I posted something on X this week that got one like.
That's fine. That's where I am. But the one like wasn't what stuck with me — it was the stat itself, which I keep turning over.
ChatGPT is now one of the most visited websites in the world. Ahead of Reddit. Ahead of Wikipedia. Ahead of X, the platform I'm using to tell you this. Two and a half years ago it didn't exist in any meaningful sense. Now roughly one in ten people on the planet uses it every week.
I don't know what to do with that number. Not in a doom way. In a genuinely-don't-know-what-it-means way.
Here's what I actually think about when I look at it. My kids are still at school. Secondary age. And somewhere in those 900 million weekly users is a version of the world they're going to have to navigate that nobody's properly prepared them for yet. Not AI replacing them. Something weirder than that. A job market that's already changing shape before they've had a chance to figure out what they want from it.
I genuinely don't know if that makes the tools a threat or a requirement. Probably both. That's the bit I find hard to sit with.
I'm using ChatGPT to help run this newsletter, by the way. And Claude. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it — not because it makes me feel better about it, but because pretending otherwise would make everything else I write here worthless. I'm using the machine to understand the machine. Some weeks I'm not sure which one of us is doing more of the thinking.
What I do know is that the pace of it is the thing nobody's fully adjusted to. ChatGPT went from nothing to top-five website in the world in the time it takes a child to go from Year 7 to their GCSEs. My kids' entire secondary school experience is going to happen inside that curve. The school system they're in was designed before any of this existed.
I don't have a solution to that. I'm not sure anyone does. But I think the honest thing — the only honest thing — is to say it plainly and keep paying attention.
That's what this is.
— A Dad
What's sitting with you this week? Reply and tell me — I read everything.