Chad Jippity

I’ve written a bit about how things changed for me some time around November of 2022.

This was the sort of change when I could suddenly see a clear runway into the future, and I wanted to be a part of this future. The summer of 1994 was like this for me as well, when I got my first peek at web 1.0.

I wrote a bit about these two moments and how they compare in Why Is This Octopus Drunk?

This first moment was in 1994, when I was visiting Richmond for the first time, and the friend I was staying with had America Online. AOL was a gateway to the brand new world wide web.

I knew that this was fundamentally different than anything that had come before, and that all human minds could be connected in ways never before seen. It took a few years of the web being built out, along with many more regular internet users to create a critical mass with an incredibly useful new ability: to look up anything you want to know, and to find out an answer quickly.

The era of online search had begun, and I was all in.

Now, you could find a relevant page that would have the answer you were looking for. This just blew my mind—there seemed to be little you couldn’t figure out, provided you were good at searching and had some time. I became good at quickly searching and screening answers, then scrolling to skim and find the answer I wanted. Instead of a day to find a tough answer, it might take 20 or 30 minutes now.

The answers that took 20 minutes might now take a few seconds of conversation with a large language model, especially Chad Jippity. Chat GPT isn’t exactly a revolutionary name, but this class of products is most certainly world-changing.

In 1998, I spent a semester learning Photoshop so that I could modify images, and make somewhat decent looking designs over the course of a few hours. I could design a VHS tape cover or a poster for an upcoming event, and it would look semi-professional, in my own marketing parlance.

Today, you certainly don’t need to spend a semester in order to learn how to prompt an image from nothing, nor to modify an existing image. If you’re good with the tools, you can do things you couldn’t do before, and of course this has all opened up a Pandora’s Box of ethics, whereby we need a truly good system for attribution—but leaving that aside for now, if you snap your fingers, you can get an image today.

That’s just the beginning of what agents can do, though. If you haven’t seen how agents create a virtual work environment and go to work in real time, it’s probably worth a quick update. If you can do it with a keyboard and mouse, all you need to do is describe what you want to happen.

Here’s Open AI’s marketing demo—do take it with a grain of salt if you watch, but understand that this really is a new era:

I’m not saying ANY of this is seamless. Far from it; I spend a lot of time pulling my hair out, largely because I’m trying to keep one foot in the future—living with that discomfort means pressing toward the frontier and understanding what’s capable, which is probably my main objective.

You don’t need to live at this uncomfortable frontier the way I do—I’m peculiarly driven to do things others aren’t, and besides, I’m a business owner who has no choice but to learn how to use the tools of the future. I have mouths to feed, students to teach, and customers to serve.

Nevertheless, I really want to recommend in the strongest terms that you don’t leave your head buried in the sand amid all this change. If AI seems destined to lead humanity down a dark path, it’s important that you understand the means of survival in such an environment. If you think AI is going to lead to a more positive outcome, let’s keep our hands on the wheel for now to make sure that really happens.

If it seems overwhelming, I’ll do my best to poke my head up and let you know when I see a big inflection point approaching, like today. If you’re already somewhat plugged in and want to learn more or keep up with what’s happening, I recommend following

Charlie Guo

or

Daniel Nest

here on Substack.