The dot. And the line.

The end is nigh. I haven't heard this much talk about the end times since I was a baptist pastor. And now it's coming from the most powerful tech and civic leaders in the world.

Dario Amodei's essay Friday the 12th and subsequent interviews, "We must slow the pace"; Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis backed it the same day.

David Sacks: "stop pretending you need anyone else's permission." VP JD Vance: "a bit of a Trojan horse." President Trump: "ai taking over the World, destroying Humanity... is a HOAX." House Speaker Mike Johnson: "If Congress just races in... we will lose the race to China." Senator Bernie Sanders, from the other end of the spectrum: "When you are racing towards a cliff, you don't just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes."

An impotent stalemate of private and public leadership, while the majority of people are looking for course correcting action. Based on a NBC news poll 81% say the government "is not doing enough when it comes to regulating ai."

The model capabilities, and Trailer King

When new frontier models emerge,

Ways of working and building with ai shift. I have watched this happen every cycle since GPT 3.5.

The release of GPT-6 Astra has unlocked a new round of capabilities.

At Gumbo, we are chronic builders and creators, and one of the best ways to learn what's possible with ai, is to just start cooking.

Steve and Ben, my fellow cofounders at Gumbo, cooked up this game Trailer King over the weekend. It's based on this viral x post of a type of demolition derby none of us had seen until now. From concept to cooked in less than 24 hours is the world we're living in today.

Play Trailer King Online with friends here. (My kids and I played all weekend! We also may have started out a few meetings at Gumbo playing this together this week……shhh…..don't tell the boss.)

The data center in my backyard

On the ground in my community in Ohio, data centers are a big focus as there are 155 new sites planned. It's hard to talk about ai, and not talk about the supply chain. In Butler County, where I live, the Trenton data center story exemplifies the confusion and need for cohesive leadership and vision for our communities across the country.

In Trenton residents petitioned for a charter amendment banning data centers over 25 MW; council refused it; residents went to the Ohio Supreme Court; the court ordered the vote on Sept 1; council put it on the Nov 3 ballot on Sept 3; on September 14 the Ohio Capital Journal counted 18 Ohio communities with data centers on the November ballot.

Never underestimate the power of an election cycle to inject all kinds of energy into the public conversation.

If the dot is where we are, the line is where we are going. When I look down the line this week, I see gaps.

The end is nigh, they say. I spent twelve years in rooms where the end times were always on the table, and I learned that how people talk about "the end" tells you what they believe about the present. This week the most powerful people in ai said slow down, and the most powerful people in government said yes, no, and maybe…..emphatically, unharmoniously. Put that together and you get a gap where leadership is sorely needed.

To me, a gap like that is an invitation. It belongs to whoever is willing to walk into it. That is the work as I understand it: show up every day, make this technology work for real people in a positive way, and do it in the open so others can see how. Most of the shaping of ai happens in small rooms, one team at a time, one person at a time.

Look at the second dot again. A new model landed, and inside a week two of my cofounders turned a viral video into a game people are playing with their kids. That is the creative power getting loose in people right now. Most people have no idea this agency increasing power is sitting on their laptop awaiting their minds, hearts, and hands. The distance between what ai can do and what people know it can do is the gap that matters most, because you cannot govern, use, or even resist something you have never touched or don't understand (although many do). Education closes that distance, and that's why we spend our energy at Gumbo teaching people how to work with ai.

The same distance runs through Washington. Congress has a patchwork of ai bills that fit together nowhere, and the executive branch answered a request for rules with a shrug. By one tracker's count there are 86 ai bills in this Congress, sorted into five different purposes, and the last Congress introduced more than 150 and passed none of them. I read that as inexperience. You cannot legislate well what you have never worked with. Things need to move, and the measure that matters is whether they move smart, not just fast.

Which brings me to the third dot. In Trenton, a ban on data centers went from a petition, to a refusal, to the state's highest court, to the ballot, and eighteen Ohio communities will vote on the same question in November. Neighbors made that happen, at a council meeting, at a courthouse, and soon at a polling place. That is where the governance of ai lives right now: in a company deciding what its ai may touch, in school systems doing their best with limited resources, in a town deciding what it may draw from the grid. At Gumbo, we make helping companies govern it well a part of what we do.

I believe real legislation belongs in this picture too, something comprehensive that fits the pieces together, and sets us up for a bright and innovative future. I have been working on what that could look like for over a year. It is unfinished, and you will hear more from me on it in the coming months.

So here is the line as I see it. The capability is real and accelerating. The leadership has gaps in it: in Washington, in the labs, and in the space between what ai can do and what most people know it can do. Gaps like these can be filled by people who believe in building a better world and can do that work every day, in their companies and in their communities. Those are the people our society needs to step in right now.

That is the invitation of this moment, and it is why I show up each day working in this space.

I believe if more of us begin to show up this way, with presence and foresight…..the line, the future, gets pointed to the horizon of building a better world, and hope is the antidote to fear.