AI NaTiVe

The Jeddah Building in Saudi Arabia is slated for completion in 2028 and in light of this I think it is worth considering briefly the hype surrounding some of the most influential technology in the world: Google's Transformer. We live in a world where computers can process arbitrary text and generate inferential text from the contextual text, performing a "next-token prediction." The systems and engineering that now surround these systems are surprisingly sophisticated, in thanks to the ability for engineers to literally dump context into a system that can render said context into more context.

Nativity to Large Language Models is another one of those interesting acceleration curves. You've either been inundated with these things or you've been blissfully unaware, and there are very few folks genuinely in between. In some circles this is the "exponential curves look the same no matter where you are on it," we all feel left behind but in real terms some folks are just simply, truly left behind. This would be the "native" delineation.

Being "left behind" means you have failed to follow the "trends" in a literal sense. You are "exponentially left behind" meaning every moment you try to catch up you are always lagging further behind! Maybe you can "catch up," there isn't any rule saying you can't accelerate faster using these systems to build your understanding more efficiently than the leaders on the frontier, but even still you are fighting adoption headwinds, rate of change isolation, and a steepening learning curve every day; singularity.

The question these days is not whether these things are useful (they are by all meaningful metrics, don't be daft) but whether they will be economical. Credit is still cheap, the Saudis are standing up their next Biggest Thing Ever Because They Can, and every single SV Giant is making a mad dash for ever-larger facilities to pass electrons through blocks of VRAM. The good times seem like they will never end, we only ever go up.

Well, until folks start defaulting on their mortgages, anyway. Eyes up, keep a little liquid, and don't forget how to code.