I can count on one hand the number of times my beliefs about AGI have been completely upended.

ChatGPT appeared on the front page of Hackernews in late November 2022. I followed the link expecting nothing more than an entertaining way to burn time between classes, but didn’t realize those ten minutes would likely guide my next ten years.

The following spring, I skipped class to attend a CLSP talk by Karthik Narasimhan—second author on the original 2018 GPT paper. His topic felt prophetic at the time: “Towards General-Purpose Language-Enabled Agents: Machines that can Read, Think and Act.”

Both times, I felt a deeply confusing, potent mix of excitement and dread settle in my chest. I was amazed by the speed and direction of new developments, but unsettled by how quickly the future seemed to be racing away from me. I had no choice but to catch up, or risk being left behind.

I tried to write a decent amount back then and profess to those who would listen: Look! Look at what’s happening! Look at where we’re going! Please, just look! Of course, in time, that awareness would diffuse from academics to enthusiasts, to early adopters, and eventually the general public. But, watching that slow spread was infuriating. How could people seem so oblivious to the world changing around us, right now?

I spent the following summer blowing off work, skimming arXiv, and talking to LLMs. I took a few courses in the fall which affirmed my interest and then joined Jason’s lab the next semester. In the year that passed, my excitement didn’t dim so much as it just matured.

Things still moved quickly, but the further upstream I ventured, the less surprising downstream currents became. Updates to my worldview became more frequent but smaller in magnitude. I settled into a rigid certainty about where we stood and where we were headed. I was comfortable. Then yesterday happened.

Standing in line to board my flight home, I habitually pulled out my phone to doomscroll Twitter. My feed was flush with live reactions to o3. 88% on ARC-AGI. 25% on frontier math. My hand froze as I stared at the same two charts. 88% on ARC-AGI. 25% on frontier math.

WTF.

At 30,000 feet, I watched my world crumble. The numbers were an existential threat to the part of me, the part of us all, that wants to believe that nothing ever happens. I combed through my beliefs and goals, tearing them down to be built anew. How had I been so wrong, so grossly miscalibrated?

Still reeling when I got home, I wrote yesterday’s post. Shklovsky talked about the role of art in defamiliarization. We struggle to see our own experiences, faults and all, precisely because they’re ours, because they’re everything we’ve ever known. When we question those boundaries, looking at the familiar through new eyes, we see things never seen before.

I feel the future rushing forward faster than any of us could ever imagine. Everything is going to happen. Everything! Everything! Everything!

Just look!