Erich Elsen is a Principal Research Scientist at Databricks, a former DeepMind researcher (co-author of the Chinchilla scaling laws), and co-founder of Adept, an AI unicorn. He earned a PhD from Stanford, where his work was among the earliest on GPU computing. Arithmetic Is All You Need: The Human Story of Computer Intelligence is a nonfiction book about how 4,000 years of accelerating arithmetic led directly to modern AI. It explains how computer intelligence works, where it came from, and what its continued development implies.
The book follows a single idea: faster arithmetic enables better prediction. From Babylonian astronomical tables to Kepler’s calculations to modern GPUs, each leap in computation unlocked new predictive capabilities — culminating in machine intelligence.
In its final chapters, the book examines the present: what it means for our behavior to be predicted and optimized by machines, and whether all predictions should be made, even when they are accurate.
For readers of The Information, Chip War, and The Coming Wave.