If that viral essay on AI had been printed in paper, there’s a good chance that AI researcher Gary Marcus would have torn it up in disgust.
Marcus acknowledges that something is happening with AI, but it’s nowhere near the scale described in a recent viral essay that predicted an impending disruption “worse than coronavirus.”
Marcus criticized an essay written by entrepreneur and investor Matt Schumer in X as “devoid of a shred of actual data,” but he dismissed the content as alarming in an interview with Business Insider.
“Exaggerated views can put us in a bad situation, leading to things like severe economic recession,” Marcus told Business Insider. “And I think we should be working on the facts rather than just trying to sound the alarm.”
In an essay titled “Something Big is Happening,” Schumer, who previously founded a startup selling subscription-based AI-assisted writing tools, warned that AI will transform not just software engineering, but most jobs done “on a screen.” Schumer also owns a small VC fund.
Marcus said AI will replace some workers and impact employment, but the process will be much slower than Schumer and others have described.
AI does some things well and can help speed things up, but Marcus says it’s far from replacing humans.
“AI can sometimes do a small part of a task, making it faster for humans and others, but it’s unlikely that AI will do everything a human can do in a given area,” he told Business Insider. “This will change over time. Just to be clear, it’s likely that AI will replace a large portion of human labor over the next century, but it’s unlikely to be replaced in the next year or two.”
Marcus said companies that tried too quickly to replace jobs with AI were likely to end up in a similar position as Klarna. In 2024, Klarna touted an AI assistant that could perform the work of 700 people. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, a long-time supporter of AI, said that by May 2025, Swedish fintechs are leaning towards hiring real talent.
“After six months or a year, they come back with their tails between their legs because they’ve learned that the AI systems don’t work as well as humans,” Marcus said. “So I’m not saying there’s nothing happening. I’m not saying these AI systems don’t have value, but it’s too early.”
Marcus said the likely short-term outcome is not that AI will replace lower-level employees, but rather that executives believe AI is capable of doing so, which could end up being a costly gamble.
“I think the biggest thing that junior employees have to worry about right now is a misconception by executives that these techniques are working better than they actually are,” Marcus said.
As of Friday morning, Schumer’s post had been viewed more than 80 million times on X alone. In a post on Substack laying out his criticisms, Marcus called Schumer’s post “weaponized hype.”
“I think the general impression he conveys is basically that the sky is falling right now, and I think at best what’s actually happening is that the younger generation is under some sort of threat, and I think that threat is actually overstated,” Marcus told Business Insider.
Schumer previously told Business Insider that he wrote his essay in part to reach people like his father who are skeptical of AI or avoid it altogether. He felt he had to warn them about what was about to happen, “even if there was only a 20% chance of it happening.”
Marcus’ biggest criticism of Schumer’s post is that it doesn’t take into account current data and research that shows AI still has a long way to go, and doesn’t provide the full context behind the famous model evaluation and threat research graphs that measure AI progress.
He said other studies, including a paper published in June 2025 by Apple’s Machine Learning Research Group, have found there are limits to what current models can do.
Marcus also said that many leading AI CEOs who have made bold predictions about the future of work have failed to deliver on their past predictions. He points to xAI CEO Elon Musk’s often rosy forecasts for the number of robotaxis Tesla will put on the roads (Musk once said 1 million by 2020) and Nobel laureate Jeffrey Hinton’s 2016 statement that the world should stop training radiologists. (Last May, Hinton told the New York Times that his predictions were poorly worded and wrong on the timeline, but that the general direction for AI’s capabilities in radiology was correct.)
“They’ve all learned to sell the rosiest picture possible, but the media rarely criticizes them,” Marcus told Business Insider.
On Thursday, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleiman made a splash by predicting that most, if not all, white-collar jobs could be automated within the next 18 months.
One of the industries Suleiman mentioned was accounting. Marcus is not convinced.
“Think specifically about accounting,” he told Business Insider. “Even one mistake can cost a client hundreds of thousands of dollars or send you to jail. Accounting is a business built on accuracy. If you aren’t accurate, you won’t be in business.”
