And within the last hour we posted that Spotify had validated in real life exactly what the essay said: "Spotify says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December, thanks to AI"
From Business Insider February 13:
- Gary Marcus said Matt Shumer's viral essay about the future of AI missed the mark.
- The AI researcher said Shumer didn't grapple with the current limitations of AI models.
- "I think that one should work from the facts rather than just trying to cause an alarm," Marcus told Business Insider.
If that viral essay about AI had been printed on paper, there's a good chance AI researcher Gary Marcus would've ripped it up in disgust.
Marcus acknowledges something is happening in AI — just nowhere near the scale described in the recently viral essay, which predicted a looming disruption "worse than COVID."
Marcus, who on X criticized the essay written by entrepreneur and investor Matt Shumer as having "not a shred of actual data," dismissed its contents as alarmist in an interview with Business Insider.
"Hyped-up views have gotten us into a bad place, possibly one that's going to lead to a serious economic recession or something like that," Marcus told Business Insider. "And I guess I think that one should work from the facts rather than just trying to cause an alarm."
In his essay titled "Something Big is Happening," Shumer, whose past startup sells a subscription-based AI-assisted writing tool, warned that AI would upend not just software engineering, but most jobs done "on a screen." Shumer also has a small VC fund.
Marcus said that while AI will replace some labor and affect jobs, the process will be much slower than what Schumer and others are describing.
AI can do some things well and help speed up work, but it's just not near the point of replacing humans, Marcus said.
"AI can do a small subset of the tasks, and that sometimes speeds up human beings and things like that, but it rarely does all of what a human being can do in any particular domain," he told Business Insider. "This will change over time, just to be clear. It is likely that AI will replace most human labor over the next century, but it's not likely that it will over the next year or two."
Companies that move too quickly to replace jobs with AI are likely to find themselves in a similar position as Klarna, Marcus said. In 2024, Klarna touted an AI assistant that could do the equivalent work of 700 people. By May 2025, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, long a proponent of AI, said the Swedish fintech was leaning back into recruiting actual people.
"Six months or a year later, they come back with their tails between their legs because it turns out that the AI systems don't do things as well as the human," Marcus said. "So, I'm not saying that there's nothing going on. I'm not saying that there's no value in these AI systems, but they're premature."
Marcus said that the more likely outcome in the short-term is not that AI will replace junior employees but rather that executives think it's capable of doing so — and make what could ultimately prove to be a costly gamble.
"The biggest thing I think junior people have to worry about right now is a misapprehension by the C-suite that these techniques work better than they actually do," Marcus said.
As of Friday morning, Shumer's post has been viewed more than 80 million times on X alone. In a Substack post expanding on his criticisms, Marcus called Schumer's post "weaponized hype."....
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