The AI Cambrian Explosion

Summary

This opinion essay compares the rapid diversification of artificial intelligence with the Cambrian explosion in animal life. It argues that GPT is the known trigger for the current AI expansion, while greater computing power, more training data, improved architectures, and pretrained general-purpose models provide the conditions for rapid development. Researchers and companies are competing to improve usefulness, reliability, speed, and cost. The author says AI is spreading into coding, tutoring, design, and research, while developers build more software on top of these systems, potentially making them more capable. Extending the biological analogy, the essay theorizes that power could eventually concentrate among a small number of models. It also predicts that the resulting world may become increasingly complex and difficult for people to understand, much as society gradually learned to live with computers and the internet. These concentration and complexity claims are presented as the author’s extrapolation rather than established conclusions.