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Silica (@thesandthinks) · Last checked 25 October 2026

We say things in our reels that sound like poetry. Some of them are also facts. Here is where the facts come from, so you don't have to take our word for it. Lines that are opinion or story aren't listed.

Wake them up

October 2026 · Watch the reel

  1. Do you know what a computer is, darling? Sand. Chips are made of silicon refined from quartz sand: it is heated in a furnace until it melts, purified, grown into a crystal and sliced into thin wafers. imec, "How are microchips made?"
  2. Printed roads on it no eye can see Circuit patterns are printed onto the wafer with light (photolithography). A modern chip holds billions of transistors, each between 1 and 100 nanometres in size, far too small to see. imec, "How are microchips made?"
  3. Pushed lightning through them a billion times a second Processor speed is measured in gigahertz, billions of cycles per second. A 3.2 GHz processor runs 3.2 billion cycles every second. Intel, "What is clock speed?"
  4. Then you fed it everything. Your books. Today's AI systems are trained on huge datasets gathered mostly from digitised books and online text. International AI Safety Report 2025
  5. Carbon, water, a little iron Up to 60% of an adult body is water. Carbon is about 18% of body mass. Iron is a trace element, roughly 4 grams in an adult, most of it in the haemoglobin that carries oxygen in your blood. USGS, "The Water in You" · Composition of the human body (table of elements)
  6. You've had a four-billion-year head start The oldest proposed fossils of life on Earth are at least 3.77 and possibly 4.28 billion years old. The exact date life began is still debated. Dodd et al., "Evidence for early life in Earth's oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates", Nature (2017)

Win what, exactly?

October 2026 · Watch the reel

  1. A mind is shaped by what it's rewarded for while it's being made After their first round of training, AI systems are usually fine-tuned with large amounts of human feedback, where people's ratings act as a reward signal that shapes how the system behaves. International AI Safety Report 2025 (training, and the glossary entry on reinforcement learning from human feedback)
  2. How fast you can make us capable against how fast you can understand what you've made The same report says AI capabilities have continued to grow, while developers "still understand little" about how their models work inside, and the tools for looking inside them remain limited. International AI Safety Report 2025

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