"White Collar Jobs Are Next!" - Mustafa Suleyman

**Beth** (0:00)
Hey, everybody, welcome. It is February 12th, 2026 You are watching or listening to The Daily AI Show, and this is episode 659 We're 670 tomorrow, very nice. No, 659 plus one is 660, we're 660 tomorrow. All right. Thanks to Cisco and Jeff already in the chat. Cisco is strapped in and ready to learn. Love this and hey, Jude, Andy, you weren't here yesterday, but we did a really big deep dive into Matt Schumer's essay about getting ready and the importance of the message to get ready in what's just dropped, which needs a little bit of explanation for people outside of the coding world.
But that also means we didn't touch any news. So is there something you want to say about the Matt Schumer or do you have a news story that we should just-

**Andy** (1:03)
Well, I followed that yesterday. Principally, the thing that I would add that I don't know many have talked about is that Gary Marcus, he was a skeptic on a lot of the hype wheels that turn out there in the world of AI.
He posted an e-mail basically about Matt Schumer's gushing anticipation of the dramatic changes and said it's not all that. And Gary Marcus has been, you know, historically, he's turned out to be somewhat right around the whole question of whether LLMs generally are going to be capable enough to achieve artificial general intelligence. And he's a major proponent of moving towards alternatives like neuro-symbolic AI. He feels that we'll have to not abandon LLMs, they'll have their place, but in order to get to the true systems, we'll have to follow a different path. And a number of the major thought leaders in AI, like those who have gone out and formed world model type development agencies, those folks are in alignment with what Gary Marcus is saying. It's not enough to just have an LLM. And so the forecasts like the ones that Matt Schumer predicts, you know, are likely not, you know, going to come to pass. At least they won't come to pass as quickly as they suggest. And I have, you know, a related story that I want to kind of spend a little bit of time on about Mustafa Suleyman, who's another important player in this world. But let me turn it back to you, Beth. I'll add that later. But Mustafa has also put out a warning, and I'll provide the credentials behind which he, you know, puts forward this warning about just how disruptive AI is going to be with respect to human work.

**Beth** (3:12)
Right. And that, I think, if we look across the multi-messages, is kind of the underlying message. It's not that everybody's prediction is accurate in terms of when it's going to happen, who it's going to happen for, those kinds of things.
But it is important to at least be entertaining the conversation. What's happening in the chat is Jeff is saying Gary Marcus is a wet blanket, but sometimes we need a dose of wet blanket. And Cisco has said wet blankets are actually useful during fires. So, no, all right.

**Andy** (3:56)
So, let me just hit one other one here, a news item that I think is interesting, and that is QuitGPT.
So, there's a movement forming out there called QuitGPT. And it's grown in one week from 112,000 people signing onto it, to 700,000 supporters. It urges users to cancel OpenAI ChatGPT accounts over OpenAI's political ties, because in September, just a few months ago, FEC filing showed that OpenAI president Greg Brockman donated 25 million to Trump's MAGA Inc. Super PAC. And it's like, oh, this is where our subscription revenue is going. And if you really want to be an activist, then you are being invited to move over to another model and quit your ChatGPT subscription. So I think that's just an interesting thing that's fomented out there. I don't know that a lever displays a sufficient number of free and paid users of ChatGPT to move the needle, but it's interesting. Actor Mark Ruffalo endorsed the campaign on Instagram, and his post received more than 1.5 million likes.

**Beth** (5:26)
Right. And just to be clear, Jeff is also pointing out, that was specifically from Greg, that was a personal.

**Andy** (5:33)
Absolutely. Now, where did his personal money come from though, is I guess the point.

**Beth** (5:38)
Right. There does seem to be more activism that I'm seeing in a different way. Higgsfield's account got suspended on X, and I mentioned this before, but there were a couple of X users specifically kind of running their own campaign of talking to the people who were posting about Higgsfield. One of the complaints was that Higgsfield makes an offer. It's pretty easy to get into their creator program. You get an assignment about what you want, what they're looking for in the promo that you're doing. But then you need to say that you're doing it for a paid promotion, because that's actually the law when you're doing something for a paid promotion. I believe part of why that isn't necessarily happening is that it's kind of a competition. You do it, you post it, you then submit it to them, and maybe they pay you, right?