A Tale of Two AI Worlds.

I grew up as a sci fi kid (did I grow up? I still feel exactly like that kid) reading books about the future so many of which had scenarios examining the human birthing of AI and what impact that would have. How it would all go down.

Those books, those scenarios, it feels like they are happening now. That we are living in the inevitable unknown future that will change everything. The fundamental rules and mechanisms of how we live, what civilization is, all changing right in front of our eyes. It is so incredibly exciting and overwhelming and beautiful at the same time.

And then... I walk outside and... no one cares.

I'd expect people to be doing or saying something. But, yeah, no. No one seems bothered. No one is running around feverishly talking to people they run into about what's happening with AI. They are oblivious or don't care or don't know or something. They don't realize maybe that our world is about to change.

I've called multiple friends telling them... I walk down the street full of ideas about what's coming and what I need to be working on and am either panicked or excited and the entire world is just going about its business as it always has. I want to run up to people and shake them and exclaim "Don't you know what's coming?! Why aren't you building stuff with AI?? You're going to fall behind!! Go inside and do stuff!" And I realize that I sound totally crazy. And, maybe I am.

At times I feel like I'm living in an entirely separate world from the rest of humanity. Those of us in this world see the progress march of AI and are in total awe. Everyone is living in the "other" world. Sure, they know there's this AI thing but they often don't care or probably think it's ridiculously over hyped and just the next fad in the tech landscape.

They don't know that those of us in this world feel like we are witnessing something gigantic, something foreign and new. That all this exploration leads to the inevitable conclusion that the world is in the process of changing, deeply changing.

Living and working in this world is so compelling, so engaging... it draws you in and it seems like you must be in it, experiencing it, living with it and creating with it every day.

Imagine you felt this everyday but couldn't tell anyone about it.

That's what it feels like.

If you are feeling what I wrote above, we are apparently in good company.

Andrej Karpathy, Tesla AI and one of OpenAI's founders, calls it "perpetual AI psychosis." He hasn't written a line of code since December. He spends sixteen hours a day directing agents, and when one finishes, his first impulse is to open three more. Leopold Aschenbrenner, former OpenAI researcher, put it colder: "Right now, there's perhaps a few hundred people in the world who realize what's about to hit us. Few have the faintest glimmer." Ezra Klein, after talking to person after person inside the labs, wrote that they're a community "living with an altered sense of time and consequence."

But that's us.

That's you and I.

When I look outside, at the greater population, the reactions are, well... all over the place.

On further reflection and research I've realized it's actually not just two camps but likely four.

Camp one: living the AI dream 24/7. Fully immersed. Building, experimenting, running sessions on the weekend, losing track of time. We don't need to talk about this group, this is us. Using Claude, ChatGPT and the rest isn't a once a day or week thing, it's an every day, all day thing. We are using Claude Code like our lives depend on it. Experimentation, exploration, this is the fabric of the day. The weekends that disappear. The staying up late worried about the future and what comes next. The conversations where you catch yourself throttling back because you know if you say what you're actually thinking you'll sound unhinged. Feeling like you're in the middle of an ocean caught in some major current and it's hard to get out. That's us. About one in five Americans are what researchers call heavy users, meaning ten or more interactions a month. A heavy user is 10+ interactions a month?!?!?

Camp two: the confused. These are the people who talk about AI a lot and say its important but don't actually know what they're doing. I see this a lot in the business world. There are a lot of executives I talk to, a lot of business leaders, who say they are doing something. You've met these people. They run real companies. And they're treating AI like they treated cloud or blockchain or mobile, yet another tech wave to acknowledge and ask questions like "What's our x strategy?" Their confusion is perhaps simply about not being deep enough or authentically into technology enough to see that this isn't like the other waves. I sort of understand this. You're busy, you have to say something about the latest trends. But it feels like the early internet, the early web. How could you not be more concerned and active?

