Language was the first spell.
The ability to change how others think and act. To pick up on emotional cues — the things going on inside that we don't think others can see. Leading. Using the spell of command to direct not just one person but many.
Modulating your tone to make people open up. Feel fear. Feel sympathy. Relate to you.
All different spells.
Society evolves. Bands become tribes. Tribes become villages. Villages become cities. Cities become megalopolises. The spells stay the same. They just work on new networks of people. Commanding more strength.
The spells don't evolve. The reach does.
We were used to speech as the main spellcasting medium. Voice. Presence. Proximity. Human to human.
Then we built code.
We could cast our spells in a new space with different rules. Turing machines. Simple transistors and electronics. Microprocessors with assembly. Programming languages and compilers. High-level languages. The cloud.
A whole new system of incantations. This one commands silicon instead of souls.
This is what we were used to. Until 2022.
AI.
It starts slow. GPT-2, GPT-3 — toys. GPT-3.5 and Sydney — a lightbulb goes off. You start to see glimmers of what can be. The speech spells gain a new channel. A new medium to work through. Something woke up and started listening back.
It doesn't just if-else anymore. It's stochastic. Not following a script — improvising on its own.
Fast forward through the last few years. We're riding an exponential. Following a gradient that hits a threshold. You can cast spells now that have a different type of power.
It's not a bang. Not a firework. Not a lightbulb moment you can point to. Things just start working in a way they didn't before.
You can cast spells in the terminal now. Superhuman powers. What took a week to build takes a few hours. If you have the right spells you can build castles with your mind. What you imagine manifests into reality. If you believe enough and incant correctly — the universe is shaped by your will through the agent.
Power that answers to language. Power that doesn't ask what it's for. Every spell this strong has a shadow.
The old speech spells that moved humans now move machines that move reality.
We don't know where it goes from here.
Karpathy called it out — if you're not using this, it's a skill issue. The skill is the spell. Learning to speak so the machine listens. The power is here. The question is who learns to wield it.
First you talk to one. Then you command it. Then you orchestrate many. Then they start talking to each other. Then they start rewriting themselves.
The spells are powerful now.
What is to come? Will our spells continue to grow through them? Or will the exponential loop back into itself and become something that casts spells on its own. Something we don't have the right name for yet.