January 2024
I have felt the ground move three times: a Windows ME machine I built at nine out of Goodwill parts on AOL dial-up, the first iPhone 2G in 2007, and the first ten minutes I spent typing prompts into ChatGPT. Each time my family saw a cool toy and I saw the world changing.
Buckle up, world! My initial reaction to ChatGPT felt like the universe had just hit the reset button again. But let me rewind a bit…
Flashback to 2001 when I was a wee lad of 9, fresh off the boat in the land of the free. I patched together my very own Windows ME-powered spaceship from Goodwill relics. Little did I know, I was about to embark on a journey that would rival the space odysseys. AOL dial-up opened the portal of opportunity and completely reset my worldview.
Fast forward to 2007, the year a friend brought over the first iPhone 2G. At the time, I had a few clunky PDAs and a wannabe “smartphone”; this sleek piece of magic was about to flip the tech world on its head. I felt like I’d just stumbled upon a hidden passage to the future, and the world would never be the same.
Now, as a tech entrepreneur, I’ve built multiple apps and software solutions and ridden the waves of emerging tech. But in late 2022, my world got rocked in a whole new way.
Enter ChatGPT. I got a login from one of my internet friends whom I’ve never met — heck, I do not even know their true identity, yet we are good virtual friends, sharpening our tools and exchanging ideas and deal flow, and I have more in common with them than most of my family members. Having excessively online friends already feels like the future; he sent me a link with credentials, saying this product is different. Skepticism was my middle name, as always. I punched in prompts, and after a mere 10 minutes, the technicolor rollercoaster of emotions hit me like a digital tidal wave. Confusion, anxiety, joy, adrenaline, fear, excitement—all crammed into one virtual encounter. This was my third time experiencing such a high.
I unleashed the beast on my unsuspecting family, who saw it as just another cool toy. But for me, it felt like being Neil Armstrong, taking that first giant leap for humankind.
Sure, I’ve dabbled with machine learning models before, even implemented them into our apps and projects. But this… this was different. In that moment, I could feel the tectonic plates of the digital landscape shifting beneath my fingertips.
Call me lucky, call me a digital time traveler, but I’ve ridden the waves of not one, not two, but three technological revolutions. And let me tell you, this one? This is the Big Kahuna, the grand finale of my tech-fueled existence.