"Something Big Is Happening"
[P]eople I care about who keep asking me “so what’s the deal with AI?” and getting an answer that doesn’t do justice to what’s actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what’s truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
Matt Shumer has posted what I think might be the most important article you can read today, this month, maybe this year. The target audience is everyone who isn’t deeply enmeshed in the world of AI, everyone who thinks it’s just the next techbro fad and will fade like crypto has, everyone who thinks it’s “just fancy autocomplete”, everyone who sporadically uses the free version of a chatbot and gets middling, hallucinated responses in return.
If any of those describe you, you owe it yourself to set aside your existing beliefs for 10 minutes and read Matt’s post. The way that most people are interacting with AI, using free models as a sometimes drop-in replacement for Google, is easily a year behind the frontier.
This is quite personal for me, because I’m seeing tech jobs disappear in Seattle, where I live. I’m seeing friends being told internally at their jobs to multiply their productivity or be made redundant (and their vacated seat won’t be re-filled except by AI). I’m personally speaking to lifelong leaders and managers who have been told their services are no longer required and may not be ever again.
It seems isolated to tech right now, but Matt lays out cogently why this may be simply the beginning of what’s coming next.
To do nothing to prepare, to learn how to use these amazing models to the best of their abilities, to try and figure out how to navigate the next few years, strikes me as deeply irresponsible.
There is an optimistic coda to the piece, one that resonates with me, one about unlocking human creativity and potential, but it’s not one that I think happens by default or even in a majority of scenarios.
Please take the 10 minutes and read it. Here is a summary of the main actionable points, but they don’t convey the urgency.
- Start using AI seriously, not just as a search engine.
- Sign up for the paid version of ChatGPT or Claude.
- Make sure you use the model picker and always use the most capable model (currently GPT-5.2 or Opus 4.6).
- Don't just use short, Google-style queries. Give it lots of context, data, ask it to do the things you do as part of your work.
- Don't assume it can't do something because it seems too hard.
- Remember that even if it only partially works today, it will almost certainly work very well in ~6 months.
- Get proficient and treat this as the most important year of your career.
- Abandon your ego about AI.
- Get your financial house in order.
- Lean into what's hardest to replace.
- Rethink your advice to your kids. Encourage them to be builders, learners, and adaptable, not to optimize for a specific career path that may be gone.
- Be adaptable. The most important skill is learning new skills.