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Matt Scherer

@matthewus.bsky.social
633 followers 43 following 50 posts

Advocate and researcher focused on fighting corporate power and building workers’ technology rights. Fellow at OMI. Posts reflect my own views.

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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
🎶For his historical knowledge, though he's plucky and adventury, has only been brought down to the beginning of last century.🎶
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 03/10/2026
Columnist Stephen Rattner probably got screwed over by the headline writer, but I'm seriously floored at how poor a job these six charts do at showing that we need AI.
nytimes.com
Opinion | Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I. (Gift Article)
All the worry about artificial intelligence should not obscure this key point: If we don’t develop it, we’ll be a lot worse off.
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Adam Becker @adambecker.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Remember, Kevin Roose also wrote "The Latecomer's Guide to Crypto," which was methodically debunked by @molly.wiki and others in this brilliant piece. I don't understand why anyone takes him seriously about anything at this point. He's far too credulous to be a good journalist.
mollywhite.net
The (Edited) Latecomer's Guide to Crypto
A group of cryptocurrency researchers and critics annotate the irresponsible cryptocurrency puff piece that was originally published in the New York Times.
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Adam Becker @adambecker.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
@aoc.bsky.social just put out a great statement on AI. Refreshing to see a major politician on the left nail this. "Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity. But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves." 🎯
Charles,

Last weekend, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the largest Al companies in the world, publicly asked his industry to slow down Al development.

Shortly after, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAl, followed suit. Then Elon Musk.

This all came days after an Anthropic researcher quit, citing his belief that this technology could wipe out humanity and that Al companies are "gambling with our lives."

For years, people have warned that generative Al could slip out of our direct control.

Those safety concerns must be taken seriously.

And this is why I have advocated for strict safety standards on how Al is built and deployed, public oversight over this technology, and using existing laws to hold these companies accountable when they cause harm.

But I want to draw your attention to another reality: Right now, the U.S. economy and our financial futures are riding on Silicon Valley's bet that Al will soon be immensely profitable and pay off. And that bet isn't looking good.

The formula for a profitable business isn't complicated: make more money than you spend. But the biggest Al companies aren't doing that. They are spending hundreds of billions per year on data centers, chips, and other costs while their ability to make revenues that exceed their already-immense sunk costs are unclear. Experts estimate that these Al companies will require another $600 billion of debt just to financethemselves in 2026 alone. That is more than the entire budgets of the U.S. Departments of Justice, Transportation, & Education combined.
Meanwhile, despite almost every single one of these companies not turning a profit & having sunk billions of investor dollars in development of data centers & other infrastructure, Al companies are also on a spending spree of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying & dark money in our elections.
It would be one thing if we were discussing a few private companies with a poor business model. But last year, virtually all stock market gains - 80% - rested entirely on just a handful of Al companies.
That tells us two things:
1. Nearly the entire U.S. economy outside the Al industry is relatively stagnating and faring poorly & the gains from these few companies are disguising it; &
2. Millions of people's retirements - including their pensions, 401ks, & investments - are potentially exposed to this risk.
That's why these Al companies' dubious financial positions matter to working people.
These companies argue that debt is necessary. They'll tell you that building transformative technologies requires upfront capital, & that massive borrowing today will pay off in generating unprecedented prosperity tomorrow.
But this is not the typical debt that startups take on while they build out a company. We are talking about billions going on trillions of dollars leveraged with no indication that these companies will be able to recoup these funds profitably. And they are increasingly looking to the government as their source of cash.
In an effort to hide their debt, tech companies have been relying on "circular financing" where tech giants like Google, Amazon, & Microsoft give billions to Al startups like OpenAl & Anthropic, only for those startups to hand that money right back to buy Al processing power.
In other words, these Al companies are luring in new investors by making it look like their financials are healthier than they really are.What's even worse is that retirement & pension funds are key to supporting this illusion.
When the Al companies issue bonds to raise more money, your pension funds & retirement accounts are some of the biggest buyers. When Musk's Al business went public, it became part of index funds where millions of Americans invest our savings. Many Americans don't even know that their retirement investments are tied up in these companies at all.
From Big Tech's perspective, that's a feature, not a bug. By tying our futures to their reckless gambling, Al billionaires are trying to make themselves too big to fail. They think they can take such dangerous risks because we will bail them out if things go wrong.
Sound familiar? This scene is dangerously reminiscent of the rampant speculation, corruption, & broken incentives leading up to the 2008 financial crisis that plunged millions of working class Americans into financial chaos that we never fully recovered from.
It is no accident that these warnings from Altman & Amodei come months-if not weeks-before these companies were meant to go public.
When companies go public, they have to be more transparent about how they are doing financially. And after a waiting period, they typically have to let private investors-like their own employees-sell their shares.
The New York Times recently confirmed that OpenAl has postponed going public for this very reason. They are in no rush for the truth about their finances to come out.
But the moment these oligarchs began to seek our public tax dollars & public contracts while exposing their companies to public pension funds & investments, they opened themselves to public accountability & scrutiny.
Silicon Valley billionaires have rigged the game & are attempting to shift their financial risk to working people: If they're right about Al's potential, they reap the profits. If they're wrong & the bubble bursts, they are setting up the American people to pick up the tab.
Heads, they win; tails, we lose.We can stop this, and we shouldn't play their game. Together we can address both the economic and safety threats of unrestricted Al development and prevent financial chaos and stabilize market risk.

