This month, the artificial intelligence discourse hit a new fever pitch.
It started with a viral post on X, titled “Something Big Is Happening,” which racked up tens of millions of views. The post was written by Matt Shumer, the CEO of the AI personal assistant company HyperWrite. It’s long, but it’s worth your time. The thrust of the post is this: Artificial intelligence is improving much faster than most anyone seems to understand, and the rate of improvement is accelerating. AI’s capability has exploded in the last six months, Shumer says, and people who played with AI tools two years or 12 months or six weeks ago have no idea how much better they are today.
To make his point, Shumer described how he, a programmer, is basically not needed for any programming tasks anymore. He gives the AI instructions, it codes something, it writes its own tests, it runs those tests, and then it fixes the mistakes it finds; he just sits back and watches. Millions of white-collar jobs are on the verge of being wiped off the map, Shumer argues. Among them: Journalism and content creation, legal analysis, software engineering, financial analysis, medical analysis, and customer service.
Shumer’s piece headlined a wave of alarming AI news, including new safety reports about artificial intelligence recognizing when it was being tested and adjusting its behavior, and more resignations from people who work on safety at major AI companies — one safety researcher at Anthropic wrote an open resignation letter alluding to unethical AI development practices, then moved back home to England to write poetry.
The combination of Shumer’s post and other AI news set off yet another wave of panic across the internet from people who believe the AI apocalypse is imminent. The number of people who are skeptical of the impact AI is going to have on our world seems to be diminishing to a vanishing point — I think it’s basically Freddie DeBoer and me left.
Still, I thought Shumer’s piece was interesting. Even though he has an obvious incentive to hype up AI — a sector he is heavily invested in — and even though he said AI literally helped him write the piece about how great AI is, it got my attention.
As you might have picked up, I also thought it was pretty deeply flawed.
