Matt Shumer, an AI startup founder, writes reviews of new AI models and essays on how fast AI is improving.
HN links his 'Something Big Is Happening' essay, which commenters call silly and misleading, especially its comparison of AI to Covid in early 2020.
5 duplicate posts in the last day. Hopefully the moderators will consolidate the posts.
- Something big is happening in AI – and most people will be blindsided (https://fortune.com/2026/02/11/something-big-is-happening-ai-february-2020-moment-matt-shumer/)
| 2 points | FergusArgyll | 3 hours ago | 2 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46979564
- Something Big Is Happening (https://twitter.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403)
| 25 points | mhb | 8 hours ago | 24 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974928
- Something Big Is Happening (https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening)
| 49 points | eternalreturn | 12 hours ago | 34 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011
- Something Big Is Happening (https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening) |
9 points | jdkee | 23 hours ago | 4 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46968686
- Something Big Is Happening (https://twitter.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403)
| 12 points | matthewsinclair | 1 day ago | 9 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46967563
> And Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, "kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people"
This is where the misrepresentation... no, the lie comes in. It always does in these "sensible middle" posts! the genre requires flattening both sides into dumber versions of themselves to keep the author positioned between two caricatures. Supremely done, OP.
If you read Matt's original article[0] you see he was saying something very different. Not "AI is going to kill lots of people" but that we're at the point on an exponential curve where correct modeling looks indistinguishable from paranoia to anyone reasoning from base rates of normal experience. The analogy is about the epistemic position of observers, not about body counts.
[0]: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
As it turns out, IMHO, the debate in this thread is about 1 year behind the reality [1]. Personally, I was about a week behind in my reading of the landscape, so didn't realize this is all asked and answered [1].
A number of points that various folks have made in the posts in this thread - free vs paid capabilities, model choices etc. are addressed much more eloquently and coherently in this blog post by Matt Shumer [1]. Discussed here on HN at [2] but like me, many others must have missed it.
[1] https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011
It's a response to this: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
The post is silly, but I do not expect Zitron's commentary to be particularly illuminating as he is a charlatan himself. I could point to many examples, but here is a blog post I wrote about one case of him trying very hard to not understand a simple and familiar situation: https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/.
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twitter is useless haha
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
Not just HN. This tweet yesterday says something similar and got 56M views:
https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 / https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening