Like the famous political campaign axiom:  “It’s the economy, stupid”, so goes a variation on the phrase that can be applied to the ongoing discussion about large language (LLM) model training, the development of the metaverse, AI, and crypto mining:  “It’s the physical layer, stupid.”  APIs, the application layer, and the cloud?  All good – but not as ephemeral and “cloud-like” as it is all made out to be sometimes.  In the end, there is a physical infrastructure running it all, and the current innovation at the physical layer  – in order to build the future  – is as interesting now as anything the future holds.