We must make it clear now that should the Al bubble pop, Congress should not bail out Big Tech.

And across our federal agencies, we have the authorities and tools to hold Al companies and their leaders accountable for releasing dangerous, unvetted, and defective products. We must not wait.

Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that Al robots will destroy humanity.

But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves.

It's time we hold them accountable.

Thank you for reading.

In solidarity,

Alexandria
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 18/09/2026
This is horrifying. Please join me in calling for an immediate return to getting our false intelligence about WMDs from the CIA and other organic sources.
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DreamingAgainstTheMachine @dreamingagainstthemachine.com · 02/09/2026
The AI bubble could produce the worst economic disaster we’ve ever seen. @matthewus.bsky.social with @openmarkets.bsky.social is our guest this week. Listen now. #ai #datmpodcast #future #science #aibubble #stockmarket #crash @multitudeshows.com @adambecker.bsky.social
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Hard Reset @hardresetmedia.com · 20/07/2026
In his latest for Hard Reset, @matthewus.bsky.social asks why is it that, four years after ChatGPT’s release, generative AI has not yet improved productivity at either the level of individual companies or across the economy as a whole? www.hardresetmedia.com/p/the-ai-pro...
hardresetmedia.com
The AI Productivity Illusion
Productivity Is About (Much) More than Finishing Tasks Quickly
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Stop me if you've heard these ones before: "AI has 10Xed my productivity!" "Of course AI increases productivity--I can finish projects in hours that used to take weeks!" Read my latest column for @hardresetmedia.com to find out why such comments miss the point on AI and productivity.
hardresetmedia.com
The AI Productivity Illusion
Productivity Is About (Much) More than Finishing Tasks Quickly
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Hi! Zeynep is a computer programmer actually. Just one who decided after awhile to focus on the social impacts.
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Hard Reset @hardresetmedia.com · 06/07/2026
In his first for Hard Reset, @matthewus.bsky.social compares the current AI moment to a little known technology from 75 years ago that was supposed to revolutionize the auto industry: www.hardresetmedia.com/p/are-we-bet...
hardresetmedia.com
Are We Betting the Economy on a Doomed Technology?
If generative AI turns out to be a dud, it could be our economy that goes up in flames.
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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 03/06/2026
“Unfortunately, the policymakers best-positioned to sound the alarm are ignoring the rapidly growing AI bubble because they are too distracted by Silicon Valley’s sci-fi-esque prophecies.”
lpeproject.org
The Real AI Threat is the Bubble, not the Apocalypse
The most pressing AI-driven crisis is the overestimation of AI’s capabilities and impacts, which has produced a historically large speculative AI bubble. To safeguard against this economic catastrophe...
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
In today's episode of, "I totally get why people are cynical about politics and see conspiracies everywhere." www.axios.com/2026/05/29/a...
axios.com
How AI, crypto and AIPAC are ending political careers
Eight of the 12 biggest outside spenders in House primaries fall into one of those three groups.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
How should we handle it when the AI bubble bursts? On the next MAIHT3k livestream, @matthewus.bsky.social joins me and @alexhanna.bsky.social to discuss how we can avoid bailing out billionaires. Monday, June 1, noon PT twitch.tv/dair_institute
twitch.tv
dair_institute - Twitch
Twitch account for The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).
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The Capitol Forum @capitolforum.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Next week’s conference calls: May 26: Katie Van Dyck (@openmarkets.bsky.social) on sports media costs & antitrust May 28: Matthew Scherer (@econliberties.bsky.social) on AI spending & bubble risks May 29: Weekly Tech Policy Briefing Series 👉 RSVP: thecapitolforum.com/events/?utm_...
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
That is bad for multiple reasons, not least that it means policymakers are not paying attention to the growing threat from the AI bubble, which has grown so big that it could bring down the economy if/when it bursts. Policymakers need to recalibrate and push back on AI hype before it's too late.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Check out my new piece for @lpeproject.bsky.social. My argument in a nutshell: Everyone in DC has been AI-pilled and sucked in by Silicon Valley's sci-fi fantasies--even policymakers who normally reject the self-serving narratives that emerge from corporate America. lpeproject.org/blog/the-rea...
lpeproject.org
The Real AI Threat is the Bubble, not the Apocalypse
The most pressing AI-driven crisis is the overestimation of AI’s capabilities and impacts, which has produced a historically large speculative AI bubble. To safeguard against this economic catastrophe...
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
...A week earlier, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. President and Chief Operating Officer John Waldron described his firm’s traditional operations as a 'human assembly line' ripe for automation." [2/2] www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
bloomberg.com
Bank Executives’ AI Talk Takes Frightening Turn for Workers
