Five takeaways from an unhinged AI discourse
What's behind the feverish AI discourse? Who thinks "AI is fake"? Is "the left" wrong to dismiss AI? Is that even what's happening? What's really going on with AI in 2026.
The AI discourse has been particularly, let’s say, “heated” lately. It’s hitting a lot of the beats we’ve heard before—people are not ready for what’s coming, critics are too dismissive, and at everyone’s peril, “the left” is getting AI all wrong, etc—but delivered at a fever pitch.
A viral, AI-generated blog post on X called “Something Big Is Happening,” by Matt Shumer, a CEO of an AI company, was one catalyst, though it builds off sentiments articulated in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s much longer essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” which makes a similar if more indulgent and nuanced case, plus all the AI Super Bowl ads, and the hype drummed up by Moltbook, the ‘reddit for AI agents’ created by yet another AI CEO, that was the talk of the town until it was revealed that it exposed the user data of everyone involved and that many of the most interesting threads were actually written by humans. Underneath it all was more organic buzz produced by Anthropic’s coding tools, which users, journalists and commentators are blogging and podcasting about. But the Something Big blog, with 83 million views and counting, burst the dam.
The gist should be plenty familiar to BITM readers and AI watchers at this point: Tremendous social change, driven by AI, is about to unfold, and people simply aren’t prepared. (Per the post’s central conceit, we are in the early pandemic days when things are about to change forever.) Yet the blog did that special thing that blogs blogged at just the right time and place can do: they inspire people to react particularly strongly on social media in a way that inspires other people to react strongly to the reaction, and then all bets were off and everyone was sharing what they think about AI, and more specifically their frustrations with what everyone else thinks about AI. That many had been preoccupied with what was happening with ICE and Minneapolis and the release of more of the Epstein files also probably meant lots of those AI thoughts had been pent up for a month or two, and contributed to the unusual force through which they were released.
It has been a rich and sprawling text, to say the least. To help make sense of it, here are the five major takeaways from the most heated AI discourse in a minute, as far as I’m concerned:
There is a distinct material basis for all this discourse. We’re in the midst of another concerted, industry-led hype cycle, this time driven more visibly by Anthropic, which just landed a $30 billion investment round.
This time the hype must transcend multibillion dollar investment deals: It must also raise the stock of AI companies ahead of scheduled IPOs later this year and help lay the groundwork for federal funding and/or bailout backing.
Much of the discourse centered on lambasting critics who accuse AI of being “fake”—but this is a straw man argument that serves the industry.
