When I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10, we got our first computer. I could not stop exploring it. I would stay up way past my bedtime downloading games over a dial-up connection, hoping they would finish by morning. I tried to figure out Excel, bought and failed at learning AutoCAD all in efforts to design cars, and found new ways to get myself in trouble. I told people I wanted to be a computer engineer. I did not fully know what that meant. I just knew I wanted to build things.

I went in a different direction, but never lost the desire to push my bounds technologically. I’ll never forget glitching the servers at my first job while trying to find a better way for my team to collaborate. I have been thinking about AI since 2018 or so, but did not have the technical chops to do much with the tools I came across, until ChatGPT came out. The past several years, I have kept up with as many platforms as possible to experiment and see what comes up. The past two months have felt different. I am not a technical person, yet I am now very active on GitHub. The range of products have helped me commit thousands of lines of code, stand up over a dozen GitHub repositories, and run experiments late into the night. Part of me feels like I’m 10 again waking up to see what finished running overnight. The creative part of my brain and the technical possibilities of this moment are speaking the same language, and it is opening things up for me.

The second thing sitting with me is Anthropic’s announcement of a $100m investment in building out its partner network. I immediately thought of David Steward and the $20B business he built with World Wide Technology, integrating technologies like Microsoft, Cisco, and NVIDIA into enterprises. An entrepreneur who has maintained their child’s eye of the world, while keeping their ear to the streets will build a business multiples the size of WWT. The gap between what the research labs and hyperscalers are releasing and what enterprises are actually capturing in returns is the gap in which that entrepreneur will create a generational business. There is a risk worth naming. At some point, AI may do much of the integration work itself. But there is a window right now.

Third, my mind goes to Andre M. Perry’s latest research on Black-owned businesses. The number of Black-owned employer firms eclipsed 200k for the first time, providing nearly 2M jobs and $70B in salaries. Who is helping them find creative ways to reimagine their business with AI in their tech stack? Hopefully, the entrepreneur I mentioned earlier comes from, and starts with, this community. There are nearly 6M employer firms in the US. I would love to see 100%+ jumps in the number of Black-owned employer firms in the coming years, through acquisitions or starting from the bottom. It feels like the tech tools available at the moment are sufficient to help make that happen. An improved set of policy tools would set that on an exponential curve.

Lastly, I reflect on all this and think about the 10-year old kids in Gaza, Sudan, Lebanon, now Iran, and elsewhere who are up late at night worrying about whether they make it to tomorrow. My heart breaks for them, and I think on James 4: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” May God have mercy and guide us to tame our passions and seek peace.