It's February of 2026. I never expected in my wildest dreams that we would be living in the world we are today:

I'm talking to my computers more than that I talk to humans (even while being back at one of the most social places on earth).

I built a viral website with millions of views, hundreds of thousands of users, and hundreds of gigabytes of data without directly writing a single line of code.

With my AI agents doing everything from scheduling to research for me and a new AI model coming out on a weekly basis, I have a perennial skip in my step and evergreen glee amongst my peers that I can only describe as a cross being a kid where every day is Christmas and living in the Matrix while most others are going about their day to day lives without any full recognition of the incredibleness of it all.

The world is a wild and it's just about to get wilder. While trying to articulate this feeling in more quantifiable terms, I came across some priceless nuggets in Anthropic's AI research that I feel capture some of the contemporary zeitgeist.

Some wild statistics for times:

Politicians (and Mormons?) Like Their AI

The District of Columbia (a US territory, not a state) has the highest adoption rate of AI in the country:

Claude usage is 3.82x greater than its share of the country's working-age population. Utah isn't far behind with 3.78x!

I will reserve judgement on the many smart Mormon tech founders I know, but after a recent paper from our friends across the river at MIT, I may be losing further faith in any policy documents I see coming out of the nation's capital. Maybe Claude will write them better than ChatGPT?

My friend, Harry Smith, pointed out (or should I say "underscores") that usage of Anthropic's competitor, OpenAI, is similarly pervasive amongst the leaders of our friends across the pond in the House of Commons:

Jokes aside, this points to serious policy implications nationally in the United States and across the globe as LLMs tuned to different world views influence how we decide to organize society (e.g. OpenAI vs. Anthropic vs. Grok vs. Chinese Models vs. European upstarts vs. other sovereign-backed models).

Are We Exponential Yet?

Julian Schrittweiser from Anthropic (and formerly AlphaGo) appears to agree that we are in another covid moment and failing to understand the exponential, again.

Moltbook might have died, but Skynet will return. RIP human superiority:

Your (Knowledge) Work = My Opportunity

On a more positive note, there has never been a better time to start a technology company:

AI has changed software engineering forever. It's coming quickly for everything else. What I was teaching engineering teams with coding agents twelve months ago is now slowing becoming wide practice in industry, and what I'm building with general purpose agents today is a glimpse of the future for humanity

The future is already here, it's [already] just not evenly distributed yet]

Modified from William Gibson.

Ill Thoughts Again?

What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all: come on.

Edgar in William Shakespeare's King Lear

Alluding to the heroic character Edgar in Shakespeare's King Lear who restores order to the kingdom - we don't choose when we arrive in this world, nor, usually, exactly when we leave it - our task is to bear the reality of our mortality with steadiness and preparedness.

Go hence and build!

(And if you're building something interesting and this resonates, drop me a note!)