Stop for one second and ask yourself a simple question. Where do your words come from?

When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start. The word is just the skin. The idea, the consciousness, is the thing sitting under it.

Now ask the same question about an LLM. For an LLM, it is exactly the opposite. And I think this one small difference explains almost everything about where we are heading. (Remember this, it will come in handy later.)

We are standing at an inflection point right now. History is full of these points, and every single one pushed the human race forward.

Long back, Homo sapiens learned to speak and think. The real magic was not the sound itself. It was that we could hold abstract ideas in our head, things like law, justice, and philosophy. That is what made us stand out from every other animal. Different groups of humans made different sounds for the same ideas, and we call these sounds languages.

Then we learned to write. Then came ink, paper, and the printing press. Suddenly proximity was not a problem anymore. Something written by a person in India could be read by a person in Europe, and that knowledge travelled without the human travelling. Felt like magic, no?

But we still had real world problems, like logistics. Moving a thing from point A to point B was hard. Still, newspapers, books, and art kept feeding the human brain, and ideas kept coming. In that era, ideas were the gold. Execution was extremely difficult, but a good idea at least gave you a direction to move in.

Then came the computer, a machine that could do maths, and again it felt like magic. But it was slow, noisy, sitting inside an air conditioned room, eating millions of dollars and giving back very little. Does this ring a bell? Hold that thought.

Then people connected computers to share information, and we got the internet. Now information could move almost instantly. The WWW arrived, then social media. At some point someone asked a simple question: why should only big businesses enjoy all of this? Why not normal people like us? And we got the personal computer. (Thank you, Steve Jobs.)

After that came phones with cameras, so now we could talk, listen, and see. Voice, image, video, all together. And quietly, in the background, we were building a giant mountain of data, while computers were getting more and more power efficient.

Fast forward to 2017. A team at Google built something called the Transformer, and it changed the world. We got LLMs.

So what is an LLM, really? At its core, it is a big pile of words that predicts the next word, using some maths the computers figured out.

Now come back to my first question. An LLM predicts the next word based on all the words before it. That is the whole story. There is no idea sitting underneath. The words are everything. For an LLM, words are the source, and any meaning is just a byproduct that falls out by accident.

But your brain works the other way around. First there is a concept, a feeling, an image, and then the words come out to describe it. (At least, this is how I feel my own brain working.) For us, words are the byproduct of consciousness. For the LLM, it is completely backwards. And this is the part I keep coming back to. I do not think that direction can be replicated.

People say LLMs are too expensive and too hungry for power. True. But remember the early computers? They were exactly the same, and within roughly three quarters of a century they became small enough to sit in your pocket. LLMs will also become efficient. The difference is, this time it will not take seventy five years. All of human knowledge is now sitting inside a small chat box. We just need a few smart humans who can imagine.

And here is the big shift. With LLMs, everyone is a builder now. Honestly, is there any idea left that does not already have an app? Earlier, ideas were powerful because they showed the path, and execution was the hard wall. Today everyone has the information, and everyone can execute too. So what is actually left? It comes down to two things: consistency, and noise. Yes, noise.

The internet today is completely flooded. Finding something good, or doing real marketing, is almost impossible. So I believe the people who win from here are the ones who are creative in their marketing and, more importantly, consistent. Not the smartest one. The most consistent one.

This also makes me think about jobs. Are software engineers safe? I think yes. (Developers, I am honestly not so sure.) Because engineering is thinking, and coding is only writing. Now that LLMs are everywhere, anyone can code anything. But not everyone can think like an engineer. And let us be honest, coding was never the hard part anyway. Just think about the algorithm behind Google Maps. It gives you directions from New York to San Francisco with almost 100 percent accuracy, in a few seconds, while calculating billions of intersections and live traffic at the same time! The code is the easy part. That kind of thinking is the real thing.

But one thing scares me a little. What if LLMs slowly become worse? Think about it. Everything written before 2017 was made by humans. After 2017, LLMs started filling the open web with their own content. And now that same content is being fed back to train the next LLMs. An LLM can give you perfect grammar and a rich vocabulary, but it can quietly lose the real context. Right now the share of AI content is small. But what happens when it keeps growing?

Still, I am not pessimistic. AI is opening a completely new way of thinking, and with it, new opportunities that I cannot even predict yet. I feel lucky, actually. I have seen Windows 98, the Nokia 3315, the iPhone, the internet, M series MacBooks, and now ChatGPT, all in one lifetime.

So I am excited. I really want to see how humans will think in the coming years.

Are you?