A Map for AI Town Planners, 2024-29

The essay argues that AI has reached a "town-planning" phase in Simon Wardley's pioneers/settlers/town-planners model, and offers a map of the field's state in 2024-29. The author says AI's apparent speed comes from a slow first decade after the 2012 ImageNet moment, followed by faster progress in the last two years. He argues that the early arrival at this phase stems less from the technology than from its dependence on training data and GPU capital, which pulled it into contact with capital markets, legacy media and copyright regulation. In the map, Sam Altman is cast as a "Robert Moses" figure, Nvidia's CUDA is described as a contested "swamp" that the industry hopes to push back, and open-weight communities around Meta's leaked Llama weights are cast as a resistance movement.