I spent an hour today with the CTO of an AI-forward startup in New York. We ended up commiserating about the same thing: the gap between the small group of people watching how fast AI is moving and everyone else.

In San Francisco, New York, and Austin, the mood in that small group has turned dark. Researchers are resigning over safety. Geoffrey Hinton puts a 10 to 20 percent chance on AI ending humanity within three decades. The Hugging Face incident has people rattled. The people closest to the models seem to be the most worried.

Everyone else is mostly oblivious. Some worry about jobs or laugh at AI’s misses. Most are not paying for Claude / ChatGPT. There is little sense of the pace that things are evolving.

If you sit on a leadership team in a non technical industry, most of your people are probably closer to the second group. That is the normal place to be. It is also the wrong place to be.

Do we need more regulation? Probably. Do I trust regulators to not throw the baby out with the bathwater? Not at all.

The dynamic that makes this moment different from other technology waves is the prospect of recursive improvement. The models are starting to make themselves better. Once that loop closes, every planning horizon you have gets shorter.

It is an unsettling time for those of us paying attention. But I guess it beats being oblivious.