Matt Shumer's AI Uber Alles hypefest a few days ago may have had everything to do with AI co. fundraising rounds

[highplainsdem]

It was certainly timed right for Anthropic, whose fundraising was initially expected to bring in $10 billion last week, then went to an expectation of $20 billion early this week, and soared to $30 billion a few days later after Shumer's hysterical ad for AI got tens of millions of views on X.

And OpenAI has another fundraising round coming soon.

Those are the companies whose AI models Shumer praised to the skies, saying that everyone should be using their most expensive AI models. It was quite a sales pitch.

And hardly the first time fear has been used to hype AI. Though in the past the fear AI companies used as leverage was fear of superintelligent AI getting out of control unless the right companies (theirs) developed it first, or fear of the US losing the AI race to China.

That fearmongering wasn't generating a lot of subscriptions to their AI products, though. AI companies are still losing money, circular financing has been happening, datacenters and AI in general are looked upon less favorably, while the AI companies desperately need to raise more money.

So, just in time, what to everyone's eyes did appear but a hysterical warning that AI would put almost everyone out of work in the very near future, and the ONLY way of avoiding that economic apocalypse would be to subscribe to the most expensive AI model they could afford (and buy AI stocks, too, as the AI Cassandra named Matt Shumer warned in a reply in his X thread).

And wow, did that warning go viral.

Shumer isn't nearly well enough known to explain why it went viral, but I have read that it was widely circulated by AI bros - and presumably their investors.

I don't know whether any payment to Shumer from any of the AI companies might've been involved.

But AI companies spent over $1 billion on digital advertising last year, paying social media influencers as much as several hundred thousand dollars each to promote AI use:

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creators-500000-and-more-to-promote-ai.html

What do you suppose a post like Matt Shumer's would have been worth to them?

[Ilikepurple]

1. Yeah, when I saw a hyperbolic article by him on the top of my news feed, I thought funding pitch

I know we have to rely on industry experts to analyze their industries, but it’s long seemed that to much deference is given to their often self serving opinions. I immediately thought AI industry must need a serious injection of capital or a faster uptake the use of its products. Fake it until you make it or some variance seems to be an effectual business plan. Venture capitalists seem to have a lot of patience since the tech boom because the payoff can be so high.