---
title: "It finally happened"
date: "2022-11-30"
summary: "OpenAI quietly put a chatbot on the internet today. I think the ground just moved."
tags: ["chatgpt", "beginnings"]
---

Today OpenAI quietly put something called ChatGPT on the internet — free, for anyone. I have not been able to stop.

I typed a question. It answered. Not with links, not with a form — with sentences. Then I argued with it, and it argued back, and it adjusted. It wrote me a function. It explained a contract clause. It drafted an email in a tone I asked for. A machine did this. Tonight.

I have been waiting for this a long time. In 2017 we sat in our studio and said out loud that language would become the interface — that one day software would understand intent, not commands. In 2018 we built JudRobot to bring AI into legal work and learned the hard way that the models weren't ready. We were carrying a thesis the technology couldn't hold yet. I started to wonder whether I'd been wrong about the timing for the rest of my career.

I wasn't wrong. I was early.

It's rough. It invents things with total confidence. It forgets what you told it a minute ago. People will point at the mistakes and call it a toy. Let them. I've shipped through enough shifts — GSM, the iPhone, the iPad — to recognize the feeling in my chest right now.

This is one of those nights. The next decade just started, and I intend to build straight into it.