AI Industry Experiences Unprecedented Milestones in Revenue and Innovation

"...I happened to be on the toilet both times everything changed...."

"...I will never forget the queasy, giddy, horrifying shiver of realization I felt that evening — knowing that the world I knew had ended, and a new, unmooring and unmapped world had begun...."

"...The second time I had that feeling was this past Wednesday...."

"...If the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 was akin to the first confirmed case of COVID in the US, in the full course of history, May 20, 2026, may be AI's "everything changed" moment...."

"...It started with numbers so stupid big they seemed unreal...."

"...The torrent continued that morning, when SpaceX filed to go public...."

"...Not only do its SEC filings reveal the path for Musk to become the world's first trillionaire, they also lay bare how much the rocket company aspires to be a world-dominating AI company...."

"...One widely shared, and questioned, slide shows that SpaceX thinks the total addressable market for its space business is paltry $370 billion, while the prospects for its AI business are $26.5 trillion — $6 trillion more than the GDP of China...."

"...Amid these world-historic numbers going up and hubbub over the biggest IPO season in the history of money, Meta began to free up room for more investments in AI by laying off 8,000 employees...."

"...They joined thousands more recently laid off employees from Amazon, Atlassian, Block, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Intuit, LinkedIn, Oracle, Workday, and elsewhere who had been flung into a meat grinder of a job market...."

"...Wednesday's Anthropic-OpenAI-Meta-SpaceX tsunami also comes immediately after waves of AI news this past week: a stadium full of undergraduates jeering former Google CEO Eric Schmidt every time he brought up AI; Google ruining the internet with its new AI search feature; and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, who in January dismissed AI as "all garbage," admitting onstage that he felt "fairly depressed" after witnessing AI agents being able to perform "extraordinarily high skilled jobs" at his hedge fund...."

"..."You could see this is going to have such a dramatic impact on society," he said...."

"...All of Wednesday's news broke by the time the sun had risen over Silicon Valley, all of it confirming — if there were any doubters left — that the sun had set on the old world, and we had been launched into another uncertain future for an unknown duration...."

"...The COVID comparison is obviously porous...."

"...We do not have two weeks to stop the spread of AI, though the mental health of the country would improve if we agreed to a two-week ban on using the term "AI" in any public or private setting...."

"...AI is also both a virus and a vaccine, depending on how it's designed and deployed...."

"...But as another totalizing force remakes the world for the second time this decade, as some make ungodly fortunes and many others lose theirs, as bitter factions form, as we do not know the shape of things to come, we shouldn't forget the core lesson of COVID, that all of us are deeply, inextricably interdependent...."