How AI changed the question of who gets to build
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Five days later, one million users. Sam Altman was doing interviews talking about how AI would change everything, and most people wrote it off as hubris. Dario Amodei was working with Anthropic in parallel to make the whole thing safe. Google and Meta launched their own models. It was the beginning of something bigger, something most people wouldn't truly grasp for years. What fascinates me most in hindsight: the debate immediately centered around the wrong questions. Will AI replace jobs? Can machines think? Will AI become dangerous? All valid questions. But the question nobody asked, the question that changed my life, was a different one: What happens when the path from idea to execution no longer takes five years of university, but only one evening? At that point I was an electrical engineering student in Stuttgart, 20 years old, and had no idea this launch would rewrite my entire life. But we'll get to that.