Investor Matt Shumer ignited a firestorm on social media this week with an essay that warned about the disruptive potential of AI. More than 80 million views later, he said it “wasn’t meant to scare people.”
“I want to be very clear about this, the article wasn’t meant to scare people in this way,” Shumer told CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Friday. “If I had known how viral this was going to go, I would have thought about certain parts and rewritten some of the parts for sure.”
The essay, “Something Big Is Happening,” details Shumer’s recent experiences using artificial intelligence. In it, he argues that AI’s capabilities are under appreciated by the wider public. He compared the state of AI to the rumblings during early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020, right before the number of cases soared in the U.S.
OpenAI rocketed into mainstream with the launch of its AI chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, and the company kicked off a high-stakes race for dominance among rivals like Google and Anthropic. Investors have been pouring billions of dollars into the technology, and Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are expected to spend nearly $700 billion on capital expenditures this year alone.
He wrote that he’s been “shocked” to discover that AI can perform all of the actual technical work of his job, and Shumer said professionals across fields like law, finance, medicine and accounting, among others, will begin to share similar experiences.
Shumer published the essay on Tuesday. Since then, it has racked up more than 100,000 likes and nearly 6,000 comments, according to X. The essay prompted a range of praise and criticism from readers. In retrospect, Shumer said he would have liked to have framed some parts differently.
Even so, Shumer reiterated his belief that AI could be disruptive to many knowledge workers. He said its “clear” that AI will be able to do anything that can be done on a computer, though he said it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will immediately be adopted or proliferate through society.
Shumer said the “core message” he is trying to convey is that people in the workforce should start to use and experiment with AI tools so they can understand what’s coming.
“Everybody likes to think their thing is special,” Shumer said. “I thought my thing was special for a while.”