Most people are still getting used to ChatGPT.
They’ve used it a handful of times — to draft an email, summarize something, look something up. It feels impressive. A little uncanny. Mostly useful. They think they understand what AI is now.
They don’t. What they’ve experienced is already being made obsolete. And what is coming next is not a better version of what they tried. It is a fundamentally different category of thing — and it is arriving faster than almost anyone outside the frontier labs is prepared to reckon with.
I’ve been tracking this closely for the past year. Coming back from forty days away from my phone, I found the picture had shifted more than I expected. What follows is my honest attempt to describe where we actually are — and what is cresting on the horizon.
From Chatbot to Agent: The Shift Nobody Is Explaining
The AI most people know asks you a question and waits for your answer. You type something in. It responds. You type again. A conversation. A tool. A very impressi…
