Something Big Is Happening
episode
The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
28 min
2 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What sparked the recent AI debate in 2026?
Today on the AI Daily Brief, something big is happening. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Rackspace Technology, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy and Superintelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai-dailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn about sponsoring the show or anything else about the show, really go to ai-dailybrief.ai or send us a note at sponsors at ai-dailybrief.ai. Now, as you guys know, I'm traveling and I had actually pre-planned a long read slash big think episode for this Sunday. But then this conversation, prompted by an article by Matt Schumer, absolutely took over our corner of the internet and frankly expanded quite a bit beyond it in a way that it felt important to add our part to the conversation and make sure that if you hadn't yet, you get access to part of this as well.
So we're going to read some excerpts from Something Big is Happening, a post that appeared on X about a week ago and has 80 million views. Much more than the views, it has sparked an enormous number of response articles and conversations, a couple of which we will also be excerpting.
And the reason it's so important is that Matt has encapsulated and crystallized this sentiment which you've been hearing and feeling through this show all year, which is that a shift has happened with big implications.
Matt starts, Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper, you would have thought they'd been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn't have believed if you described it to yourself a month earlier.
I think we're in the this seems overblown phase of something much, much bigger than COVID. I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't. My family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me, so what's the deal with AI? And getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version, the cocktail party version, because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what's truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I've been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big.
The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy. Here's the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet. The reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We're not making predictions. We're telling you what already occurred in our own jobs and warning you that you're next. For years, AI has been improving steadily, big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster and then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last, it was better by a wide margin.
And the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise. Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day. GPT-5-3 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.5 from Anthropic.
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