What's So Different This Time?

By Hira Fernando | September 2025 | Career Strategy

I've been saying this since early 2024 — definitely since ChatGPT-4 dropped. In fact, I wrote a blog post about it (it's on my website). I watched people nod politely, then go back to their day. So when Matt Shumer — co-founder of OthersideAI and someone who actually lives inside this technology — published an article in Fortune that went viral with over 50 million views,

I felt equal parts vindicated and quietly alarmed. Because Matt said, more powerfully and publicly than I had, exactly what I've been trying to tell people. If you haven't read it yet, go read it now — Something Big Is Happening in AI — and Most People Will Be Blindsided. Then come back. I'll wait.

Here's my shorter version.

This isn't just another tech wave

Previous technological shifts — the internet, smartphones, even social media — arrived in our personal lives with a delay. They crept into industries slowly enough that most professionals had time to adjust. They disrupted some jobs, created others, and careers generally found a way to adapt. You had breathing room. GenAI is not giving you breathing room.

What makes this genuinely different is the combination of three things happening simultaneously: it thinks (or something functionally close to it), it creates original content, and it's available to everyone, right now, across every profession. A lawyer, a marketer, a product manager, a career coach — all of us are in the blast radius at the same time.

The "I tried it, and it wasn't that impressive" trap.

Matt addressed this beautifully, and I want to echo it. If you poked around with AI in 2023 or early 2024 and walked away shrugging, I get it. It hallucinated. It was inconsistent. It felt like a gimmick.

But here's what you need to understand: the models that exist today are almost unrecognisable from what existed even six months ago. Every few months, the capability doesn't just improve — it leaps. The people who are paying for the best tools and actually using them daily know this. The people who tried the free version once and moved on do not.

The gap between public perception and current reality is enormous. And that gap is costing people — especially professionals — the time they need to prepare.

What does this mean for your career?

It means the skills that made you indispensable last year are not guaranteed to do the same next year. That is not pessimism — it's the most important piece of career advice I can give you right now. The professionals who will thrive are not the ones who resist this shift, but the ones who understand it, adapt to it, and figure out how to work alongside it.

I know it sounds dramatic. I know part of you wants to roll your eyes. But I've been watching this unfold closely, and the pace of change is not slowing down. It's the opposite. Spoiler: humans are notoriously bad at understanding what "exponential" actually means.