Matt Shumer reached out to me before publishing his viral essay. I'm glad I waited to read it.

"Something Big Is Happening” racked up over 75 million views—but it’s a breathless argument built on shaky assumptions, and it shows how hard it’s becoming to separate signal from hype in AI discourse

On Monday, AI influencer and CEO Matt Shumer reached out to say he was writing an article to explain to the average person “what’s going on in AI and how it’s going to affect them.” He asked whether Fortune runs opinion pieces, and I passed him along to the appropriate editors.

He also asked if I wanted to read a draft. I declined—and I’m glad I waited to read it until “Something Big Is Happening” had already racked up nearly a million views on X. (Full disclosure: Fortune did end up running a shorter version of the piece.)

In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t read it before publication, because I probably would have pushed back on the breathless tone (“bigger than Covid”), the hyped-up framing (“The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy”), and the sweeping claims built on shaky assumptions (“We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next”). As a longtime editor, I also might have suggested some tightening. The piece runs more than 5,000 words.

Of course, then it might not have gotten even close to those 75 million views.

As it happens, I’m glad my colleague Jeremy Kahn took the time to weigh in with a critique of the essay today, focusing on Shumer’s assertion that what’s happened in coding is a prequel for what will happen in other fields—and that this shift will unfold within just a few years. Kahn sees that timeline as wrong, even though he himself wrote a book—Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future—arguing that AI would massively transform knowledge work by 2029, something he still believes.

“I just don’t think the full automation of processes that we are starting to see with coding is coming to other fields as quickly as Shumer contends,” Kahn wrote. “He may be directionally right, but the dire tone of his missive strikes me as fear-mongering, and based largely on faulty assumptions.”

What’s been most frustrating to me is how difficult it’s become to separate real industry signals from overwrought hype. Every hot take explodes into a narrative cascade—mega-threads, podcasts, YouTube takedowns, extravagant quote-tweets—until it’s hard to remember what the original claim even was.

Shumer says he wrote the post as a warning to friends and family about how their jobs are about to be radically upended. In a follow-up post, he clarified: “To be very, very clear: I didn’t write this to scare people. I just think it’s our duty—those of us in the AI space—to share what we’re seeing so people at least have a sense of what may be happening.”

But the reality is that we don’t yet know how this story will play out—and I worry that framing uncertainty as inevitability risks leaving people not prepared, but disoriented and confused. The hardest thing to do may be to sit with and work with uncertainty—and resist turning it into prophecy.