the smartest people in the room hate the room

AI and biotech bros are D1 at hating their own industry. and i don't mean casual criticism. i mean full-blown, borderline-obsessive hatred for anything new that comes out of the fields they chose to dedicate their lives to. it's a sport to these people. and they're undefeated.

it's like clockwork at this point. every time a breakthrough drops or something new hits the timeline, they find everything wrong with it. they mock it. they write threads about why it's overhyped. they say it's never going to work. they nitpick the methodology. they question the data. they call it a toy. they call it a gimmick. they say “we had this in 2019, it's nothing new.”

then a couple months later they're all using it.

every. single. time.

and once they've adopted the thing they swore was garbage, they move on to shitting on the next new thing. the cycle never ends. it's a hamster wheel of ego and insecurity dressed up as intellectual rigor.

i've watched this play out in both AI and biotech for years now. i work in both. and the pattern is identical.

remember when people clowned transformer models? when folks said LLMs were a parlor trick? when the biotech crowd said mRNA would never scale? when CRISPR was “too dangerous to ever be practical”? i remember. and i remember who was saying it. a lot of those same people now have those technologies front and center in their work. funny how that works.

i think a lot of it comes from the PhD barrier to entry in both fields. years in academia has a way of pumping egos full of hot air. when you spend 6-8 years grinding through a program, publishing papers, defending your thesis, and clawing your way to credibility - you start to believe that nothing is valid unless it went through the same gauntlet you did. and when some startup or some lab drops something that gets attention and it didn't go through your process? that stings.

it's jealousy. plain and simple. their work isn't in the spotlight at that moment and they can't handle it. so instead of celebrating a win in their own field, they tear it down. because if they can't be the ones getting the attention, no one should.

and look - criticism is healthy. peer review exists for a reason. skepticism has its place. i'm not saying we should blindly hype everything. but there's a difference between constructive criticism and being a hater. and most of what i see on this app is the latter. it's not “here's a flaw in the methodology and here's how to fix it.” it's “this is stupid and the people behind it are frauds.” those are two very different things.

here's what i've noticed about the people who are building things that matter. they don't have time to hate. they're too busy shipping. the loudest critics are almost never the ones producing the most impactful work. the people doing the real work are heads down, grinding, and when something new comes out in their field they go “oh that's interesting, let me see how i can use that.” that's it. no ego. no hot takes. just curiosity.

so here's my message to the haters in both camps.

hey pal, park that ego for a sec. celebrate a win in your field. someone else's spotlight doesn't dim yours. competition is healthy. a rising tide lifts all boats. and your refusal to acknowledge progress doesn't slow it down - it just makes you look bitter while the rest of the industry moves forward without you.

the best part? both industries still print. AI is printing. biotech is printing. the money doesn't care about your ego or your tweets. the breakthroughs keep coming whether you celebrate them or not.

might as well enjoy the ride instead of standing on the side throwing rocks at the parade.