A Boy, A Fossil, A Thought

Five hundred million years ago, evolution ran its most audacious experiment — producing every major animal body plan in roughly twenty million years. Nothing like it has happened since. Until, arguably, now. This series maps the current AI landscape through the lens of the Cambrian explosion, using the deepest pattern in the fossil record to identify what survives the next wave of decimation.

I was just about eight years old when I first stood before the Anomalocaris. It was at the National Museum of Natural History, in the cavernous hall filled with rocks and fossils and the musty odor of granite and gravel.

The Anomalocaris fossil was about one meter long, and a weird amalgamation of features — two grasping "great appendages" lined with tinier appendages; a thin, circular, pineapple-shaped mouth; compound eyes with over 16,000 lenses (similar to a dragonfly); a wing-like body. One could very well have mistaken them for prehistoric lobsters or aliens from James Cameron's Pandora, yet just over five hundred and twenty million years ago, these creatures ruled the seas as apex predators. All these evolutionary traits, even before the oceans had organisms with backbones (Paterson et al., 2011). I recall walking away from that display, confused — how had multi-lens eyes categorized oceanic lifeforms long before spinal construction ever did?!

Beyond the Anomalocaris, the exhibit featured other Burgess Shale oddities — Hallucigenia, an organism so mystifying that for the longest time, scientists had reconstructed its body upside down and backwards; Opabinia, with 5 eyes and a vacuum-cleaner-like nozzle for a face, a prehistoric Pokémon of sorts; Wiwaxia, a sort of armored slug whose shape was so polarizing it divided the scientific community; and little Pikaia gracilens, a flattened eel-like blob, two inches long, which happens to be one of the most iconic early chordates recorded (Conway Morris & Caron, 2012). The Cambrian Evolution created some funky natural phenomena!

Those displays left a particular kind of mark on me. It wasn't "wow, ancient biota are cool." It was closer to the realization that the forms life can take are not the ones I expected.

Fast forward to the present. I am sitting in Berkeley, an M.E.T. senior (since graduated 😄), trying to finish a final paper, surrounded by a laptop, three open browser tabs to Nature, Cell, and PNAS papers on bacterial warfare, a terminal running Claude Code, an open Cursor window, and an Opus 4.7 conversation on the best way to build a knowledge graph. On my other screen, Granola is quietly transcribing a YouTube video lecture on agentic workflows. There is an OpenClaw agent on my old MacBook Air, researching Bessemer and Felicis articles on my behalf for a blog I am drafting on BioLLMs. And on my phone: Perplexity News notifications on SpaceX and xAI's merger. On X, Jensen Huang is calling AI the largest infrastructure buildout in human history. I google "AI Bubble 2026" and get a wall of half-contradictory takes. And the word "Cambrian" — yes, the very same Cambrian — is used roughly eleven times a day in the Silicon Valley discourse.

And the thing is: they are not wrong!

The structural parallel between what happened in the oceans roughly 539 to 515 million years ago and what we are seeing in the global technology stack in the modern era, specifically, in measurable ways, is the same pattern of events.

The analogy is genuinely useful. Not just metaphorically, the way every tech cycle gets called "Darwinian" or "evolutionary" because someone wants to tie their thesis to scientific buzzwords. Both are explosions of form. Both are preceded by long periods of hidden pre-adaptations. Both are catalyzed by a single, seemingly abstract innovation that unlocks dormant developmental toolkits. Both produce a staggering "weird wonders" prototypic phase, followed by "species" decimation. Both feature apex organisms that seem permanent in the short run, but can be threatened in the long run. And both culminate in a small number of durable traits that ultimately define downstream consequences.

I've contributed to investment memos on volatile startups, and observed in real-time Anthropic go from a $61.5B post-money in March 2025 to a $380B Series G in February 2026 — essentially a 6x increase in eleven months, in private markets, on a company that does not yet have public revenue that can justify it by any conventional SaaS multiple. Growth in AI has been exponential, and truly, the best way I have come to categorize it is as Cambrian.

This multi-part series is my attempt to contextualize the Cambrian analogy more formally, supported by both observations and evidence. Specifically, I break down the parallels across six ideological frames: speciation at hyperscale, transformers as the inflection point, proto-species and prototypes, org structures and organic hierarchies, evolutionary convergence, and lastly, Darwinian futures. Across each frame, the goal is to validate how biological lessons learned from the Cambrian Evolution could translate into successful navigation of the AI boom — being prescriptive about the present, observational about short- and medium-run trends, and predictive about the long run.