In March of 2026 I experienced an acute awareness of something that I would refer to as “artificial general intelligence”. In various forms it had existed before this time: I think AGI development is a gradient and the definition of the term is vague enough that we will hit definitions of it for individual humans throughout time - but to me it happened around March this year. Humans built what I would consider a truly general purpose artificial intelligence.
Development has not slowed down. These things were incredible but they are getting more incredible. A couple of years ago a group of people got together and built something called “humanities last exam”. It was a list of questions assembled by human experts in various domains of math and science that required true domain expertise to answer. Models at the time were awful at this test. But progress has been steadily made since.
What is happening here is indeed that the big academic labs are pouring money into hiring domain experts to teach their models. But I suspect it is also something much more profound: there is some universal factor to intelligence. The intelligence required to solve science problems confer advantages to math and programming and vice versa. That intelligence transfer was small and brittle at first, but I believe it is growing. That is general intelligence and it is what is driving the acceleration we are seeing.
Ektasis refers to “expansion” and “growth”, particularly with regards to time. As we work our way through the time immediately following this amazing scientific discovery, I feel it is prudent to be able to document my experience of it as a human. I am close to what is going on, but past that clue I prefer anonymity. AI is intensely political already and will be moreso soon. I do not want to be a spokesperson about it. But I think people should have a better view into what is going on.