Three Hundred Fifty-Four Fireworks per Second. Is it a good idea?
The essay examines the extreme proliferation of fireworks displays, calculating that in some peak seasons, fireworks are launched at rates of 354 per second globally. It questions whether this scale of celebration, with its environmental and noise impacts, is truly a good idea, urging reflection on the costs of entertainment.
Background
This essay is about the staggering computational cost behind today's AI-generated videos. The author takes a concrete example — a short AI clip that shows a single firework explosion — and reverse-engineers what it would take to render the same thing using traditional computer graphics (pixel-by-pixel, ray tracing, etc.). The headline number (354 trillion "fireworks per second") is a deliberately absurd comparison meant to highlight how much raw computation modern generative models burn through compared to what a human animator or a game engine would need. The piece is by Chad Topaz, a mathematician and data scientist who writes about the hidden physics and engineering of AI systems. It's aimed at readers who understand that AI is computationally expensive but have never seen the gap quantified this way.