Build the Brain Before the Models Run Away

The most important AI story right now is speed.

Every few months, the models get better. Then, suddenly, every few weeks, the models get better. Then one day you look around and realize that the thing many people dismissed as a chatbot has become a coding partner, a research assistant, a financial analyst, a tutor, a strategist, and a personal operating system.

That is what the arrival of Fable 5 represents to me.

The specific model matters less than the direction. The direction is obvious. The frontier is moving faster, the intelligence is becoming more usable, and the gap between the people using AI and the people ignoring AI is widening.

There is a very important example hiding in plain sight. Since February 28, much of the market’s attention has been pulled toward the back-and-forth in the U.S.–Iran war, the risk around the Strait of Hormuz, and the possibility of another oil shock. That focus is understandable. But while everyone was watching geopolitics, the AI model layer kept accelerating. By my count, there have been roughly two dozen notable model releases, model-family launches, previews, or major capability rollouts since then. Anthropic alone shows the speed of the cycle: Claude Opus 4.7, then Opus 4.8, then Mythos Preview, and then Fable 5/Mythos 5. OpenAI released GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5. DeepSeek released V4 Preview with a 1-million-token context window. Google, xAI, Mistral, Moonshot, MiniMax, Qwen, and NVIDIA all pushed forward as well. The point is simple: AI is not waiting for the world to calm down.

That is the part I do not think most people understand yet.

The risk is no longer that AI disappoints. The risk is that AI keeps improving while many people continue to treat it like a novelty. They try it once, ask it a question, get a generic answer, and decide they understand it. They use it like Google with a personality. Then they move on.

Meanwhile, the models are moving from answering questions to doing work.

That is the divide.

Some people are still asking AI to write a paragraph. Others are asking AI to build tools. Some people are still debating whether AI is overhyped. Others are using it to build personal systems that make them smarter, faster, and more capable.

That second group is beginning to separate.

Last week, I saw something that made me more excited than almost anything I have seen in AI this year.

I uploaded a project for subscribers (ai.22vresearch.com)

showing how to build a Jensen Huang knowledge brain. The idea was simple: take transcripts, organize the source material, connect it to an AI workflow, use an API key, and build something that allows you to ask better questions of a focused body of knowledge.

This was not meant to be a Silicon Valley engineering project.

It was meant to be a bridge for people just like me with no prior coding experience.

The goal was to take people who had mostly used AI as a chatbot and show them that they could build something. They could gather information. They could structure it. They could connect it. They could create a tool that reflected their own curiosity. The could feel empowered.

The response I received in the days after was incredible.

People who had never coded before were building. Adults who had been intimidated by AI were sending me messages saying they had done it. Some of them were proud in the way people are proud when they realize they can do something they thought belonged to another class of person.

Then the next wave came, which was even better.

Those same adults were showing it to their kids.

That is when the whole thing clicked for me.

This was not just a knowledge brain. This was agency.

For the last year, AI has been discussed mostly through fear, market speculation, job loss, regulation, national security, and competition. All of those topics matter. I spend a lot of time on them. The macro implications are real. The investment implications are enormous. The national security implications are arriving faster than most people expected.

Yet at the personal level, the most important question is much simpler.

Do you feel more powerful because of AI, or do you feel more powerless?

That is the entire game.

The people who feel powerless will wait. They will watch the headlines. They will listen to the doomers. They will tell themselves they are too busy, too old, too nontechnical, too late, or too far removed from the center of the action.

The people who feel powerful will build small things.

That is how this starts.

A knowledge brain does not need to begin with Jensen Huang. It can begin with anything you care about. Your favorite investor. Your favorite author. Your company’s internal documents. Your health research. Your industry. Your sales calls. Your podcast library. Your notes. Your family history. Your fantasy football preparation.

That last one is where this gets fun, especially as we approach the beginning of training camps.

As fantasy football season approaches, adults and kids are already starting to talk about building their own fantasy football brains. Imagine taking your favorite podcasts, transcripts, rankings, injury discussions, coaching comments, team previews, and draft strategy shows, then turning that material into your own AI-powered research assistant.

