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

The fear of missing out on the latest AI tools can be difficult to ignore. Credit: OsakaWayne Studios/ 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. And yet, over the past year, I have felt a growing pressure to become a different kind of professional. 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. …