We are living in the early days of AI

The Internet is, like, one of the biggest and most impactful inventions ever. For how quickly it took us from disconnected cities, nations and continents to an interconnected network where you can establish a direct connection to anyone, no matter how far away, even from the opposite side of the globe, and talk to it in real time, like through a magic mirror, it's pretty insane when you think about.

I like montages of what the 2000's web a lot (think older brother core), and make me feel sort of nostalgic ¹. People were just figuring things out, decorating their little web pages with colorful flashing banners, aggregating in little forums, cozy stuff like that.

Sometimes I regret that I wasn't born 15 years sooner, to have been caught in that Big Bang of the information age, to have witnessed it unfold in real time, to have had the chance to take part in it. Maybe I'd create a startup in my garage, like a browser written in Lisp that would take the world by storm. Or I'd take part in the hacker culture. Or write a cool video game with my friends and share a demo of it online for free. Or at least simply get a good paying job at 18 by being able to implement FizzBuzz.

I wonder whether people back then realized that they were part of the information revolution.

Today, AI is what all the buzz is about. The common sentiment that I see on the internet (HackerNews and my YouTube recommendations), and the one that I share, is a mix of annoyance and fear, not of awe and optimism. We are annoyed by the slop that fills the internet ever more, and are scared at the prospect of having our skills devalued. I wonder whether people shared this sentiment in the early days of the internet.

But what if we're blind to the doors that AI has unlocked for us, which will be obvious later, in the same way that the importance of the Internet is obvious to us now. Maybe there will be a kid who will regret not having been born 15 years sooner to have had the chance to take part in "the early days AI".

Perhaps we are even going to feel nostalgic about these early days of chatbots and agentic coding? We surely are going to cringe at how such a powerful technology is being used simply to churn out half-assed copies of the same aged software concepts and wrapped as new startup products.

It only started in 2023 with ChatGPT slowly creeping into our lives, so we're still in its inception age. Who knows what great things will AI be known for, but we surely haven't discovered them yet.