Musk buries code: the economy will be decided in data centers

The end of code: Musk's economy will be decided in data centers

In the future there will be no code, no operating system, no applications: only artificial intelligence. The verdict comes not from just any tech prophet, but from the owner of Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, and it carries an economic thesis behind it. If all software becomes neural networks that directly generate pixels, sound and commands, the dominant factor of production stops being human talent and becomes computing power. The problem is that, when it comes to setting dates, Elon Musk's track record is what it is: the Moon alucinación he promised for 2023 still hasn't lifted off.

But even skeptics admit the direction is interesting. "Any input bitstream to any output bitstream" sounds like a slogan, but there are already concrete moves. xAI has hired former Nvidia engineers to develop so-called "world models", capable of designing physical environments in real time. Video games will be the first testing ground, and there the threat is explicit: goodbye to Unreal Engine and Unity, if AI renders directly what the player asks for.

The economy of the end of work

The productivity debate has numbers on the table. In the most digitalized sectors, AI is said to have already delivered increases of around 27%, and the most optimistic estimates point to global GDP growth of between 10% and 15% in about five years. That is the scenario of those who believe AGI will turn computing into the only relevant factor of production, equating the value of human labor with that of the equivalent computing units. The winners in that world would be the owners of the data centers.

Not everyone buys that story. Some point out that the massive investment in AI data centers could become an economic hole that is hard to finance, and that the bailout would end with a "reset" of the system to stop paying without it looking like a default. The concentration of profits also raises hackles: the problem, it is said, is not the technology, but that those who already own the capital take it all without having written a single line of code. "Product X is already a commodity" is the favorite phrase of the PowerPoint and Excel crowd.

The walls that won't crumble: energy and determinism

Engineers put their finger on the sore spot: traditional code offers a clear contract — with inputs A, B and C, the output is D, always. Neural networks, even though deterministic on paper, are black boxes with uncertainty. Fine for generating images with six fingers on a hand, but not for deciding whether a plane lowers its landing gear. And there is the energy wall: today's processors don't have the right architecture and the problem is solved with brute force; neuromorphic chips, which imitate the brain, could ease consumption, but they are still far off.

In the end, the future without code is not just an engineering question, but one of who controls computing. Kurzweil, the prophet of the singularity, goes further: matter itself can become fruta until the solar system is exhausted. But before that, the distribution of the spoils will be at stake. And like the Moon alucinación, it may arrive later than promised. Or it may arrive before anyone has written the software to check.