Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company‘s Plugged In.
A February 9 blog post about AI, titled “Something Big Is Happening,” rocketed around the web this week in a way that reminded me of the golden age of the blogosphere. Everybody seemed to be talking about it—though as was often true back in the day, its virality was fueled by a powerful cocktail of adoration and scorn. Reactions ranged from “Send this to everyone you care about” to “I don’t buy this at all.”
The author, Matt Shumer (who shared his post on X the following day), is the CEO of a startup called OthersideAI. He explained he was addressing it to “my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me ‘so what’s the deal with AI?’ and getting an answer that doesn’t do justice to what’s actually happening.”
According to Shumer, the deal with AI is that the newest models—specifically OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6—are radical improvements on anything that came before them. And that AI is suddenly so competent at writing code that the whole business of software engineering has entered a new era. And that AI will soon be better than humans at the core work of an array of other professions: “Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service.”
By the end of the post, with a breathlessness that reminded me of the Y2K bug doomsayers of 1999, Shumer is advising readers to build up savings, minimize debt, and maybe encourage their kids to become AI wizards rather than focus on college in the expectation it will lead to a solid career. He implies that anyone who doesn’t get ahead of AI in the next six months may be headed for irrelevance.
The piece—which Shumer told New York‘s Benjamin Hart he wrote with copious assistance from AI—is not without its points. Some people who are blasé about AI at the moment will surely be taken back by its impact on work and life in the years to come, which is why I heartily endorse Shumer’s recommendation that everyone get to know the technology better by devoting an hour a day to messing around with it. Many smart folks in Silicon Valley share Shumer’s awe at AI’s recent huge leap forward in coding skills, which I wrote about last week. Wondering what will happen if it’s replicated in other fields is an entirely reasonable mental exercise.
In the end, though, Shumer would have had a far better case if he’d been 70% less over the top. (I should note that the last time he was in the news, it was for making claims involving the benchmark performance of an AI model he was involved with that turned out not to be true.) His post suffers from a flaw common in the conversation about AI: It’s so awestruck by the technology that it refuses to acknowledge the serious limitations it still has.
