Nib's Mountain

Walk through the machine that answers you.

Nib says: Hello. I am Nib, and I have dug through every layer of this mountain. Every chatbot answer is made by a very long chain of physical things: sand, light, memory, glue, drills, pipes, turbines. Hold up your phone and I'll show you.

• Follow the chip

  Eleven stations from sand to your answer. Turn on the goblin lens to see who gets paid at each step, and how.

  Floor or tabletop

• The rack

  A 72-GPU rack, life-size in your room. Pull it apart, then send it a question and follow one token through it. The tokens sing.

  Needs about 3 m of clear floor

• The campus

  A one-gigawatt AI campus on your coffee table. Zoom from the substation down through a hall, a rack and a tray to a single chip.

  Point at a table or a patch of floor

Best on a phone. Allow the camera and motion when asked, then turn on the spot to look around. On iPhone, turn off silent mode to hear the sound.