The 40 TOPS Creed: How the Tech Industry Invented a New Religion to Sell You Salvation

In the year 2025, the most important number in consumer electronics was not a clock speed, a version number, or a price tag. It was a line of scripture.

40 TOPS.

Forty Trillion Operations Per Second. This was the threshold, the doctrinal line drawn in the silicon sand by the high priests at Microsoft. Any personal computer capable of this holy speed was anointed a “Copilot+ PC.” Anything less was cast out, a profane and legacy machine. This was not a technical specification; it was the first verse of a new gospel, written to solve a crisis of faith that had been festering for years.

The old god was dead. Moore’s Law—the benevolent deity that for decades had guaranteed a biannual miracle of doubled transistors, justifying the endless, cyclical ritual of hardware replacement—had passed into history. Its death left a spiritual vacuum. Without the promise of reliable, tangible miracles, the value of a new machine became indistinguishable from the old. The industry had become a world of featureless atheism, and manufacturers were losing their flock. They needed a new god.

They found one in “AI.”

“AI” is the perfect modern deity. It is omnipotent in its perceived capabilities, deeply mysterious in its inner workings, and its power is proven through arcane benchmarks and catechisms that few understand. It promises salvation from the mundane tethers of human limitation, offering boundless productivity and creativity. And like any good religion, it requires new, expensive relics to properly channel its power.

This brings us to a recent sermon, held at an Amazon event, where a congregation of Chinese electronics-makers testified to their newfound faith. They spoke of embedding AI models into their products as a “path to premium pricing.” Listen closely. That is not the language of engineering; it is the language of alchemy. It is a ritual of consecration: the act of taking a mundane object—a laptop, a voice recorder—and transmuting it into a sacred artifact worthy of a higher price, a tithe collected from the faithful.

They are not innovators. They are new converts, desperately performing the prescribed rituals to enter the kingdom of the premium market. They are building their temples to the 40 TOPS creed, hoping the worshippers will come.

But this new faith already has its first schism, a division between the True Believers and the Cargo Cultists. And in this division, the entire story is told.

Consider the case of the company Plaud AI and its device, the Plaud Note. Launched in 2023, it was a simple card-shaped recorder. But by integrating a powerful suite of language models—GPT-4o, Claude 3.5—it performed a tangible miracle: it solved the agonizingly human problem of turning sprawling conversations into concise, usable notes. It didn’t just contain AI; it did something with it. Its faith was made manifest through works.

The results were biblical. By mid-2025, Plaud had sold over one million devices, on track for $250 million in annualized revenue without a single dollar of venture capital funding. Its $159 price and subscription fees were not a tax justified by a holy NPU; they were an earned offering from a grateful congregation who had experienced a genuine deliverance from a genuine pain point.

Now, contrast this with the other acolytes, the makers of the generic “AI PC.” They speak of “deepening AI hardware R&D” and hitting revenue targets of 800 million yuan. They faithfully build machines that meet the 40 TOPS requirement. They perform the ritual correctly. But they worship the relic, not the spirit. They believe the presence of the NPU itself is the miracle, that the label “AI” is the incantation that creates value. They are building a cargo cult. They assemble the form of the airplane from twigs and leaves, perform the rituals they have seen, and pray for the cargo of profit to fall from the sky.

Most of them will be left waiting.

The story of Chinese manufacturers “tapping AI” is not a story about competitive strategy. It is a story about belief. It reveals a fundamental truth about the human condition: when faced with a value vacuum, you will invent a god to fill it. The tech industry, having exhausted the physical frontier, has turned to the metaphysical.

They are not selling you a better computer. They are selling you a more expensive prayer book, one certified to commune with the new god of AI. But salvation is not found in the relic itself. It is found in the work, in the solving of a problem. Plaud understood this. Most of the new converts do not.

So when you see the next device sanctified with the “AI” label, ask yourself a simple question. Is this a tool that performs a miracle, or is it just a very expensive candle, lit in a darkened church, in the desperate hope that a god might be listening?