Best of all, unlike a personal account on a platform, it\u2019s easy to go back in and update, if and when the site needs to grow, or the designer has a different sensibility. At some point I can set up a storefront, add more pages, and use S.E.O. tools to improve the ability of the poor souls who Google \u201cMax Read\u201d to find me.<\/p>\n If you need a website, portfolio page, storefront, or nearly anything else, Squarespace is perfect. The only thing it can\u2019t provide is KidPix images my son made.<\/p>\n Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today\u2019s newsletter, a look at the state of A.I. discourse.<\/p>\n A reminder: This newsletter, and all the other newsletters you receive from Read Max, would not exist without the generosity and support of paying subscribers. This newsletter takes work, not least because I am an astonishingly slow thinker and writer, and the money I make from subscriptions allows me to really devote time and care to what I do. If you find it at all enlightening, interesting, educational, funny (?), or just \u201cadequately distracting,\u201d to the extent that you would buy me a beer if you saw me at a bar, consider paying the equivalent in a subscription: $5\/month or $50\/year.<\/p>\n From time to time, in my capacity as a professional assessor of vibes, I like to dip into the A.I. discourse on sites like Bluesky and X.com and evaluate the outlook of the sector based on the metaphors being used to describe the development and significance of the various technologies bundled together under the term \u201cA.I.\u201d What do we think A.I. is most like these days? What is the proper conceptual context to best understand it? <\/p>\n The answer to these questions, lately, at least on the part of the people most interested in and enthusiastic about \u201cA.I.,\u201d is \u201cthe global COVID-19 pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n Nathan \ud83d\udd0e@NathanpmYoung<\/p>\n if you\u2019re walking round SF does it feel like the early days of covid, where it\u2019s clear what\u2019s on everyone\u2019s mind?<\/p>\n 11:35 PM \u00b7 Feb 5, 2026 \u00b7 678K Views<\/p>\n 20 Replies \u00b7 3 Reposts \u00b7 226 Likes<\/p>\n <\/a> Andy Masley@AndyMasley<\/p>\n I know everyone’s saying it’s feeling a lot like February 2020 but it is feeling a lot like February 2020<\/p>\n Derek Thompson @DKThomp<\/p>\n for me the odds that AI is a bubble declined significantly in the last 3 weeks and the odds that we\u2019re actually quite under-built for the necessary levels of inference\/usage went significantly up in that period <\/p>\n basically I think AI is going to become the home screen of a<\/p>\n 10:52 PM \u00b7 Feb 5, 2026 \u00b7 150K Views<\/p>\n 24 Replies \u00b7 27 Reposts \u00b7 727 Likes<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The Wuhan phase of A.I. discourse cycle began bubbling up last week, driven to some extent by impressive results for OpenAI\u2019s state-of-the-art GPT 5.2 model in evaluations<\/a> and the spooky fable of the bots-only Reddit clone \u201cMoltbook,\u201d<\/a> but moreso by the increasingly widespread adoption of the A.I. start-up Anthropic\u2019s command-line developer tool Claude Code and its newer, general-use equivalent, Claude Cowork. These are so-called \u201cagentic\u201d A.I. programs: Tools that can, to a fairly high degree of accuracy and consistency, and with a minimum of oversight or correction, plan and execute multi-step tasks like building an app or organizing files based on natural language commands like those you\u2019d type into a chatbot. <\/p>\n The Claudes Code and Cowork are extremely cool and impressive tools<\/a>, especially to people like me with no real prior coding ability. I had it make me a widget to fetch assets and build posts for Read Max\u2019s regular weekly roundups<\/a>, a task it completed with astonishingly little friction. Admittedly, the widget will only save me 10 or so minutes of busy work every week, but suddenly, a whole host of accumulated but untouched wouldn\u2019t-that-be-nice-to-have ideas for widgets and apps and pages and features has opened itself up to me. <\/p>\n Put another way, these are the first L.L.M. apps to capture broad attention and interest whose most obvious use is not \u201cproducing more slop for the platforms.