Millions of minds came together to make this possible.

This is a grain of sand. Melt it, grow it into a crystal, slice it thin, then carve it with light. Now it gained the ability to think. In the time it took for you to blink, the chip in your phone playing this video made billions of calculation. How is this even possible? Let's zoom in. Further. Even further. This is a transistor.

About 100 billion of these can fit in the size of your nail. The only thing a transistor can do is turn on and off. Put voltage through it, you get a 1. Take voltage away, you get a 0. 0. On is a 1, off is a 0, and this is the only language that the chip understands. Put two

switches in a row, and current only gets through when both are on. You just made an AND gate. Put them side by side, and either one is enough. That's an OR gate. Add a NOT gate, which flips whatever that comes in, and now you can build any logic a computer needs. Wire those three gates together in the right way, and now electricity can perform addition. If it can add, then it can

also subtract, multiply, and divide. If it can do arithmetics, then it can do anything. Pack You take enough of these circuits into one block, and you have an arithmetic logic unit. Loop 2 not gates together, so when a signal enters, it gets trapped, this loop just memorized a bit. Put a billion of these loops together and you get a library where each section has an address This is called the memory Now we have a calculator and a memory but nothing is telling them what to do So you give the chip a list of instructions like add these two numbers or save the answer here

This list is called a program, and it's stored in the memory as ones and zeros. Then, add a control unit with a clock. Every tick, the control fetches an instruction, decodes it, tells the ALU to execute it, and writes the result back to memory. Fetch, decode, execute, write back, then again, and again, 3 billion times every second. The chip is now moving so fast that everything around it is slowing down.

Let's slow down time, so one tick takes one second. Grabbing a number from memory now takes six minutes. Grabbing one from storage takes days. So the chip keeps the things it uses most in a small memory right next to it, where grabbing a number only takes a few seconds. This is called the cache. Add an input source, like a camera, and an output, like a screen,

and you now have a computer. From supercomputers to the phone you are watching this on, almost every computer is built this way. Every transistor powering the system only knows on and off. It doesn't know what a face looks like or what your voice sounds like, but flip billions of them in the right order and you can see a face and hear a voice from someone across the world.

A grain of sand and the magic of human ingenuity is all we need to create the intelligence that power the modern world.