The AI ​​industry has a serious Chicken Little problem

Entrepreneur Matt Shumer’s essay, “Something Big Happens,” is going mega-viral on X, with 42 million views and counting.

The piece warns that rapid advances in the AI ​​industry in recent weeks threaten to change the world as we know it. Schumer compares the current moment to the weeks and months leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, and says most people won’t hear the warning “until late at night.”

We’ve heard warnings like this before from AI killers, but Shumer wants us to believe that this time the world is truly shifting beneath our feet.

“But it’s time now,” he writes. “Not in a ‘finally we have to talk like this.’

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Unfortunately for Schumer, we’ve heard warnings like this before. We’ve heard it over and over again and again and again and again and again and again and again. In time, some of these predictions will surely come true – many smarter people than I certainly believe they will – but I’m not changing my plans for the weekend to build a basement.

The AI ​​industry now has a huge Chicken Little problem, making it difficult to take serious warnings like this very seriously. Because, as I have written before, when an AI entrepreneur tells you that AI is a technology that will change the world in the order of COVID-19 or the agricultural revolution, you should take this message for what it really is – a sales pitch.

Don’t make me tap my sign.

Why are people so worried about AI right now

Shumer’s article states that the latest AI models being developed from OpenAI and Anthropic can already do much of his work.

“Here’s something that no one outside of technology really understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm now is because this has happened we. We do not make predictions. We tell you what has happened in our operations, and we warn you that you are following.”

The post clearly impressed X. Across the political spectrum, top accounts with millions of followers shared the post as an urgent warning.

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To understand Shumer’s post, you need to understand big concepts like AGI and Singularity. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a hypothetical AI system that “has human-like intelligence and can perform any intellectual task that a human can.” Singularity refers to the limit at which technology develops itself, allowing it to become more advanced.

Shumer is right that there are good reasons to think that progress has been made in both AGI and the Singularity.

The latest OpenAI coding model, GPT-5.3-Codex, helped create them. Anthropic made similar claims about a recent product launch. And there’s no denying that generative AI is now so good at coding that it’s shrinking the job market for entry-level coders.

It is certainly true that generative AI is developing rapidly and will have a major impact on everyday life, the labor market, and the future.

Still, it’s hard to believe the weather report from Chicken Little. And it’s even harder to believe everything a car salesman tells you about the amazing new convertible that just hit the dealership lot.

Indeed, as Shumer’s posts proliferated, critics of AI joined the fray.

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It is not yet time to panic

There are many reasons to doubt Shumer’s claims. In the essay, he gives two specific examples of AI’s emerging capabilities – its ability to consult lawyers on par with top lawyers, and its ability to create, test, and delete apps.

Let’s look at the application argument first:

I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Get the user flow, the design, everything.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that was not thought of last year, it opens the application itself. It clicks buttons. Checks features. It uses the app as a human would. If it doesn’t like the way something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, itself. It iterates, as an engineer would, tweaking and refining until it’s satisfied. Only when it has determined that the application meets its standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I check it, it’s usually perfect.

I am not exaggerating. How was my Monday this week.

Does this sound impressive? Absolutely!

At the same time, it’s a running joke in the tech world that you can just get an app everything. (“There’s an app for that.”) That means coding models can model their work on tens of thousands of existing apps. Will the world really be irreversibly changed because we now have the ability to create new applications so quickly?

Let’s look at the official claim, where Shumer says that AI is “like having a team [lawyers] There’s just one problem: Lawyers across the country are being accused of using AI. A lawyer who tracks AI ideas in the legal profession has found 912 documented cases so far.

It’s hard to swallow warnings about AGI when even the most advanced LLMs are completely incapable of fact-checking. According to OpenAI’s own documentation, its latest model, GPT-5.2, has a hallucination rate of 10.9 percent. Even if it is given Internet access to check its activity, it is still visible 5.8 percent of the time. Can you trust someone who only sees six percent of the time?

Yes, it’s possible that a fast forward jump is just around the corner. But it’s also possible that the AI ​​industry will quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. And there are good reasons to believe that the latter is likely. This week, OpenAI introduced ads to ChatGPT, a tactic it called “the last resort.” OpenAI also introduced a new “ChatGPT for adults” mode to let people engage in sensual play through Chat. That is definitely not the behavior of a company that we would unleash great AI intelligence on an unsuspecting world.

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This article expresses the author’s opinion.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringes Ziff Davis’s copyright in training and using its AI programs.