Large language models, like Gemini and ChatGPT, are the precursors to large omni-multimodal language models (OLMs) that integrate text, images, audio, and video. Combine this with world models like Genie, and you have a space for syntax to make discoveries in virtual worlds (including discovering how to pilot a robotic body within the safety of simulated physics).
So if I had to pick the most important invention in my lifetime, it’d be AI models capable of multimodal architecture that scales into general intelligence (i.e., being able to do anything a human could cognitively do).
That’s in the future, within my lifetime.
Currently?—as of January 2026, I’d say AlphaFold is the most important invention in my lifetime, given how it accelerated scientific research by predicting protein structures that would have taken us generations to solve.
AlphaFold is an example of why AGI, or artificial alien general intelligence, will be as society-shifting as the discovery of fire, storytelling, and electricity. Imagine if all of scientific research accelerated at the same rate as protein structures—and how that will ricochet across industries (ex., the impact of new material sciences on everything else)—and possibility comes into view.
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