At a recent dinner in San Francisco, an engineer at a prominent AI company asked a media executive a simple question: “If I went out on the street in Europe and asked the average person how much AI is going to affect their life, would they have any idea?”

The answer is probably not. 

Then he asked the follow-up: “Why aren’t you telling people?” The intensity and the genuine concern in his voice had a profound effect. I woke up at 5:30 the next morning with that question ringing in my ears.

Why aren’t we telling people?

Partly because I’m not sure we fully understand it ourselves. The engineer asking the question described his own job. He works on one of the most advanced AI systems in the world. But his role isn’t simply building the model anymore; it’s trying to understand it.

Yes, really.

The system his team created is now writing and verifying its own code. Updates produce new code, which produces further updates. The model improves itself in cycles that are increasingly difficult for humans to fully track.

His job is to study what is emerging from that process.

Think about that for a moment.

The people building the systems are still trying to understand exactly what they have created. So how are the rest of us supposed to grasp the implications?

If you haven’t read Something Big Is Happening, I strongly recommend it. I’ve already sent it to several friends outside the tech industry because it captures the feeling many people inside the field are starting to express: The pace of change is extraordinary.

AI systems are rapidly improving at completing longer, multi-step tasks, with their capability roughly doubling every seven months over the past six years, even more quickly in the last year, as this graphic illustrates:

But most people don’t feel it yet. Even people who have been using models for a year or two.

Why?

Because most of us are still using AI tools in roughly the same way we were six months ago. We ask them to summarise articles, rewrite e-mails, maybe help draft a presentation. They are still very good at those things.

But they can do so much more. The capabilities have moved faster than our habits.

And outside the tech bubble, the scale of investment is already signalling what is coming next. In the United States today, more money is being spent building AI data centers than building office space.

That’s not a marginal shift. That’s serious infrastructure. It suggests we are moving into a world where AI is becoming a foundational layer of the economy, as significant as electricity, broadband, or cloud computing before it.

Which brings us back to that original question.

If this transformation is coming, and if it will reshape how people work, learn, create, and make decisions … why aren’t we talking about it more clearly?

A challenge for media isn’t simply reporting on AI. It’s helping society understand the scale of the transition while we are still living through it.

Because one thing seems increasingly certain: Something big really is happening.

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