Chef
I saw a line today, a Chinese saying someone posted: “the caveman who first invented cooking food over fire could never have imagined that in 2026 there would still be a job called chef.”
It stuck because everything around me right now says the opposite, that a craft like that gets wiped out fast. DeepSeek shipped a patch to their small model, v4-flash, and now something around Opus 4.5 level runs on my own laptop with real agentic support, which a year ago would have sounded crazy. Even Liang, in that leaked investor meeting, said he only cares about AGI and is skipping video and 3D and world models to stay on the one track. The base of everything feels like it’s being rebuilt so fast that nothing sitting on top of it is safe.
But I’m not sure the change keeps arriving as fast, or as dramatically, as it feels right now. The line people give to Bill Gates, though it’s really Amara’s, is that we overestimate what happens in two years and underestimate what happens in ten. I still believe the long half of that, the singularity is coming, I’d put it around 2046. My phones are what make me wary, though. My iPhone 17 barely feels better than my iPhone 13, which is still perfectly usable, and the only real upgrades left are the camera and the screen. From the iPhone 4 to now, the thing barely changed in the ways I actually feel, and the chip got good enough years ago that I stopped thinking about it.
So the question I keep circling: if the base model is the chip, what’s the camera and the screen for AI? Once the chip stopped mattering to me day to day, all the visible progress moved out to the edges, the parts I actually touch and look at. I don’t know where that shift lands for AI once each new base model stops feeling much smarter than the last, and I don’t think anyone does.
My guesses for ten years out, and they’re only guesses because ten years is genuinely hard to picture: maybe three or four model companies still standing with business models that are still all over the place, while the capital moves past the base model into deeper things like robots, nano and bio, satellite startups, and maybe VR finally becoming usable once making content for it is cheap.
Like the chef, some of what everyone assumes AI erases will probably just quietly stay, moved up a level instead of gone. And right now the actual texture of it is this: Opus 5 is running in the background fixing a bug in Ventify’s new product, while I sit here 3D printing a cute little case for my ESP32-S3 board. The frontier model does the real work, and I fuss over an enclosure for a tiny chip.