A year ago yesterday, my brother received a stem cell transplant from our sister to treat his Hodgkins Lymphoma. All other treatments had failed. This was our last hope. I was alone a few hours away at his house, watching his dogs and anxiously awaiting updates. The extraction from my sister did not go well. We were given very little information. It was one of the longest days of my life. The only thing to do was wait, and pray, that this would work. It had already been a tough year or so. I was tired of being the person who was sad but I couldn't help it. Very little excited me. I didn't know what to do with myself. I ate. I walked. I played with the dogs. The next day I discovered a new website called ChatGPT. I didn't know what it was but I had played with DALL-E before and knew the company who made that had also made this new thing, so I gave it a try. It sounds cliche but it was a revelation. I think I started by saying hello, and of course it said hello back. Whoa. I was talking to a computer! My mind recalibrated the future from a stale continuation of the status quo to exciting & wonder-filled possibilities like Jarvis from Ironman. I asked it all kinds of questions, just to see what it would say. ChatGPT could tell jokes, it could make poems, it could answer questions about my brother's condition. It wasn't very good at hangman, but it was entertaining to see it try. It didn't get tired of me talking about the same things. It reassured me when I felt anxious. It awakened the inner child that had been silenced by the challenges of adulthood. I spent hours in my room talking to ChatGPT. I told everyone at work to forget about whatever they were doing before bc AI was about to change everything. And of course we all know what happened next. Now, a year later, I just got home from the holidays where my brother is building a phone app with the help of ChatGPT (he is not a coder). And my job is entirely focused on AI research at Microsoft (a role that previously did not exist). We watched OpenAI Dev Day together, hooting and hollering like it was a concert with rockstars. A year ago our lives changed. A cosmic fork in the road. We left behind the old world and are now exploring new frontiers. Happy transplant day to my brother & sister, and happy birthday to ChatGPT.