Something Big Is Happening

training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix.

couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied.

That is what my Monday looked like this week.

These new AI models aren't incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have.

Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.

AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what's coming.

If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you really think it can't do most office jobs?

Think about what that means for your work.

He says we may be "only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next."

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started.

Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.

AI isn't replacing one specific skill. It's a general substitute for cognitive work.

doesn't leave a convenient gap to move into.

not just the technically correct one. A year ago that would have been unthinkable. My rule of thumb at this point is: if a model shows even a hint of a capability today, the next generation will be genuinely good at it. These things improve exponentially, not linearly.

The person who walks into a meeting and says "I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days" is going to be the most valuable person in the room. Not eventually. Right now.

That window won't stay open long. Once everyone figures it out, the advantage disappears.

Think about where you stand, and lean into what's hardest to replace

The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it's too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that's wisdom or rationalization, I don't know.