Wall Street leaders’ rhetoric about the impact of artificial intelligence on their firms has taken a dystopian turn.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
And remember, this is what Wall Street execs think of their *own* workers... --------- "At Standard Chartered Plc, CEO Bill Winters said Tuesday he’s replacing 'lower-value human capital' with financial and technology capital to cut 8,000 support roles over the next four years... [1/2]
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
It’s a little experiment. Trying to meet people where they are in terms of how they “read” things these days.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Check out my new report with @openmarkets.bsky.social, “No Bailouts for Big Tech Billionaires: Policies for when the AI bubble bursts.” The title gives you a sense of its content. Available in audio/podcast form on Spotify, in addition to text!
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
To be clear, the alternative in our messed-up system is still worse. But it's hard not to empathize with people who don't see the point in participating in a system where the choice is between a party that actively pushes for exploitation and one that is *openly* too beholden to donors to stop it.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
If you want to know why people don’t trust Democrats despite the Trump administration being awful, here you go. The party establishment is literally telling policymakers to ignore their constituents because the important thing is not pissing off wealthy donors. www.ft.com/content/7529...
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
Don't you just love the smell of insider trading in the morning? www.cnbc.com/2026/03/23/v...
cnbc.com
Volume in stock and oil futures surged minutes before Trump's market-turning post
The timing of the earlier volume spikes — across both equities and crude — caught the attention of traders.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
It's nice to see it spelled out so explicitly. The only interests most policymakers care about when it comes to tech policy are those of corporations and billionaires. Advocates for consumers and workers aren't even at the table. Legislating is merely an exercise in balancing corporate interests.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
The Tyranny of Quantification means that unless we can be readily reduced to data, we don't matter. Only corporate profits do. (3/3)
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
After all, cost to a business of complying with a regulation can be easily quantified. The value of a human life and reductions in our quality of life cannot. Rather than come up with a system that factors it in, corporate interests argue we should therefore ignore them entirely. (2/3)
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
This is a particularly extreme and galling example of what I call the Tyranny of Quantification, where corporate interests argue that policy should be based solely on easy-to-quantify metrics. That inherently favors corporate interests. (1/3)
nytimes.com
E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 02/11/2025
In all seriousness, that was the best World Series since at least 1991. And the best Game 7 ever.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
Everything makes sense now futurism.com/future-socie...
futurism.com
Tech Bros Have Been Accidentally Poisoning Themselves With Severe Brain Toxins for Years
Among the worst offenders was meal-replacement company Huel, a long-time favorite among Bay Area builders.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Given that genAI clearly enhances productivity in cheating and scamming but has mixed results everywhere else, there's a real possibility that genAI will actually have a net negative effect on profitability as companies are forced to invest ever-more in cybersecurity. www.axios.com/2025/10/07/o...
axios.com
OpenAI's new Sora app and other AI video tools give scams a new edge, experts warn
Fake audio and videos are bound to make scams sound more believable as tools improve.
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Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 01/10/2025
We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
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Center for Democracy & Technology @cdt.org · 29/09/2025
Why it matters: ADSs shape access to jobs, housing, health care & more. Yet too often, they’re opaque, error-prone, and biased—leaving consumers & workers at risk. Transparency + accountability are essential.
cdt.org
Bringing Transparency and Accountability to Algorithmic Decision Systems
Also authored by Grace Gedye, AI Policy Analyst, Consumer Reports Algorithmic decision systems (ADSs) increasingly determine what jobs people apply to, what apartments they can rent, what health care coverage they receive, and other major determinants of their lives and livelihoods. ADSs can speed up decision-making processes and, with proper design and oversight, can help […]
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Center for Democracy & Technology @cdt.org · 29/09/2025
New brief from CDT’s @matthewus.bsky.social & @consumerreports.org's Grace Gedye examines state efforts to regulate algorithmic decision systems (ADSs)—spotlighting promising proposals, pitfalls, and what effective regulation must include. Read more: cdt.org/insights/bri...
Building Transparency and Accountability.
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Electronic Frontier Foundation @eff.org · 26/09/2025
California’s “No Robo Bosses Act” is a great start. And much more is needed, because many kinds of powerful institutions are using automated decision-making against us. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
eff.org
Yes to California’s “No Robo Bosses Act”
