The tipping point

I’m off to the Magic Castle tonight. I’m not performing; I’m going to see some good friends of mine. So I thought I’d record another video.

Thank you if you watched the first one. If you didn’t, go back and watch it sometime. It was just an introduction: I’m going to start making videos, and here’s why. The meat of it is what follows.

This one is on a specific topic. It’s really popular right now and it’s all over the news, but I don’t want you to think this is what it’s always going to be about. There are so many other things to talk about. This is just a big one of them: the AI thing that’s happening right now.

I’ve been in technology my whole life. My dad bought one of the first Apple computers when I was about four years old. I played video games when they came on cassette tapes. It was actually Star Wars. Hard to believe that was the thing, and now look where we are.

I’ve been looking at AI and playing with it for a few years, and it was okay. Some of us have played with it, some of us haven’t. It was this thing you maybe talked to once in a while, but it couldn’t do what I wanted it to do, which is what it can do now.

I remember a point last October, at the company I was working for. There was something that took a person about 20 minutes to do, and I thought, I’ll just try it again. It took a lot of wrangling to get it to work, but I was able to automate it and make it happen in a minute and a half.

We’re not going to get technical. What’s important is that there was a crossover point, roughly between last June and November. A lot of people in tech noticed over the holiday break, when they started playing with things more intensely, but it happened before then. By October it was getting really interesting. I knew at that point that everything had changed forever and there was no going back. I was absolutely floored. It was an instinctual knowing, the kind you get when you’ve been in the ins and outs of all kinds of technology for decades. We had reached a tipping point. Hold on to your butts, it’s going to get crazy. It is getting crazy, and it’s just the beginning.

Then about a month later it got a lot better. Another crossover point. Now it was at the point where I could build anything I can imagine. That’s what I’ve been looking for my whole life: when can we build anything we can imagine, without it taking a thousand people?

When I was a kid I didn’t love grade school. I loved the weekends, because that’s when I created and built things. Probably out of necessity, I had this mindset: anything I wanted to do, I wanted to be able to build over a weekend, because that’s all you had. A couple of days, and then you had to go back to school. Even into adulthood I had this thing in the back of my mind that anything you want to do, you should be able to do in about two days. Of course that didn’t really work, until this stuff came around. It doesn’t always take two days, but you can do things really fast if you have the skill set and the knowledge of what to do.

So I got to the point where I said, okay, let’s take my wildest dreams and start building all the things I always wished existed. That’s what I started doing.

I’m going to start talking about the things I’ve built. Some I can talk about in detail, and some I can’t, because of NDAs or other reasons. But I’ve been building some really cool things. And again, this won’t be the entirety of what I talk about. It’s a big part of it because I love creativity and I love building things, and a lot of my friends are starting to use these tools too.

There’s a whole debate about AI, the good and the bad. Trust me, I’ve thought about all of it for years, and we can talk about that too. The short of it is that technology advances are usually not great before they get great. This is just the beginning, and it could go a couple of different ways. We’ll get to that.

In the meantime, I’m having the time of my life building things I never thought would be possible. I thought they’d take years and probably millions of dollars at huge companies, and now we can build them so much faster. Maybe nothing even comes of some of them, and that’s okay. They’re interesting, fun projects I’ve wanted to build. But there are a couple of cool ones that I think could actually change some things. We’ll see where that goes.

This was the second video. I’m just driving, no script. I wanted to get my thoughts out and tell you where we’re headed. If you haven’t noticed yet, it’s about to get really interesting. It already is.

We’ll talk again soon.