The AI Boom Heard ’Round the World

AI Boom

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I keep coming back to this: my whole life, I’ve heard people throw around the term “paradigm shift.” The internet was a paradigm shift. Social media was a paradigm shift. App stores, Wi-Fi, cellular broadband—they all got called paradigm shifts. And maybe they were, depending on where you were standing at the time. But you know, it always struck me that it was kind of relative. What a caveman would have called a paradigm shift, we just call a lighter. Perspective matters. Context matters. And most of the time, people don’t even really know what they’re saying when they throw that label around.

But now? Now I can’t think of a bigger or more honest example of that phrase. AI isn’t just another paradigm shift—it’s the paradigm shift. This one doesn’t move the needle; it redraws the entire board. It doesn’t just change the rules of the game; it calls the whole game into question. We’ve built something that puts the horizon out so far we can’t even see where the edge is anymore. Everywhere we thought there was a guardrail or a hard stop, it’s gone. We don’t know where our limitations are now.

And the thing people don’t understand—the thing I see every single day when I’m working with folks—is that they think this is just another Google. Just another tool to look things up. Just a slightly smarter version of a search engine. They think it’s about writing emails faster or spitting out essays or giving you a quick draft of something you could’ve done yourself. And yeah, it can do that. But that’s the shallow end of the pool. That’s just playing with the ripples. What they don’t realize is that you can wire this thing into your workflows, set it loose on real problems, and let it carry part of the load for you while you go do something else. This isn’t just a helper. It’s a multiplier.

And it matters at every level. Take music. Is AI the greatest musician in the world? No. But to the kid who can’t afford a music teacher, it’s the best one they’ve ever had. It’s patient, it’s available 24/7, and it can explain theory, chords, and practice techniques in infinite detail. That’s transformative. Same with math. I’ve watched kids struggling at the table with parents who are just as lost as they are, frustration compounding on frustration, tears welling up because no one can break through the problem. AI can step in and explain it calmly, clearly, from a dozen different angles until it clicks. That’s not just technology—that’s relief. That’s hope. That’s opportunity.

And from there, scale it up. From the kitchen table to the classroom, from the classroom to the company, from the company to the national level, and from the national level straight to the stars. Because this isn’t just about doing homework faster. It’s about accelerating every human endeavor—medicine, physics, engineering, material science, longevity research, space exploration. We’re already seeing breakthroughs that used to take decades of trial and error, now happening in months because we can put AI to work as a partner. We have superpowers now. We just haven’t realized it yet.

And here’s the beautiful irony: there’s nothing alien in this power. There’s nothing mystical. Every bit of it was trained on us. It’s a mirror—our art, our music, our words, our knowledge, compressed and focused and sharpened into a tool that gives it back to us in ways we can act on. AI isn’t some foreign invader—it’s condensed humanity. Hyper-condensed. Super-human humanity. And that’s what makes this such a species-level moment.

And look, I’ve worked with all of it—the skeptics, the Luddites, the naysayers who say it’s dangerous, demonic, or dumb. And on the other end, I’ve met the zealots who treat AI like a religion, as if it’s already some all-knowing oracle. Both sides miss the point. This isn’t about worship or fear. This is about acknowledgment. Because whether you like it or not, this thing is here, and it’s not going anywhere. Just like the internet. Just like social media. You may not have agreed with them, you may not love them, but you cannot deny them. They happened. They reshaped the world. And this is bigger. Way, way bigger.

If people really embraced this for what it is, if they leaned into it, not as a fad but as a fundamental shift, we’d have a different world inside a year. That’s not hyperbole. That’s just math. The compounding effect of millions of people suddenly building, learning, creating, and solving with AI would change the culture overnight. It would be like watching a caterpillar burst into a butterfly—but at the scale of an entire species. Butterfly the shit out of it.

That’s what the boom is. That’s what I mean when I say “the AI boom heard ’round the world.” It’s the sound of a door blowing open that will never close again. And whether you step through it or not—that’s up to you. But the world already has.

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