> The one thing driving the internet and state of the art computing is money

You're kind of separating yin from yang and pretending that one begot the other. The reason so much money flooded into chip fab was because compute is one of the few technologies (the only technology?) with recursive self improvement properties. Smaller chip fab leads to more compute, which enabled smaller chip fabs though research modeling. Sure: and it's all because humans want to do business faster. But TSMC literally made chips the business and proved out the pure play foundry business model.

> Even if Moore's Law was never a thing

Then arguably in that universe, we would have eventually hit a ceiling, which is precisely the point I'm trying to make against the article: it's a little silly to assume there's an infinite frontier of exponential improvement available just because that was the prior trend.

> Moore's Law has very little to do with the physical size of a single transistor

I mean it has everything to do with the physical size of a single transistor, precisely because of that recursive self improvement phenomenon. In a universe where moore's law doesn't exist, in 2025 we wouldn't be on 3nm production dies, and compute scale would have capped off decades ago. Or perhaps even a lot of other weird physical things would probably be different, like maybe macroscopic quantum phenomena or just an entire universe that is one sentient blob made from the chemical composition of cheeto dust.

Transistor size is not the only metric that matters in computer speed. Maybe you weren't around when 1MHz CPUs were considered fast. Then there were 8Mhz, then 16MHz, then 25MHz, and soon enough it was 250Mhz, then it jumped up to 1GHz, and now we're seeing 4GHz and faster. We're probably not at the end of the GHz that can be achieved. Chip dies got bigger, too. Way bigger. It doesn't matter if a single transistor can't be shrunk smaller than 3nm if the chip size can be increased. We've seen this in Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), which is 12 inches by 12 inches and contains 4 trillion transistors. And then there's the possibility of 3D chip design - if you can't go wider, build taller - but the main problem with all of this is heat and power. More transistors, more GHz, larger dies, all means more heat - and heat is the real limiting factor. If heat and power weren't a concern then we'd have far faster computers.

But all of these advancements in processing power are driven by money, not by some made-up "law" that sounds nice on paper but has little to do with the real world. Sorry but "Moore's law" isn't really a "law" in any way like the laws of physics.