The Great Acceleration is Here Now

This is the first part of a special two-part post about what I call The Great Acceleration of our time. What exactly is accelerating? And why is that important? Several things are accelerating: one is knowledge, another is time, a third is energy, and a fourth is our cognitive brain capacity. So, let me break this down.

Recently, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, sat down for an interview with Fareed Zakaria. Jensen is being called the Godfather of AI because his company pivoted several years ago from making GPUs for gaming to developing GPUs for AI. A GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, replaces what are known as CPUs, or Central Processing Units, semiconductor chips. CPUs powered the internet. GPUs are powering AI because they are faster and optimized for performing multiple simple tasks simultaneously, making them ideal for both image processing and machine learning, the heart of AI.

That is as technical as I will get here. The point is that Jensen is a true visionary—some say he is the Da Vinci of our time. He saw what he had and how to utilize it to transform technology in our time. And the so-called hyperscaler companies in technology—Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—are investing many billions of dollars in developing their AI capabilities, as this is a race. Okay, so that’s another acceleration. The time between the release of the first AI chatbot and the “winner-take-all” race to create the best AI capability will be a fraction of the time it took for the early search engines of the web, the internet, to consolidate down to just one dominant provider, Google.

The initial consumer-facing availability of AI for everyday purposes takes the form of these various so-called chatbots. As the name implies, they are conversational machine learning tools that generate and share knowledge. And the way they work leverages everyone’s skill with legacy search, like Google.

The important thing to know here is that this change from search to artificial intelligence knowledge generation and reasoning is happening right now, and you can tap into it with any of the major consumer-facing chatbots like xAI’s Grok, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Anthropic’s Claud, or Google’s own AI chatbot, Gemini.

And I’m going to pound the table here. If you want to have any mastery of skills necessary to navigate what comes next, in technology, in our culture, in your professional life, you MUST begin NOW to learn how to optimize AI in your everyday life. 

Jensen Huang provided Fareed Zarkaria with the very simple steps of how to do this. Remember, he is the Godfather of AI. He is the visionary who knows what AI is and how best to optimize it right now. So, here’s what Jensen Huang told Zakaria about how AI will accelerate the cognitive abilities of the human brain:

“I think my cognitive skills are actually advancing,” he said. "Yeah. So, the reason for that is because I'm not asking it to think for me,” Jensen said.

"I'm asking it to teach me things that I don't know or help me solve problems that I, otherwise, wouldn't be able to solve reasonably.

I'm not exactly sure what people are using it for that would cause you to not have to think, but you have to think.

For example, the idea of prompting an AI, such as asking questions, is a highly cognitive skill. You're spending most of your time today asking me questions in order to formulate good questions.

And as a CEO, I spend most of my time asking questions. And 90% of my instructions are, you know, conflated with questions.

It is veiled within questions. And when I'm interacting with AI, it's a questioning system. You're asking a question. And so, I think that in order to formulate good questions, you have to be thinking, you have to be analytical. You have to be reasoning yourself.

And when you receive an answer from an AI, I wouldn't just receive it. Usually what I do is I say are you sure this is the best answer you can provide.”

Now, think about that for a minute. You can’t go to Google, type in a search query, and then, when it responds, type or say, “Are you sure that’s the best answer you can give me?” However, that is important here because AI is designed to strike a balance between speed and responsiveness. That’s why we can sometimes get an inadequate or even an incorrect answer.

Then Jensen says:

“I take the answer from one AI. I give it to the other AI. I ask them to critique themselves. You know this is no different than getting three opinions, three doctors' opinions. I do the same thing.

I asked the same question of multiple AIs, and I asked them to compare each other's notes. And then, you know, give me the best of all the answers. And so I think that process of critiquing and criticizing the answers of your pre you know critical thinking enhances cognitive skills. And so all the people who were taking those tests I would advise that they they apply critical thinking.”

So, what this process does is that it teaches you how to think better, faster, more deeply—not just to get a piece of data or information, like directions to the theatre or how many calories are in the piece of cheesecake you’re about to eat. You can do that, too, if you want. But you can do that with Google, too.

What you cannot do with Google, and the real power of AI as an accelerant for knowledge and understanding, is a back-and-forth iterative question-and-answer process. As you get more information, the next logical question arises, or you receive new information that now shows you a different path for your next question that you never would have thought of. Using chatbots trains your brain.

Now, that redundant process that Jensen Huang described of getting an answer, asking for a better one, then feeding those to 3 different chatbots— that’s not something you’re going to do all the time. That’s not efficient. Save that kind of rigor for important needs—like maybe you want to pick doctor specialist, or buy a new car that you’ve heard has come recalls against it. You want to get the very best answer for those things, while for mundane things you might just need a good-enough answer, maybe just to rule something out.

For the lawyers listening, this iterative prompting process is similar to the Socratic method used in law schools. Law school does NOT train law students to become lawyers. That happens AFTER graduation with whoever hires you. No, law school teaches students how to train their brain to create law-mind, legal mindedness, so that they can follow all the pathways to problem solve legal problems, no matter what the context, or the facts or even the laws involved. It doesn’t matter. The reasoning process is the same.

That is what I am pounding the table about in this episode. You need to spend time with an AI chatbot like putting in time at the gym to train your cognitive brain in a way that it is optimized in collaborating with AI chatbots. And that will, of course, be a transferable skill so that you and others you regularly use AI chatbots will be thinking more in alignment cognitively.

The Socratic method and prompting AI chatbots both utilize dialogue and iteration as core mechanisms, rather than one-off exchanges. Iterative questions—called “prompts”—just like a law professor’s follow up questions to a student involve refining questions to arrive at a better answer. This kind of conversational refinement fosters deeper exploration, accuracy and understanding.  This process also reveals flaws in assumptions or knowledge gaps that can be further investigated. That’s why Jensen used the term “teach” – to teach me things I don’t know, he said, or solve problems that I couldn’t solve reasonably.

 Okay, so that is how AI chatbots will become your new brain trainer for the great acceleration that is beginning now. And, if you’re feeling a little intimidated by it, that’s okay. That’s natural. It’s just new. Just begin. Spend 30 to 60 minutes a day, just like going to the gym. And start with topics that interest you, your passion, or your profession. And pick something you know about with the aim of going deeper in your knowledge and understanding. And your brain builds new neuropathways that collaborate effortlessly and playfully with AI. Play with it. You will learn better if you don’t overthink. Just start with as thoughtful a question as comes to mind, and iterate from there. When you’re done, you can even copy and paste the response into your notes application to easily search and find it later.

I told you that AI is an accelerant of knowledge, energy, time, and thinking. However, there is something else on the horizon, something not quite ready for development, such as chatbots, but it’s coming. And it could make AI look more like an abacus over time. It’s millions of times faster, a much more powerful accelerant. And that new technology is QUANTUM COMPUTING. And I’ll leave you with this assignment: ask Grok, or ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Claud to tell you about Quantum Computing and how it will compare with AI and the world as we know it. It’s going to be okay. Just start where you are.

On August 1st, I’ll share part 2 of the Great Acceleration to show you how to utilize AI chatbots in mind-bending ways to accelerate your self-development.

Copyright © 2025 Joseph Kornowski