An AI discussion of the article "The Architecture of Purity: How 1920s Distillation Columns Explain the AI of Today", by William L. Weaver at https://williamlweaver.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-purity
What do 1920s chemical distillation columns and 2026 reasoning AI models have in common?
Under the hood, both are entropy pumps.
A century ago, chemical engineers like McCabe and Thiele mastered how to burn steam to un-mix chaotic crude oil into pure, valuable fractions. Today, large language models consume megawatts of electricity to un-mix coherent thought from the noisy, high-entropy ocean of the internet.
From equilibrium trays to Transformer layers, and from reflux ratios to "test-time compute" reasoning loops, the isomorphism is striking. Separation is never free—and clarity is always paid for in the currency of thermodynamics.
Read our latest Independent Variables editorial on why the secret to understanding modern AI inference was invented in a petrochemical plant 100 years ago.
#Thermodynamics #ChemicalEngineering #ArtificialIntelligence #TestTimeCompute #DeepLearning
