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The AI Takeoff: Why We’re in the Fast Phase
Since 2016, I’ve followed artificial intelligence obsessively. Not just casually—properly obsessed. While painting, I’ve had lectures running in the background for hours, absorbing everything I can about neural networks, deep learning, and the exponential curve AI has been riding. And for years, I’ve been anticipating what’s happening right now.
We are in the fast takeoff phase.
For a long time, AI development followed a relatively predictable trajectory—gradual improvements, incremental advances. The gains were impressive but measured. Then, around 2017, transformers changed everything. The rate of progress started accelerating, and the world barely noticed. But I did.
At first, AI seemed confined to narrow tasks—beating humans at Go, generating plausible-sounding text, handling customer service chats. Impressive, but not shocking. Then came multimodal AI—models that could see, hear, and generate across different media. Then, AI started coding, solving complex problems, breaking ground in protein folding, and producing art that was unsettlingly good. The pace wasn’t just increasing; it was compounding.
This is the nature of exponential growth. For years, it feels slow. Then suddenly, it goes vertical. That’s where we are now.
What took decades of research can now be achieved in months. AI models that seemed cutting-edge six months ago now feel ancient. The cost of training models is plummeting while their capabilities are skyrocketing. And perhaps most importantly—AI is now improving itself. Auto-generated code, self-improving architectures, AI designing better AI. This is the feedback loop that accelerates everything.
People who weren’t paying attention are now scrambling to catch up. Those who dismissed AI as hype are suddenly surrounded by it. The world is waking up to what I—and many others who have been obsessively tracking this—already knew: we are at the knee of the curve, and things are only going to get faster.
What does this mean? It means everything changes. The jobs that were “safe” suddenly aren’t. The tools we rely on today will look primitive in a year. Creativity, reasoning, problem-solving—things we once thought were uniquely human—are now being challenged. It’s exhilarating. It’s terrifying. And it’s only just begun.