Something Big Is Happening

Today on the AI Daily Brief, something big is happening. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Rackspace Technology, Robots and Pencils, Blitsy and Superintelligent. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn about sponsoring the show or anything else about the show, really, go to a idailybrief.ai or send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. Now as you guys know, I'm traveling, and I had actually preplanned a long read slash big think episode for this Sunday. But then this conversation, prompted by an article by Matt Schumer, absolutely took over our corner of the Internet and, frankly, expanded quite a bit beyond it in a way that it felt important to add our parts of the conversation and make sure that if you hadn't yet, you get access to part of this as well. So we're going to read some excerpts from Something Big is Happening, a post that appeared on x about a week ago and has 80,000,000 views. Much more than the views, it has sparked an enormous number of response articles and conversations, a couple of which we will also be excerpting. And the reason it's so important is that Matt has encapsulated and crystallized this sentiment which you've been hearing and feeling through this show all year, which is that a shift has happened with big implications. Matt starts, think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing great. Your kids were in school. You were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper, you would have thought they'd been spending too much time on a weird corner of the Internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn't have believed if you described it to yourself a month earlier. I think we're in the this seems overblown phase of something much, much bigger than COVID. I've spent six years building an AI start up and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't, my family, my friends, people 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 that was a good enough reason to keep what's truly happening …