Welcome to the VectorVerse

Back in my days as a tech journalist, I interviewed a VP at a FAANG company who was dressed and groomed exactly like the founder of that company, and who laid out a brief history of the 20th century before predicting that the next great innovation would happen in 2025 — and it just so happened his division was building it. What a coincidence!

His prophecy, it turned out, didn’t come to pass. But his prediction of a paradigm shift wasn’t completely wrong: if you haven’t noticed, generative AI is radically reshaping our reality.

That VP wasn’t unique in his mentality: I’ve chatted with plenty of entrepreneurs in tech who obsess over disruption, an idea built on a backward-looking perspective, applied to forward-looking innovation (as in, “I’m going to create the next iPhone”). So many self-styled innovators are fixated on repeating history — on being crowned the next Steve Jobs, the next Jeff Bezos. Heck, even Mark Zuckerberg dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg.

The problem is, in the race toward disruption, we can miss the fuller picture. I’m sure creative applications of generative AI will mint a few billionaires in the next few years, but the rest of us are entering a new world, a world fundamentally transformed by AI. The internet, the nature of work, politics, religion, art, meaning itself — nothing will remain untouched by it.

That’s what we want to explore in this weekly blog: a thing we call the VectorVerse. That is, the world of generative AI, as it crashes into our material reality.

Every week, my colleague Jenna Pederson and I will post a piece that examines some element of artificial intelligence — from its technical elements to its wider applications. We’ll get specific, we’ll get speculative, and we’ll have some fun along the way.

Who are we to go on this journey? Jenna is a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS — someone with tons of technical know-how from decades in the industry. I’m a storyteller at AWS who likes to ask smart people hard questions. Together, we’re going to be talking to experts about generative AI, testing out new tools, analyzing the latest research on the topic, and trying to get a handle on this brave new world of ours.

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