\u201d For a few years now, the conventional wisdom among savvy pundits has been that A.I. would revolutionize work, but on the evidence it mostly seemed to be revolutionizing spam<\/a> and screen-augmented psychosis. <\/p>\n Now, the revolution is back on. In the visions of pundits like Derek Thompson<\/a>, \u201cAI is going to become the home screen of a ludicrously high percentage of white collar workers in the next two years and parallel agents will be deployed in the battlefield of knowledge work at downright Soviet levels.\u201d (Anthropic, which is particularly focused on enterprise applications, has been a distinct beneficiary of this energy: This week, we were treated to a long and fascinating <\/a>New Yorker <\/a>profile of the company<\/a>, as well as a Times<\/a> interview with its founder, Dario Amodei<\/a>.)<\/p>\n But the let\u2019s-call-it-optimistic feeling gathering over the past six months or so that A.I. might finally be finding a productive and practical form, and that the \u201cslop era\u201d of L.L.M. development might be waning has been matched by a creeping sense of dread. What is cool and impressive to me is, to a certain breed of programmer, a kind of existential dilemma, and, to a certain kind of boss, an obvious opportunity: If we have a bot that can program for us, why do we need to employ programmers? <\/p>\n The paranoid sense that the bottom is about to fall out on employment in the software sector has been cultivated for a while now in the hothouse of A.I. Twitter, and extrapolated out to white-collar work in general: We are all to become casualties on the Battlefield of Knowledge Work, victims of suspicious friendly fire, our deaths covered up by the Knowledge Work Pentagon.<\/p>\n Add to that a short historical memory, and more than a little repetition compulsion, and you begin to understand the attraction of the pandemic metaphor, which reached (let\u2019s hope) its peak on Tuesday with the publication on X.com of a viral essay called \u201cSomething Big Is Happening,\u201d by an A.I. entrepreneur named Matt Shumer, which begins<\/a>:<\/p>\n Think back to February 2020.<\/p>\n If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren\u2019t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they\u2019d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn\u2019t have believed if you\u2019d described it to yourself a month earlier.<\/p>\n I think we\u2019re in the \u201cthis seems overblown\u201d phase of something much, much bigger than Covid. [\u2026]<\/p>\n [N]othing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn\u2019t \u201csomeday.\u201d It\u2019s already started.<\/p>\n I have to confess I find myself taken aback at the popularity of Shumer\u2019s essay–75 million views, according to X.com\u2019s statistics–which contains almost nothing you could not have read at some point in the past year in a thousand identical LinkedIn and Medium posts, all of them designed to one-shot<\/a> bosses. (The last time Shumer got this much attention was when he made fraudulent claims about an L.L.M. he\u2019d trained<\/a>.) Was it the novelty of a Twitter essay? Did Elon\u2019s algorithms over-promote it? Was it the endorsement of Shazam <\/a>star Zachary Levi<\/a>? Did the largely A.I.-generated prose actually \u2026 resonate with people?<\/p>\n In the end I suspect it was just a right-place, right-time kind of a thing: The mood on X.com needed a scary essay about A.I., and here one was for the taking. As John Herrman puts it<\/a>:<\/p>\n [\u2026] it was written and passed along as a necessary, urgent, and awaited work of translation from one world \u2014 where, to put it mildly, people are pretty keyed up \u2014 to another. To that end, it effectively distilled the multiple crazy-making vibes of the AI community into something potent, portable, and ready for external consumption: the collective episodes of manic acceleration and excitement, which dissipate but also gradually accumulate; the open despair and constant invocations of inevitability by nearby workers; the mutual surveillance for signals and clues about big breakthroughs; and, of course, the legions of trailing hustlers and productivity gurus. This last category is represented at the end of 26-year-old Shumer\u2019s post by an unsatisfying litany of advice: \u201cLean into what\u2019s hardest to replace\u201d; \u201cBuild the habit of adapting\u201d; because while this all might sound very disruptive, your \u201cdreams just got a lot closer.