Jeff Wise

California fights wildfires like wars, but this one may be unwinnable.

This article originally ran on January 9, 2025 in New York magazine.

Walls of flames pushed by hurricane-force winds are devouring the Los Angeles basin, leveling whole neighborhoods and overwhelming firefighters. The water streaming from fire hydrants slows to a trickle. Ash rains down over the tens of thousands fleeing their homes, masked against the choking smoke. For Angelenos watching their city burn, there is no prior experience that can help them grasp the scale of what is happening. As a friend texted me from Hollywood, “This may be the biggest wildfire disaster in world history.”

The scale of the destruction is all the more dismaying given how assiduously California has prepared itself to combat wildfires. The state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as CAL FIRE, spends $4 billion a year on prevention and mitigation. Over the last decade that money has allowed it to assemble an army-like force of unprecedented sophistication and scale, with a staff of 12,000 and an aerial firefighting fleet larger than most countries’ air forces.

Yet in the face of some of the worst fire conditions in over a decade, it hasn’t been enough. Though some 9,000 firefighters were on hand to battle this week’s blazes, they were overwhelmed by the multiple wildfires that moved at hundreds of yards per minute. “We don’t have enough fire personnel in L.A. County between all the departments to handle this,” L.A. County fire chief Anthony Marrone told the L.A. Times on Wednesday.

The problem wasn’t only a shortage of manpower. Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”

The winds slackened Wednesday night and on Thursday morning, helping firefighters gain the upper hand against some of the infernos. The city’s fire chief announced on Thursday that the Woodley fire in the San Fernando Valley had been brought under control and that firefighters had made gains against the Sunset fire threatening Hollywood. But other fires still burned out of control and further danger loomed. According to the National Weather Service, humidity remains dangerously low and gusty winds of up to 70 mph are expected between Thursday night and Friday evening. By Thursday morning, five major fires were still burning and tens of thousandsof people were under evacuation orders. Warned the NWS: “Any new wildfires that develop will likely spread rapidly.”

This article originally ran in Sherwood News on December 26, 2024.

In 1959, physicist Robert Noyce and his colleagues at the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation created a nifty little piece of technology: a wafer of silicon with an entire electronic circuit printed on it. As a technical breakthrough, it was an impressively clever feat, but what made Noyce’s achievement historically important was the cascade of innovations that followed. By making it possible to progressively shrink computing power into smaller and cheaper packages, the integrated circuit gave rise to wave after wave of transformative products, from the pocket calculator to the personal computer, the internet, and mobile computing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Noyce’s invention engendered the entire digital world as we know it today.

Noyce and some of his collaborators left Fairchild to form their own company, IntelINTC $19.92 (-2.41%), in 1968. Like OpenAI today, Intel had a head start on a new field of almost unlimited promise, and it used its advantage to great effect. In 1971 the company invented the microprocessor chip, a development that would later enable personal computers to bring the information age into homes of retail consumers. In 1997, Time magazine named Intel CEO Andrew Grove its Man of the Year. By 2000, the company had a market cap of $250 billion and ranked as the sixth-most-valuable business in the world.

That, however, proved to be the company’s high-water mark. In the years that followed, the company learned that being present at the birth of a technology and riding it to great heights doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be able to sniff out market trends and outcompete newcomers indefinitely. In 1999, NvidiaNVDA $138.46 (0.28%), a much smaller rival, began shipping its first graphics processing unit, or GPU. In the decade to come, these chips would prove essential to the growth of PC gaming and multimedia applications, and then proved equally vital to both cryptocurrency mining and the large language models that power OpenAI. This time it was Nvidia, not Intel, whose chips were powering the revolution, and the changing of the guard was reflected in the company’s share prices. Ten years ago, Intel’s market cap was 15x bigger than Nvidia’s; today Nvidia’s is 30x bigger.

Investor Warren Buffett famously once said that he likes to invest in companies whose business has an “economic moat” around it — some factor, whether brand strength, network effects, patents, or economies of scale, that prevents rivals from swooping in and poaching its business. A head start in a technology can function as a moat for a while. But success inevitably draws rivals, and sooner or later some of them will catch up, or the demands of the market will change and favor a different technology. For now, OpenAI has a first-mover advantage in machine learning, and it has every reason to be optimistic about its fortunes in the years ahead. But if history is any guide, its halcyon days will eventually go the way of all flesh.