Color television. The cassette tape. The remote control. The microwave oven. The cell phone. Wireless. The Internet.
I’ve watched every one of these arrive, take hold, and quietly rewire how we live. None of them announced themselves as history. They showed up as novelties, little gadgets and curiosities, and then one day you realized the world had reorganized itself around them and there was no going back.
Each leap carried more momentum than the one before it. And somewhere along the way I learned to tell the difference between the advances that actually move us forward and the ones that burn bright for a season and vanish.
So I want to be honest about something before I go any further. I am not an easy sell.
I Know Hype When I See It
I’ve spent more than two decades in enterprise technology, and I’ve sat through a lot of sales decks. Cloud was going to change everything. So was virtualization. So was “digital transformation.” And they did change things, eventually, with far more operational complexity than anyone admitted in the demo.
That history gives you a calibrated ear. You learn that new technology tends to create fresh problems about as fast as it retires the old ones. You learn that the distance between a polished demo and a system that actually runs in production is where most grand visions quietly go to die. You stop caring what something could theoretically do and start asking what it does today.
I mention all of this so you understand the weight of what I’m about to say.
I believe we are standing at the edge of the most significant technological shift of my lifetime. And this time, I don’t think it’s hype.
Then Came 2017
On June 12, 2017, eight researchers at Google published a paper with a deceptively modest title: Attention Is All You Need. It introduced an architecture called the Transformer.
Almost no one outside a small research community noticed. There was no keynote and no product launch. Just a few dozen pages of dense technical work that would turn out to be one of the most consequential ideas of the century.
Everything you now think of as modern AI traces back to that moment. The systems that can hold a conversation and write working code. The ones that can reason their way through a problem you assumed required a person. In the space of a few short years, capabilities that lived in science fiction became something you can open in a browser tab.
I’ve seen a lot of technology arrive. I have never seen anything arrive like this.
Nothing Prepared Us For This
And here is what I still find staggering. I don’t think we yet comprehend what has happened.
We are living through a rate of change with almost no precedent. Every revolution before this one gave us time to absorb it. Years, sometimes whole decades, to build around the new thing and let our institutions and our habits catch up. This one is compressing that timeline into months. The ground is still moving while we are trying to find our footing on it.
The closest comparison I can reach for is the birth of the Internet. That was the last time a single technology pushed its way into every corner of how we work and how we talk to one another. And even that undersells the moment, because the Internet connected us to information. This connects us to capability. Historians are going to write volumes about this decade, and we happen to be living inside its first chapter.
That should not frighten us. It should focus us.
The Machines Are Only the Beginning
Most of the coverage misses the point that matters most, so I’ll say it plainly.
The renaissance isn’t the machines.
The tools are remarkable, and they are going to get more remarkable still. But a tool is only ever as good as the hands holding it and the intent behind it. The printing press didn’t write the Enlightenment. The telescope didn’t find the heavens on its own. Technology opens the door. What we walk through it to build is on us.
My optimism doesn’t come from the models. It comes from what they put within reach of ordinary people. Knowledge that used to belong to a privileged few is becoming available to anyone with a question. Problems that have resisted us for generations, in medicine and in basic science, suddenly look approachable from a new angle. We have a real chance, if we choose to take it, to start closing some of the gaps that have always decided who gets to thrive.
I’m not naive about any of this. None of it is guaranteed. Powerful tools amplify whatever we aim them at, the worst of our impulses just as easily as the best. That is precisely why the people who understand this technology cannot afford to sit out the conversation about how it gets used.
Where I Stand
So here is my hand on the table.
I’m an optimist. Not the kind who looks away from the risks, but the kind who has seen enough of what people can build to believe we are capable of far more than we usually give ourselves credit for. I want to be a defender of what’s true in a moment crowded with noise, and a champion of the best this field has to offer.
Most of all, I want to challenge whoever is reading this to look past whatever limit they think is holding them back. The barriers to building something and putting it into the world have never been lower. The tools have never been more willing to meet you halfway. The only question left is what you decide to do with them.
This blog is where I’m going to work all of that out. The technology and the strategy, the messy reality of getting things into production, and the larger question of what we ought to build with what we’ve been handed.
I’ve spent my whole life watching the future arrive.
This is the first time I’ve felt like we have a say about where we go from here.
