Know it All Better What is AI – Part 1 - Why AI feels different this time

Why This Time AI It Actually Feels Different — Why This Time It Actually Feels Different

Why This Time AI Actually Feels Different

After twenty years in IT I have a ritual every time a new “next big thing” shows up. I roll my eyes, wait for the hype to die, and six to eighteen months later we’re all back to writing SQL queries and arguing about Agile ceremonies. Java applets, Flash, blockchain-for-everything, NoSQL-will-kill-RDBMS, the metaverse last year… seen them come, seen them fade.

But AI? AI is refusing to follow the script.

I still remember the first time ChatGPT answered a question better than half the Stack Overflow threads I was reading at 2 a.m. while debugging a production issue. I actually said out loud to my empty home office, “Uh… okay, that’s new.” Twenty years of muscle memory told me this would peak and crash like everything else. Instead, six months later my team was using Copilot, my mom was asking Alexa to read her recipes, and my nine-year-old niece was generating pictures of purple dragons wearing sunglasses.

So I did what I always do when something genuinely interesting shows up — I went down the rabbit hole. And because I love translating geek-speak into human, I’m turning everything I learned into this blog series for people who don’t live in Jira boards and cloud consoles.

This is Part 1: the “why should you even care” edition.

1. AI is the first technology that learns instead of being programmed line-by-line Every tool I’ve used in two decades needed me to tell it exactly what to do. If-then-else, loops, stored procedures — you get the idea. Artificial Intelligence is different. You show it millions of examples and say “figure out the pattern”. That single shift is why Artificial Intelligence feels alive in a way nothing else ever has.

2. The data explosion made it possible Back in the early 2000s we were proud when a database crossed a few terabytes. Today my phone has more storage than entire data centers I managed in 2008, and every click, like, swipe, and Netflix pause is being recorded. All that data is the raw material AI needs to learn.

3. Computing power finally caught up Remember when training a neural network took a supercomputer and a research grant? Today you can do it on a laptop with a decent graphics card — or just rent time on the cloud for pennies. The same hardware that lets gamers run ray-tracing at 4K is now training models that write poetry.

4. The 2022–2023 “ChatGPT moment” was the iPhone moment for Artificial Intelligence People love comparing Artificial Inteligence to the internet or smartphones. I think that’s fair. Before the iPhone, smartphones existed — BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm. They were clunky and only business nerds cared. Then Apple put one in everyone’s hand and suddenly your grandmother was on Facebook. That’s what November 30, 2022 did for Artificial Inteligence. One wow demo and suddenly the whole world noticed.

5. It’s creating value faster than any technology I’ve ever seen In my day job I track ROI like a hawk. I’ve never seen anything move from “cool research demo” to “saving my team 15–20 hours a week” in under a year. That’s what GitHub Copilot and similar tools are doing right now in 2025.

6. But it’s also creating new risks faster than ever Every revolutionary technology has a dark side. The internet gave us Wikipedia and also 419 scams. Social media connected us and also rage addiction. Artificial Intelligence will amplify both the best and worst of humanity. We’ll talk plenty about that in Part 5.

By the end of this series you’ll understand:

What AI actually is (and isn’t)
How it works under the hood without needing a PhD
Where it’s already changing your daily life (even if you haven’t noticed)
What jobs are genuinely at risk and which ones are about to get superpowers
How to future-proof your career or your kids’ careers
The ethical landmines we’re stepping on

No gatekeeping, no “only computer science grads can understand this” nonsense. If you can use WhatsApp, you can understand everything I’m about to explain.

Next post: the absolute basics — what the words Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Large Language Model actually mean, and why people keep mixing them up (including me, until very recently).

See you in Part 2 –> The Family Tree (AI vs ML vs DL vs Generative AI)

Know It All Better What is AI Artificial Intelligence 5 Part series link below