A Bun logo displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying Claude Code logos. | Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images

It’s February 2020 again.

An exponential process is in motion — one that will inevitably shake the world to its core — and upend our economy, politics, and social lives. Yet most people are still going about their business, oblivious as dinosaurs to a descending asteroid.

This is what many in and around the AI industry believe, anyway.

Except, in this telling, the invisible force that’s about to change our world isn’t a virus that will rip through the population and then ebb. Rather, it is an information technology that will irreversibly transform (if not extinguish) white-collar labor, accelerate scientific progress, destabilize political systems, and, perhaps, get us all killed.

Of course, such apocalyptic chatter has always hummed in the background of the AI discourse. But it’s grown much louder in recent weeks.

Key takeaways:

• AI “agents” like Claude Code can autonomously complete complex projects — not just answer questions — making them potential substitutes for skilled workers.

• Investors are now treating agentic AI as an existential threat to many incumbent software and consulting firms.

• If AI’s capabilities keep improving at an exponential rate, things could get really weird by 2027.

SemiAnalysis, a prominent chip industry trade publication, declared last Thursday that AI progress had hit an “inflection point.” At Cisco Systems’ AI summit that same week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared, “this is the first time I felt another ChatGPT moment — a clear glimpse into the future of knowledge work.” Not long before these remarks, Altman’s rival, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, wrote that recent breakthroughs had made it clear that we are only “a few years” away from the point when “AI is better than humans at essentially everything.” (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. The Vox section Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)

In a succinct summary of the tech-savvy’s new zeitgeist, the effective altruist writer Andy Masley posted on X, “I know everyone’s saying it’s feeling a lot like February 2020 but it is feeling a lot like February 2020.”

Critically, tech pundits and executives aren’t alone in thinking that something just changed. In recent weeks, software firms saw their stock prices plunge, as traders decided that AI would soon render many of them obsolete.

This is a vibe shift

Not long ago, the conventional wisdom around AI’s near-term effects sounded radically different. For much of last year, industry analysts and journalists warned that AI had become a bubble ripe for popping.

After all, major........

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