A No Baselines Letter About AI

In a letter published publicly this past week, Jim VandeHei, co founder and CEO of Axios, shared a blunt message he originally wrote to his wife and children about artificial intelligence later released with a link for a broader audience. From a no baselines perspective, the letter is striking because it rejects gradualism and assumes discontinuity. Careers, education paths, and entry level roles were built for a world where intelligence scaled linearly and experience compounded predictably over time not at exponential speed. AI breaks that logic. The takeaway is not learn AI someday but rebuild how you think learn and create now. When someone whose job is identifying real shifts says the change is imminent the signal is that the baseline has already moved.

The letter reads as a warning but its core argument is responsibility. AI is not framed as optional or distant. Opting out is already a decision and likely the wrong one. The divide will not be between those who fear AI and those who admire it but between those who actively learn to use it as a force multiplier and those who continue measuring the future against outdated norms. In that sense the letter is less about technology and more about refusing to anchor judgment to baselines that no longer apply.