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.
