Welcome to AC Bits. I’m Anshu. Before we get into the mechanics of how AI works, I want to answer the question I hear more than any other: How did this happen so fast? Because if you’re over 30, you remember a world where AI was either a science fiction concept or a clunky chess computer. And now it’s writing emails, passing the bar exam, and running inside almost every digital product you use. That’s a genuinely disorienting shift — and it deserves a straight answer. Here’s the honest answer: AI didn’t appear overnight. It took 70 years. We just couldn’t see it building. The concept of machine intelligence goes back to 1950. Alan Turing — the mathematician who helped crack the Enigma code in World War Two — published a paper asking a deceptively simple question: can machines think? He proposed what we now call the Turing Test. If a machine can hold a conversation indistinguishable from a human, it’s reasonable to call it intelligent. For the next five decades, researchers chased that idea and mostly hit walls. Early AI systems were brittle, rule-based, and couldn’t handle the messiness of the real world. By the 1980s and 90s there had already been two major AI winters — periods where funding dried up and the field nearly collapsed because the promises outran the results. Every technology wave has that cycle. The hype arrives before the infrastructure does. Then three things changed. Not one. Three — and they had to happen together. First: data. The internet generated a volume of human-produced text, images, and behavior that no previous generation of researchers could have imagined working with. By 2020, the internet contained an estimated 40 zettabytes of data. If every grain of sand on Earth represented one byte, you’d need 40 Earths to store it. Second: compute. Graphics processing units — GPUs, originally built to render video games — turned out to be extraordinarily efficient at the kind of parallel mathematics that AI training requires. And the cost of that compute dropped by roughly a factor of ten every few years. Third — and this is the one that tends to get missed in most explainers: a architectural breakthrough called the Transformer. In 2017, a team at Google published a paper titled Attention Is All You Need. It described a new way for neural networks to process language — not word by word in sequence, but by paying simultaneous attention to relationships across an entire body of text at once. That 2017 paper has since been cited over 100,000 times. It is the direct ancestor of every major language model in use today — GPT, Claude, Gemini, all of them. Put those three things together — an ocean of data, cheap compute, and a new architecture — and you get rapid compounding acceleration. By 2020, GPT-3 could write coherent essays. By 2022, image models could generate photorealistic visuals from a sentence of text. And then in November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in 60 days. Instagram took two and a half years to hit the same milestone. It remains the fastest consumer product adoption in recorded history. That’s the moment most people think AI appeared. It didn’t. That was simply the moment the door opened wide enough for everyone to walk through at once. So where does that leave us today? We’re at a genuinely unprecedented moment. These systems can write, reason, code, diagnose, and generate — at a level that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. And we’re still in the early innings. But here’s the tension: the tools are extraordinary and they’re everywhere — and most people are using them without a clear picture of how they actually work. That’s not a criticism. It’s just what happens when technology moves faster than explanation. I’ve watched this from the inside for 15+ years — at Visa, Amazon, and Meta, and now building my own AI company. The capability is real. The communication gap is equally real. That’s the gap AC Bits is here to close. Next episode: what AI actually is under the hood. Why it doesn’t think — it predicts. And why that distinction changes everything about how you use it. Three minutes. One idea. See you there. I’m Anshu. That’s your origin story. This is AC Bits. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit acbits.substack.com
