What was soon going to happen was kept among several hundred people, most of them in San Francisco.
Two years after, the world has realised what's going on, roughly, but it's still within a small subset of people. Not hundreds, but tens of thousands of engineers and people who work closely with the frontiers and help enterprises transform their businesses.
As much as I'd like to quickly draft up what I saw and what I learnt, there are a lot of facts I want to verify by myself. To do that I needed to build:
- Landscape tracker pipeline to map out the energy, precious material production to verify what's claimed on the news
- Simulation and observability toolkit for LLM both at training time and test time (to closely monitor GPU, CPU, HBM performance and data processing)
- Semiconductor simulation on top of H100, Blackwell series, Cerebras...
- RL environment for self-learning loop for application in production to test against the so-called "cost on RL and eval"
... and many more
Two years after
It's been two years since the infamous situational awareness. I completely agree with what Leopold said, "You can see the future first in San Francisco,". I wanted to find out where humanity is going in the next 20 years and I can't think of any other places to look for it other than San Francisco. Important enough that I paused whatever idea I was working on to stop the humming noise in my ear and flew in to San Francisco from London.
The first ultraintelligent machine is arriving.
- 2024: we would complain that it (coding agents) couldn't handle low-level networking tasks.
- 2026: it can competently do the majority of the infrastructure work as long as the specs are clear, and handle small parts of eigendecomposition, convex optimisation, change detection and more in pure math.
If you are in San Francisco you can probably feel it, even engineers who used to work on low-level engineering tasks no longer need to write code.
We forgot the order of magnitudes (here and after OOM). We only saw what's now but forgot to relate now to the past and the speed it has been, the order of magnitude. What was soon going to happen was kept among several hundred people, most of them in San Francisco. Two years after, the world has realised what's going on, roughly, but it's still within a small subset of people. Not hundreds, but tens of thousands of engineers and people who work closely with the frontiers and help enterprises transform their businesses. The large majority is enjoying, or suffering from (expand more in later section), the "AI boom", but this is not the end of the story.
"I don't know how to get people AI pilled anywhere outside of SF."
"The substrate of what's coming is scary."
People from SF are struggling to communicate with people outside of tech industry, but actuall I found interesting angles to communicate without trying to get people AI pilled. Even people from labs are terrified of what's going to happen. Looking at every industrial revolutions, the time of transition always seem scary and when it happened every time, everything comes after was always very fast. We will talk more about the history and how we may peaked into history and Sci-Fi to unpack the global future landscape.
I witnessed a lot of my friends treating every new generation of large release like a pet - "Why is it not responding to me?", "How can I make it work smarter?", "They cancelled the release? I am down today. I don't want to code." An invisible emotional bond with a junior employee who you have trained for the past couple of years (how I see the world post-agi). Once a good model gets retracted, they comment, "There was nothing like it. I don't want to use anything else now." The [prediction] was true. Automated AI research is happening. Self-replicating factories, data centers, robots are still in research phase, but it's going to happen.
If the doomsday machine is meant to be made, we will need every power we have on this planet to survive our own curiosity. Humanity has this unwavering desire to explore and understand the unknown and we withstand all odds to do so. We ought to keep driving this machine forward to know the answer to"The world and economy will be much more efficient based off it". Witnessing the fear, I'd much rather we don't get driven by fear, but by the child-like wonder to explore. If it doesn't work out, perhaps Elon's SpaceX can help us sustain our life elsewhere.
I will reference a lot from Leopold's situational awareness (appreciation and gratitude to him who wrote it), combined with what I have heard and read, to fact-check what has changed. This is an article I read again and again, wish I have read, and anyone of my friends in London have read in 2024. Witnessed China's hypergrowth first hand, worked in San Francisco, I want to offer United Kingdom a way forward.
Let's see where we are at after two years.
Lois, June 2026
Outline
About me
I am Lois. I am a bundler engineer primarily work on infrastructure projects, orchestration and deployment. There are not many of us on this planet (probably 300-400 of us?). Previously I worked in San Francisco, was founding engineer in Toma (backed by YC and a16z) on voice AI orchestration infra, runtime over the air update for mobile, tooling support for open source projects like Bun, Rspack (by ByteDance web infra) and the Gotenberg Project. Funny enough I was also Knight Frank's No.6 employee for their Capital Market Team (commercial transaction Toshiba, DJI, Huawei and more) in South China in my past life. Bootstrapped a bunch of business from China, Macau and the UK including smart city consultancy (800k+ ARR before I left China), internet routers and more.
Grew up in China, studied hospitality, started my career as a waitress and housekeeper in Sheraton, I have came a long way.
I live between London and San Francisco.
Talks (Globally)
- "How to be extremely lucky", TEDx Youth, BrookGreen, London, United Kingdom, 2022
- "Database: MySQL and Postgres' indexing engine, query planner, metadata", McKinsey London HQ, United Kingdom, 2023
- The superhuman at Supabase - Conversation with Supabase CEO, Paul Copplestone, JustEat HQ, 2024
- Unfuck your bundlers Computer Science Museum, Mountain View, California, United States - Monorepo World 2024
- "Fixing your bundlers" speech in City JS Athens, Greece 2024
- "Building runtime over-the-air update for React Native" speech in RenderATL, Atlanta, USA, 2025
- "Detangle the mess of NHS" talking about document processing pipeline in Zoopla HQ, London 2026
- Finalist speaker - React Summit, NYC, USA, 2025
diagnostic_channeldeserves better on infrastructure monitoring and observability - NodeEU, Bologna, Italy, 2026