AI FOMO: everyone is mastering AI except me - or are they?

A browser crash revealed many saved AI-related materials that were intended to be read but were mostly deferred into a “To Read” folder. The speaker is a hospital pharmacist responsible for prescription review, ensuring medications are safe, appropriate, and correctly dosed, and also conducts personalized medicine research to understand why drugs succeed for some patients and fail for others. Over the past year, pressure has increased to become a different kind of professional as major AI companies released frequent model updates, launched subscription coding assistants, and as the FDA issued new guidance on AI in drug development. The speaker previously worked on verifying biomedical training data for large language models and later encountered an open-source agentic tool connecting LLMs to computer tasks.

"My browser has 47 tabs open. I know this because it crashed this morning, and when I restarted it, the tab counter stared back at me like an accusation. Most of them are related to artificial intelligence: tutorials, preprints, model comparisons and launch announcements. I had opened each of them with the honest intention of reading them. Instead, I did what I always do: bookmarked them into a 'To Read' folder, closed the tabs and moved on with my day. The folder now has several hundred items; I have read only a few dozen."

"I am a hospital pharmacist. My daily work is prescription review, checking that the medications that doctors order are safe, appropriate and correctly dosed for each person. I also do research in personalized medicine, trying to understand why a drug that works beautifully in one patient fails in the next. It is careful, slow and detail-oriented work - not glamorous, but important."

"Over the first few months of 2026, the US firms OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all shipped major updates to their AI models. Chinese AI companies arguably moved even faster, with Alibaba, Moonshot, StepFun and Zhipu all releasing new models in quick succession. Many major technology companies announced subscription plans for their AI coding assistants, and the US Food and Drug Administration published new guidance on AI in drug development. The implicit message was everywhere: the world is rushing towards AI, and you are standing still."

"I got a taste of that in 2023 when, as a visiting scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I helped to curate and verify biomedical training data for large language models (LLMs). I was not involved in designing or training those models themselves, but I was close enough to the frontier to see how fast things are moving. Then came OpenClaw. OpenClaw is an open-source 'agentic' software tool that connects LLMs directly to your comput"

Read at Nature