\u201d<\/p>\n I have neither the interest nor the ability to address the Shumer essay in any kind of substantive way, except to say that you should not make any kind of changes to your life, career, business, or finances based on something you read in an essay posted to X.com, the Everything App. What I am more interested in is where we are in the A.I. hype cycle and discourse wars. <\/p>\n Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, we\u2019ve been in the midst of a long macro hype cycle in which a number of smaller hype epicycles have already played out. Here\u2019s something I wrote in March 2025 trying to outline the first of these epicycles<\/a>:<\/p>\n Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, A.I. discourse has gone through at least two distinct cycles, at least in terms of how it\u2019s been talked about and understood on social media, and, to a lesser extent, in the popular press. First came the hype cycle, which lasted through most of 2023, during which the loudest voices were prophesying near-term chaos and global societal transformation in the face of unstoppable artificial intelligence<\/a>, and Twitter was dominated by LinkedIn-style A.I. hustle-preneur morons claiming that \u201cAI is going to nuke the bottom third of performers in jobs done on computers \u2014 even creative ones \u2014 in the next 24 months.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n When the much-hyped total economic transformation failed to arrive in the shortest of the promised timeframes–and when too many of the highly visible, actually existing A.I. implementations turned out to be worse-than-useless dogshit<\/a>–a backlash cycle emerged, and the overwhelming A.I. hype on social media was matched by a strong anti-A.I. sentiment. For many people, A.I. became symbolic of a wayward and over-powerful tech industry, and many people who admitted or encouraged the use of A.I., especially in creative fields, was subject to intense criticism<\/a>.<\/p>\n The occasion of that post, which was published not quite a year ago, was the emergence of a \u201cbacklash to the backlash\u201d–the early stages of a new hype epicycle driven by new L.L.M. capabilities and products like Deep Research. The 2025 epicycle reached its own valley late last summer, with the disappointing release of GPT-5<\/a>; now, almost right on cue, we find ourselves at or near the peak of a new epicycle brought on by Claude Cowork–one which, no matter how well deserved, will likely bottom out later this year or early next as the practical limitations of agentic A.I.–whatever they really end up being–become clear through extended use, and as excitement gives way to habituation.<\/p>\n That we are in a relatively familiar place on the hype graph, however, doesn\u2019t mean that nothing has changed. At a very basic level, time has passed. \u201cA.I.\u201d has advanced by basically any metric–scope, speed, ability, accuracy, reliability; at the same time it\u2019s been the subject of extensive practical use, deployment, and experimentation. And, maybe most importantly for the specific interests of this newsletter, the fact that we now have some experience with this software paradigm means the way we\u2019re talking about A.I. is changing. <\/p>\n This time last year, at the height of the backlash-to-the-backlash, \u201cartificial general intelligence\u201d was on the tip of every booster\u2019s tongue and everyone was (reportedly) asking each other \u201ccan you feel the A.G.I.?\u201d This time around, \u201cA.G.I.\u201d doesn\u2019t seem to be coming up as much, despite the fact that the current state of the technology makes a much greater claim on the idea. Instead, the operative framework for understanding where A.I. is headed is \u201cremember the week that the N.B.A. shut down?\u201d <\/p>\n The pandemic is not a cheery metaphor, precisely, but it is a practical one: An experience everyone participating in the discourse has lived through. The world on the other side of the pandemic is different–worse–but not unrecognizably so. For all that the \u201cit\u2019s February 2020!\u201d claim is meant to alarm and disquiet its readers, it\u2019s not really a messianic or eschatological fable but a social and economic parallel, and I think its popularity is, counterintuitively, an admission that even as A.I. continues to make impressive advances, the range of credible futures is narrowing.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/1a27c179-3681-4759-9c09-35242b835b69_1210.png\")
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