики on Wikipedia
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All posts tagged under technology notebook
Introduction to this series of posts
Cover photo by Denley Photography on Unsplash
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.