Reflections on AI and Projections for the Next 6 Months

Since the last time I wrote my AI Boom-Bust blog, the landscape and collective culture around AI has shifted. I'd argue that projections on this technology follow something like Moore's Law — the observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. It's an empirical projection of technological growth, not a physical law, but it drove exponential increases in computing power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness for over five decades.

We may be sitting in the centre of an LLM-AI-Moore's Law right now, where compute and reasoning abilities are just a few half-steps away from being incalculable. Here's what I mean by that: this projection covers the next 6 months. Six months from today the projection window will shrink to 3 months, then 1.5 months, then increments of weeks. The rate at which things change is itself accelerating. What exactly gets projected and reflected on at that point is anyone's guess — I can only work with what I see from this moment in time.

Anyway, math aside, let's speculate.

The Bingo Card

I like to tell my friends and colleagues about my "bingo card." Since the state of the world has started to wobble — and I mean wobble like a washing machine with one shoe in it, not wobble like a gentle breeze — every year I think there's an increasingly unpredictable set of black swan events, or at least the buildup to them. The washing machine metaphor is important here: you know that feeling where it's technically still running but you're watching it from across the room wondering if it's going to walk itself off the platform? That's the vibe.

Anything incredibly notable that reaches cultural zeitgeist territory belongs on my hypothetical bingo card. You know a year is a bit crazy when the card fills up before June.

Here's what's on the tech bingo card as of this moment, kept in bullet points with no explanation for comedic effect. Think of it like a horror movie trailer — the less context, the more unsettling:

• Geopolitical tensions

• Critical infrastructure attacks

• Vibing our way into the semi-century

• The unknown health implications of AI datacentres and infrasound

• Increasing lack of privacy (flock camera exploits, Palantir and surveillance technology)

I keep separate bingo cards for pop culture too, but I'll spare you those for brevity. You're welcome.

So What Happens in the Next 6 Months?

Given these bingo items, here's what I think we're about to see.

A boom in open-source solutions. Previous open-source projects of every kind — the ones that were lost or abandoned because nobody had the time or human resources to maintain them — are going to get picked up again by enthusiastic vibe-coders. We're already seeing overwhelming support for projects like Meshtastic, Reticulum, open-source democracy applications, and more. These aren't new ideas. They're old ideas that finally have the tooling to come alive.

On top of old projects getting revived, new ones will be built entirely from scratch based on past principles. Except these projects will have automation baked in, properly utilize open-source intelligence, open-source government data, and other publicly available datasets. The potential data analytics from these vibe-coders might genuinely change how we view certain datasets and shift our perspective on what we thought were "hard problems" — possibly overnight.

Here's a concrete example: imagine someone stitches together a dataset that's historically scattered across various government departments and shows how certain social issues could be better addressed by directing resources at key areas that were previously undiscovered. We could have new solutions to decade-long problems appearing seemingly out of nowhere. I say "seemingly" because the data was always there. The people who could connect the dots just didn't have the tools yet.

Entrepreneurship on the rise. With the lack of jobs, accessibility of AI, and the overall need to claw out of a recessive slump, more people are going to become entrepreneurs. Not the "I have a startup idea and need $5 million in seed funding" kind. I'm talking about people with data-minded approaches who create niche solutions to specific problems overnight. Physical-world problems may not change as dramatically, but I expect these tech-entrepreneurs to target things like the network stack, coding workflow issues, meta-coding, code-agnostic tooling, AI agent workflows, and more. Basically, the plumbing behind the plumbing. That's not a metaphor about actual plumbers — I'll get to them in a minute.

The hallucination problem gets widely mitigated for certain niche groups. For example, using multiple agents working together to create what I'll call a "memory bank train" — a chain of context-aware agents that cross-check each other — which mitigates hallucinations significantly. The caveat is that only those with sufficient token limits and compute budgets can pull this off right now. The "for now" part of that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

My Personal Wish

My personal wish for the next 6 months is for a growing number of non-technical people to use no-code LLMs to create custom solutions to their own problems. I genuinely believe that LLMs are best used to solve problems for non-technical people — the plumber who can't use Excel, the welder who wants to understand how to invest in RRSPs, the small business owner who needs a simple inventory tracker but doesn't know the first thing about databases.

That said, I'm worried. I'm worried that people who are non-technical may look at this technology and see magic. And when something looks like magic, the natural human response is either worship or avoidance — neither of which involves actually learning how to use the thing.

This is the part where I tell you I'm re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you haven't read it, the core tension in that book is between people who engage with how things work and people who'd rather not look under the hood. Pirsig argues that the refusal to understand technology isn't just a personal preference — it's a kind of alienation that makes your life harder in ways you don't even notice. I think the same thing is happening with AI right now, and I may write a follow-up post about it because I have a lot of feelings about this and they probably need their own word count.

That's It

The world is looking both bleak and exciting every day, as it always has. The washing machine is still running. I'll reflect on this reflection in about 6 months — assuming my bingo card doesn't fill up first — and will be working on some new networking solutions until then.