California’s Governor should sign S.B. 7, a common-sense bill to end some of the harshest consequences of automated abuse at work. EFF is proud to join dozens of labor, digital rights, and other
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Evan Greer @evangreer.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
The Minnesota shooter apparently used data broker websites to find the home addresses of the people he shot and murdered. Congress has had years to do something about data brokers and they've sided with the tech lobby over and over again. Their inaction is deadly.
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Center for Democracy & Technology @cdt.org · 29/05/2025
“@matthewus.bsky.social, senior policy counsel at CDT, has a more dire warning: ‘The moratorium [on state-level AI legislation] is so sweeping that it’s hard to imagine how any law that touches on AI or automated decision-making in any way could escape it.’" www.pcmag.com/news/t...
pcmag.com
There's a Lot of AI in Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill': Here's What It Does and Why Elon Is Not a Fan
Among the more eye-catching provisions is a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulations. Though xAI stands to benefit, Elon Musk says the spending bill is 'undermining' DOGE.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
You know you've got a serious, serious brand issue when your main competitor is 11 points underwater in favorability but you're doing 10 points *worse* than they are. thehill.com/homenews/cam...
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
Quick! Hide this from Ezra Klein!
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
...anecdotes are not evidence. None of the predicted labor market disruptions have materialized. Level 5 AVs have been 3 yrs away for 10 yrs now. Productivity growth hasn't accelerated. Practical improvement in cutting edge models has slowed to a crawl. So I, and many others, just aren't seeing it.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
I do use it, both for research and for editing/polishing my writing. It's helpful for polishing my writing, but not in an "I'm blown away" way. And in research, frequent hallucinations in all the models mean that I often have to spend more time verifying info than if I'd not used AI. Anyway...
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
I have, in fact, studied AI and its impact on the economy and labor market for a decade now. I've made something a career of it. And while I’m not a programmer, I have a better technical understanding of AI than most laypeople. Happy to engage in a reasoned debate, but not engage in name calling.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
I could be wrong. I often am. But AI hype increasingly strikes me as something driven by a desperate effort to delay the popping of a speculative bubble, and it boggles my mind that people brush off recent and repeated delays and admissions of fundamental flaws in new models by big LLM developers.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
Anecdotes are rarely meaningful evidence, and never evidence of transformative impact/potential. What you describe strikes me more akin to the impact that Google/decent Internet search had on knowledge professions as compared to early knowledge databases. And maybe not even that.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
I think the only thing that has been big/fast about AI is the hype surrounding it. I'm not alone in thinking so. You disagree, but I haven't seen real-world evidence (arbitrary benchmarks don't count) that it's having transformative impacts in its current state, nor do I see how it'll get there.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
As @randomwalker.bsky.social said two years ago: "Every exponential is a sigmoid in disguise."
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
It's obvious that all big LLMs have plateaued. Improvements are X steps forward/Y steps back, with X fast decreasing and Y increasing. None are close to AGI; tweaks/scaling won't get them there. The only reason none of the big developers are saying so is no one wants to be first to admit to the con.
link.axios.com
Exclusive | Meta Is Delaying the Rollout of Its Flagship AI Model
The company’s struggle to improve the capabilities of latest AI model mirrors issues at some top AI companies.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
Why would you need anything other than LLMs? I mean, once we scale LLMs up enough, we’ll have AGI. Didn’t you get the memo? 🙃
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
This is seriously great. There has been a vacuum of moral leadership when it comes to the impact of AI on workers and their dignity. And there are a few (if any) people with a bigger moral megaphone than the Pontiff. www.cnbc.com/2025/05/10/p...
cnbc.com
Why Pope Leo chose his name: AI, workers’ rights, new Industrial Revolution
Pope Leo also suggested that he would follow the late Pope Francis' lead on his commitment to social justice.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
And, of course, the reason nobody understands their tech is that they abuse the trade secret doctrine to keep people from finding out how it works and how it affects them. Which shows the need for… wait for it… regulation.
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Matt Scherer @matthewus.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
That’s an excellent argument for starting regulation with strong transparency measures so that people understand how new tech works and how it affects them. But industry adamantly opposes such transparency (trade secrets!) because they want to maintain information monopolies on their technologies.
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