Camp three: the haters. Creatives, political pundits and more. Nick Cave called ChatGPT "a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human." Entertainment industry folks are in full rebellion. Politics is using this to further outline how terrible capitalists are. Everyone will lose their jobs doomers. This one I understand the most and have the most sympathy for. Because there are multiple kernels of real truth here. We really don't know how this living experiment will turn out. AI could truly go rogue. Impact millions of jobs. And it directly assaults the creative industry and what it means to create as a human. I feel that. But as part of the music world for a long time... I remember the sampler. Remember that? The entire music industry rebelled. This isn't music! It's an assault on musicianship! Well, yeah, every tech wave in music has raised similar concerns. But we're all still making music and sampling is now a given. So... yeah.

Camp four: "Oh AI, yeah I've heard of it." People who use GPT once a week to look up a recipe. They've heard about AI on the news and perhaps think it's another fad that the tech industry dreamed up. To them AI is basically invisible and something of an amusement or a thing that they vaguely fear as a looming threat. Just another thing to pile on to the list of things they are worried about. This is of course the group that loses me entirely. It's impossible to be in the world we're in and not see the potential. This is the biggest divide. Only nine percent of American workers use AI every single workday. Fifty-one percent never use it at work.

Maybe because I was so into those sci fi books as a kid and so obsessed with the future, I had all the sign posts built for me. I knew what to look out for.

And I think one of the weirdest parts of this moment is that it feels like we're living in one of those books. Maybe that's why this parallel worlds thing is so important, so stark for me. If you haven't read those books, you don't realize that we're living in exponential times where everything we knew about how things work gets thrown out the window.

It's not just that we can do new things or that there are new tools available to play with — it feels like something more. Like there is something fundamentally new happening. It feels like the birth of a new intelligence, a new life form. All the books said this was coming. Those of us who studied Computer Science have been staring at Moore's Law now for decades wondering how long it will continue to hold and where that will take us.

You could easily argue this parallel-universe feeling is actually evidence we're crossing a civilizational phase transition... that we're going from pre AI to post AI world. And if you've followed along with the sci fi, this is the biggest change that could exist. Perhaps since we invented language.

Either way, it's weird. I find myself having to entirely shift out of that context when I talk to people or risk sounding like a lunatic cult member. Every day I feel this!

I remember, super clearly, discovering the internet as a kid and wanting to tell everyone about it. This was before the web and even then it seemed remarkable and world changing. I'd tell my parents about it: "Mom, dad, there's this internet thing and it's going to change everything! People are going to be able to talk to each other from anywhere all at the same time and it's going to make the world a better place!"

Ok, I might have gotten that bit wrong.

But it did change just about everything.

I remember then that every once in a while someone on the news would talk about some zany thing happening on the internet. The famous exchange from 1994 on the Today Show was perhaps the pinnacle. This is an exact quote from Bryant Gumble: "What is internet anyway? What... do you write to it like mail?"

Those news programs were a wake-up call to me to realize that most people didn't understand the Internet. It was deeply bizarre, I felt like I could see into the future, that I was some kind of Moses bringing down valuable information from the mountain top. And... they looked at me like I was a crazy person.

But of course I was right. (Except about how the internet would solve all our problems, sigh.)

It's the exact same feeling now. Except one major thing is different.

The speed is way off. This is happening FAST. So much faster than before. The web took roughly 3.5 years to reach one million users. ChatGPT did it in 5 days. That's 250x faster. When the web launched, no one really cared for years and years. Businesses didn't take it seriously for a long time. And they didn't really need to. It took a while for people to starting using it for ecommerce.

This is so incredibly different. The impact is real and happening now. I could list examples but if you've gotten this far you already know this. And that's why it seems even crazier that people aren't paying attention.

If you're in the same world as me, we all see where this is headed. We are watching the machines of the future assembling themselves right in front of our eyes. It is breathtaking and kinda terrifying at the same time. And when you are seeing that and spending time with it... looking into the void stretching before us... you emerge slightly stunned. And then people just don't talk about anything outside this world that makes any sense.

I wrote this because I needed to get it off my chest. Because watching the world fundamentally change while everyone around you just carries on is strange, and isolating, and doesn't have a name yet.

If you're in camp one: I see you.

And yeah, it's weird for me too.

Here's to navigating the uncertain yet deeply compelling future that feels like it's arriving at a rate of one year per week.