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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further.

And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403

It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.

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I just skimmed this and the so called zeitgeist here is fear. People are scared, it's material concern and he effectively stoked it.

I work on this technology for my job and while I'm very bullish pieces like that are as you said slopish and as I'll say breathless because there are so many practical challenges here to deal with standing between what is being said there and where we are now.

Capability is not evenly distributed and it's getting people into loopy ideas of just how close we are to certain milestones, not that it's wrong to think about those potential milestones but I'm wary of timelines.

Are you ever concerned about the consequences of what you are making? No one really knows how this will play out and the odds of this leading to disaster are significant.

I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

>I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

A cynical/accelerationist perspective would be: it enables you to rake in huge amounts of money, so no matter what comes next, you will be set up to endure it better than most.

Unless the AGI starts a new monetary instrument or something

Of course, I think about this at least once a week maybe more often. I think that the technology overall will be a great net benefit to humanity or I wouldn't touch it.

Genuine question: how?

I’m younger than most on this site. I see the next decades of my life being defined by a multi-generational dark age via a collapse in literacy (“you use a calculator right?”), median prosperity (the only truly functional distribution system we have figured out is labor), and loss of agency (kinda obvious). This outcome is now, as of 2026, essentially priced into the public markets and accepted as fact by most media outlets.

“It’s inevitable” is at least a hard point to argue with. “Well I’M so productive, I’m having the time of my life”, the dominant position in many online tech spaces, seems short-sighted at best.

I miss being a techno optimist, it’s much more fun. But it’s increasingly hard.

I really think the doom consensus is largely an online phenomena. We're in a tense period like the early 80s, and that would be true without AI in the mix, but I think its a matter of perspective. We're certainly still way ahead of the 1910s and the 1940s for instance (it's on us btw to make sure we don't fall to that in time).

Every generation has its strains and the internet just amplifies it because outrage is currency. Those strains are things you only start to notice as you start to get older so they seem novel when in reality in the scheme of humanity is basically standard.

Fwiw if the market actually priced it in it would be in freefall since the market would be shortly irrelevant. We are due for a correction soon though.

Internet discourse is a facsimile of real life and often not how real life operates in my experience.

So I see all the discourse around extremes on either end and based on lived experience and working in the field think theres a much neater middle ground we'll ultimately arrive at thanks to people working very hard to land the plane so to speak.

None of that answers the question:

How will this technology be good for humanity as a whole?

I answered the more important question of a seemingly lost youngin and how to deal with the stress of inheriting a world in a bit of turmoil.

That said, trivially we already see it advancing math and science research as an assistive tool, development and more. Extrapolate it out a few more generations and it helps us unlock a whole bunch of things on the skill tree of life so to speak.

Yes, doomerism is a symptom of severe doomscrolling addiction. All the people who talk like this spend all day on X. They sound like delusional drug addicts TBH.

Well the zeitgeist is that our brains are so fried that such piece of mediocre writing penned by a GPT-container startupper can surge to the top

It’s possible that all this will come to pass but honestly AI being able to do most of white collar work means we have reached AGI or baby AGI. The changes that will bring are for me totally unprojectable

This is what they get for not reading our antislop paper (ICLR 2026) and using our anti-slopped sampler/models, or Kimi (which is remarkable relatively non sloppy)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061

I thought normies would have caught onto the EM dash, overuse of semicolons, overuse of fancy quotes, lack of exclamation marks, "It's not X, it's Y", etc. Clearly I was wrong.

Is Kimi still non-sloppy? When I switched to 2.5, it suddenly felt noticeably less creative and base-model-like, more sycophantic, and it hasn't gone aggro at all. Feels like a lot of the magic is gone.

Let me get something straight: That essay was completely fake, right? He/It was lying about everything, and it was some sort of... what?

Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading?

Have we now transitioned to a point where we gaslight everyone for the hell of it just because we can, and call it, what, thought-provoking?

The guy is a fraud https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-open-source-ai-leader-reflect...

Yes. It’s an ad for his product, which nobody had heard of before. I’m not on twitter but I’m seeing it pretty much everywhere now.

What was fake? I don't see anything controversial or factually wrong. I question the prediction but that's his opinion.

I think the claim is that it doesn't represent an authentic personal experience, despite pretending to.

> Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading?

Those numbers are likely greatly exaggerated. Twitter is nowhere near where it was at its peak. You could almost call it a ghost town. Linkedin but for unhinged crypto- and AI bros.

I'm sure the metrics report 80 million views, but that's not 80 million actual individuals that cared about it. The narrative just needs these numbers to get people to buy into the hype.

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