Earlier this week, I sent my parents and siblings the widely shared essay by Matt Shumer called Something Big is Happening (or, “The Essay That Launched a Thousand Blog Posts,” as I’ve come to call it). I texted them the link and wrote, “Please read this. It isn’t hyperbole.” I don’t usually send my family 5,000-word essays by AI insiders, in case you were wondering.
If you haven’t read it, check it out. It’s the kind of essay that makes its way from Silicon Valley group chats to mahjong tables and insurance company break rooms.
I don’t mean that as a diss. In fact, quite the opposite. The reason it’s launched a thousand blog posts is that it has touched a nerve among people who don’t live in the AI bubble where I dwell. Shumer has put his finger on something that is connecting for people in a way that all the breathless coverage of the latest AI IPOs and Super Bowl commercials have not. It’s made something big and amorphous seem suddenly close and tangible.
Part of it is the simple way Shumer says things with enormous implications: “This might be the most important year of your career.” and “Get your financial house in order.”
But it's also that his essay reflects a wider trend in AI Land over the last few weeks, where a pattern has started to emerge. In the same span of days:
When technologists, economists, safety researchers, journalists, and Ivy League professors all start sounding urgent at the same time, that’s not noise.
That’s signal.
And yet, much of the daily conversation still revolves around smaller things: which model is marginally better at coding, which startup just raised at a $3B valuation, whether a generated image has an extra finger, whether an email sounds “too AI.”
It reminds me of the moment I wrote about recently — AI’s “magical realism” phase — when people nitpick em dashes while missing the larger miracle unfolding in front of them.
This feels similar. But more consequential.
If you read all of these articles, then zoom out and turn the AI hype dial down from 11, we’re left with one inescapable fact: AI is changing the way we live, yet almost none of us understand that.
We use AI to write better emails, summarize meeting notes, and create silly caricatures of ourselves because those are comfortable doorways into the AI conversation. But what lies on the other side of those doors is a world so vast and so misunderstood that the people who are closest to the center are starting to shoot off signal flares to get people to pay attention.
I consider myself an AI optimist and realist, so I don’t subscribe to the idea that the sky is falling. Nor do I think that AI is just hype that will fade away.
But when I look at the stories that have come out in the last few weeks, I do see a pattern worth paying attention to.
And patterns are what leaders should pay attention to.
This isn’t a call to panic. It’s a call to perspective.
If 2026 truly ends up being one of the most consequential years of your career, it won’t be because of a single model release. It will be because of how prepared — or unprepared — your organization was to respond to a structural shift already underway.
The real risk isn’t doom. It’s distraction and delay.