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Imagine you have 100 Legos and need to build a castle. With only one person (or computer) doing the building, the task takes extended time. That’s serial processing or computing.

Now imagine you have 100 helpers who were all instructed to build the castle with all 100 pieces at the same time. That’s parallel computing. And that’s partially why AI only needs seconds to do what one human needs hours to complete.

In essence, a computer’s processor can have thousands of tiny workers that perform simple calculations simultaneously. So instead of saying, “Calculate this, then this, then this…” it can essentially say: “Everybody calculate your part of the larger equation at the same time!”

That’s the basic idea of parallel computing and why AI works so fast. Break a huge job into smaller pieces and have thousands of machines complete separate tasks, mathematical calculations, or whatever simultaneously.

Genius. Or at least really good at following brilliant human instructions.