Suddenly, AI is no longer abstract.

It is no longer a scary headline about job replacement. It is no longer a debate about whether the models are conscious. It is no longer just a stock-market argument about capex, chips, power, and margins. It is no longer a way to secure a job. It is fun.

It is a kid asking better draft questions.

It is a parent and child building something together.

It is a fantasy football brain that knows the voices you trust, the analysts you follow, the players you care about, and the strategies you want to test.

That is the on-ramp.

Most people do not become AI users because someone explains artificial general intelligence to them. They become AI users because they build one thing that matters to them. Once they build that one thing, their relationship with AI changes. The intimidation fades. The curiosity rises. The next project becomes easier.

That is exactly why I built my AI subscriber paywall around three ideas: Signal, Alpha, and Agency.

Signal means staying current.

The AI world is moving too fast for people to follow casually. The headlines are noisy. The incentives are messy. The doomers are loud. The hype men are louder. One side wants you terrified. The other side wants you euphoric. Neither is useful by itself.

Signal is about my YouTube channel filtering the noise and understanding the regime. What is actually changing? Which model release matters? Which infrastructure bottleneck matters? Which company comment matters? Which government action matters? Which part of the AI economy is accelerating, and which part is digesting the last wave of investment?

If the models are speeding up, the first job is to stay oriented.

Alpha means turning that signal into investment insight.

AI is not just a technology story. It is a capital cycle. It is an infrastructure buildout. It is an energy story, a chip story, a data center story, a networking story, a software story, a security story, and eventually an application story.

The winners will not be limited to the companies with the most famous chatbots. The buildout is much bigger than that. There will be beneficiaries across the stack, from power to chips to infrastructure to models to applications. The goal of the paywall is to take the signal and translate it into company-level opportunities, because investors need more than excitement. They need a map.

Agency is the third piece, and right now it may be the most important.

Agency means using AI yourself.

It means prompts. Tools. Workflows. Experiments. Buildouts. Examples. Mistakes. Iteration. It means watching someone else do it and realizing you can do it too.

The knowledge brain project was the clearest example yet. It gave people a path from passive user to active builder. It showed them that the API key, the transcripts, the code, and the AI assistant were pieces they could learn to assemble. Once they assembled them, they did not just have a tool. They had proof.

Proof matters.

Proof changes identity.

A person who says “I do not know how to code” becomes a person who says “I built a knowledge brain.” A parent who worries their child is falling behind becomes a parent helping that child build a fantasy football research system. A subscriber who thought AI was something happening to the world begins to see AI as something they can use to shape their own world.

That is the message I want people to hear.

You do not need to become an AI researcher. You do not need to become a professional programmer. You do not need to understand every detail of model architecture, inference scaling, token economics, or frontier benchmarking.

You need to start building.

Start with something you love. Start with something familiar. Start with a small body of information and ask how AI can make it more useful. Build a brain around a person, a topic, a hobby, a market, a sport, a company, or a question you cannot stop thinking about.

The first version can be messy. It should be messy. The goal is momentum.

The models are going to keep improving. Fable 5 will lead to the next model, and the next model will lead to another step change after that. The people who wait for the perfect moment will discover that the perfect moment keeps moving away from them.

The people who start now will compound.

They will learn how to ask better questions. They will learn how to structure information. They will learn how to connect tools. They will learn how to separate good answers from lazy ones. They will learn how to turn AI from a chatbot into a collaborator.

That is why I am so excited.

The knowledge brain response showed me that the audience is ready. Adults are ready. Kids are ready. Investors are ready. Builders are ready. The curiosity is there. The only thing missing for many people is a path.

That is what I want this platform to provide.

Signal to know what matters.

Alpha to understand who benefits.

Agency to make sure you are not just watching the AI revolution from the sidelines.

The world can always give you a reason to wait.

The models will not.

Build the brain before the gap gets wider.