So Swanson’s law is an observation for solar panel cost, where each increase in production volume results in lower cost and it is driving an S curve.
It seems like there would be 2 separate effects running here: the S curve like technology improvement to photovoltaic cells, and as production volume increases, greater and greater automation is justified.
Note also you would expect that for silicon PV we are well into the diminishing returns area of the curve, yet costs continue to decline.
Eyeballing the plot..well....it actually looks kinda flat. Like increased solar cell volume is leading to scaling r&d investment and leading to almost linear efficiency improvements with time.
I would argue that AI inference hardware production would be an example of something that should benefit from the learning effect and lead to a similar S curve adoption of ai, totally decoupled from the r&d effort for the model capabilities.
Investment scaling with volume looks like an important effect.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson’s_law
So Swanson’s law is an observation for solar panel cost, where each increase in production volume results in lower cost and it is driving an S curve.
It seems like there would be 2 separate effects running here: the S curve like technology improvement to photovoltaic cells, and as production volume increases, greater and greater automation is justified.
Note also you would expect that for silicon PV we are well into the diminishing returns area of the curve, yet costs continue to decline.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency
Eyeballing the plot..well....it actually looks kinda flat. Like increased solar cell volume is leading to scaling r&d investment and leading to almost linear efficiency improvements with time.
I would argue that AI inference hardware production would be an example of something that should benefit from the learning effect and lead to a similar S curve adoption of ai, totally decoupled from the r&d effort for the model capabilities.
Investment scaling with volume looks like an important effect.