Exponentially increasing compute hardware, GPU clusters, memory, and training data size to improve software performance, rather than designing more efficient code or clever algorithms.

A term used by AI research labs to describe spending tens of millions of dollars on cloud server power to make models slightly smarter, treating raw energy burn as an engineering substitute for elegance.

• Inefficiency Mask: Disguising a total lack of mathematical innovation behind massive electricity and server bills.
• Capital Flexing: Using multi-million-dollar compute budgets as an unassailable competitive moat against lean startups.
• House-Cleaning Reality Check: Like using a jet engine to blow leaves off a driveway because you don't want to use a broom.

WarGames (1980s) scene where the WOPR supercomputer uses brute-force processing power to cycle through thousands of nuclear war scenarios per second, calculating every possible permutation.

Throwing massive amounts of server hardware at a problem instead of optimizing software code.

“Industry reliance on brute-force scaling is driving up data center power requirements.”

“Instead of re-writing our inefficient code, our team temporarily relied on brute-force scaling by doubling our cloud servers.”