Being Early in AI

Being early is a blessing.

Being early is leverage.

I have never been early to anything - metaphorically and figuratively.

It’s part of my Asian DNA jk but seriously Vietnamese people show up late to everything. Asian time is a real thing. That’s pretty much how I lived my life until I met Peter who instilled in me the importance of being early, which is considered on time. Figuratively, now I always show up 5-15 min early. Metaphorically, I am early in AI.

As everyone, I was completely against the sentiment of AI taking over jobs, especially my own which I’d invested so many hours to learn the skills needed to perform my job.

After taking time to reflect - I asked myself why am I so against it? How could it take my job! Don’t I owe it to myself to find out? I’ve always been an open minded person - so let’s not let ego take over and look simply at the facts.

December 2021 I started my first job in tech as a frontend developer. 2022 I started seeing usages of ChatGPT on Twitter and decided to give it a try. It was ok. It could barely get simple math equations right. Then, 2023 the model got better. I was now able to ask questions about things I’d typically google. I always ran into Google to verify on my own because I didn’t trust it and at this point it has grown from 20% accuracy to 40%. I thought to myself, hmm.

2024 was the year I saw the true value. I had gotten laid off and jumped into the role of a cofounder of a startup AND frontend engineering lead. I had no idea what the heck I was doing - but I’ve always been a huge believer in “when there’s a will, there’s a way”. This was a huge risk for me - financially and threatened my becoming a homeowner but that’s another story. I took it on and would not have been able to step into this foreign role with new levels of responsibility I’d ever experienced or witnessed, without the help of ChatGPT. My expert googling turned into beginner prompting. And that’s when the model had gotten good and my view on AI finally flipped to, oh shoot. My work powered by AI is 10x my knowledge, productivity and ability to just do things. Months of what it took to learn advanced topics such as new technologies, communication, marketing, leadership etc turned into weeks. I was promoted simply because I was so good, so fast. The models had scraped the entire web of all its data minus 6 months and held incredibly power. That 40% grew to 70%.

2025 despite being out for 3+ years now, I am early and this is leverage. I spent at least 8-12 hours a week learning about the llm models and using it for research, code, everything. I stopped using ChatGPT in April and switched to Perplexity where I could experiment with multiple models (not just GPT) at a time, particularly Claude, Gemini and Perplexity’s very own model Sonar. I witnessed the explosion of models going from good to beyond mind blowing. Not just models, but software powered with AI such as Granola which could record your meetings, take notes and summarize them for you while you get to focus on the meeting, Gamma for slides, Bolt/Lovable/v0 for prototyping real apps and so much more. Middle of the year, practically every company held a hackathon to use & build with AI. This prompted a shift to happen due to the increase in humans using it - where the models had become not just good, but incredible beyond the scope of even a 10x engineer. Marketing increased, adoption began and usage exploded across all industries. The models now held recent data as soon as the day before, and that 70% grew to 100% accuracy. Humans are what helped the models get “smarter” by using it, breaking it, and new innovations formed.

It’s 2026 now, and there is still 70% of the world who has never used AI.
My mind races with excitement everyday thinking of the all possibilities to do good in the world.

I am blessed to be early.

I encourage everyone I know to utilize AI as the powerful tool it is. Stop doing repetitive work that formerly was the way to make money and honestly hindered our true capabilities. As humans, we are creative beings put on this earth to learn, grow, teach, create and build beautiful things that positively impact the world.

Leverage this opportunity to amplify your time to think and reason with good morals and ethics.

You are the creator of your life and destiny. AI can only create what you tell it to and does not exist without you. You are the visionary and hold the vision for how the next 10 years will look. AI is the tool to help you reach your purpose is life with less effort and quicker if you let it, so you can do real good in the world. It is up to us, to use AI - because just like money and power - the more people that use AI / have money and power - the better off the world will be.