They wanted to pull the plug back at GPT‑3, convinced that a runaway mind was about to steamroll humanity. Then time did what it always does to bad prophecies. In the space of a few news cycles, new startups, new tools, new opportunities arrived. Not an intelligence explosion, a knowledge furnace, hotter every week, fed by research, iteration, and use.
These systems are weird and wonderful. Think tireless librarian with a gift for connections, dazzling at recall, occasionally clumsy at grade‑school math. Fallible, corrigible, already useful. You trade pennies for what used to take days, and the bargain keeps improving monthly, sometimes weekly.
This is what getting things right looks like. Not perfection, progress. Technology is a moral good when it expands our reach and our ability to explain the world. The people who say “freeze it, trust us, hand over your freedom so we can keep you safe from the unknown” are selling the oldest superstition in politics. Fear as policy. No. Knowledge grows by bold conjecture and hard criticism, not by permission slips.
The future is open and unpredictable by nature. Generative tools give ordinary people levers once reserved for studios, labs, and guilds. You can speak a film into a first draft, sketch a product into a prototype, hum a song into an arrangement, outline a business and pressure‑test it before lunch. The cathedral is now a keyboard project. Share with a tight circle or with millions, and watch feedback do its compounding work.
Progress never moves in a straight line, it comes in pulses, like a city at night. If it feels slower one month, that is just the texture of discovery. The appetite has been lit. Capital will keep chasing better architectures because problem solvers hate ceilings. We are strip‑mining the design space of minds, searching for systems that carry more initiative, better memory, sharper models. Not for control, for reach.
If we manage to build generally capable, self‑correcting partners, history truly turns a page. If we do not, we still walk away with legions of intelligent assistants that amplify curiosity, compress drudgery, and free more human time for explanation, art, and exploration.
Problems are inevitable, all problems are soluble. The unknown is not a menace, it is our address. Please, keep building.
George Kroustallis // Minorstep