AI CEO's Viral Warning: Something Bigger Than COVID Is Coming

AI CEO's Viral Warning: Something Bigger Than COVID Is Coming

The Viral Essay

In a nearly 5,000-word post published on X, Shumer wrote the essay titled "Something Big Is Happening" for "the people in my life who keep asking me 'so what's the deal with AI?' and getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening."

The response was immediate and intense. As of Wednesday morning, the post had 40 million views and 18,000 retweets. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian replied simply: "Great writeup. Strongly agree."

What Changed His Mind

Shumer, who is cofounder of OthersideAI (the company behind Hyperwrite), said the moment of realization came with the recent dueling releases of Anthropic's Opus 4.6 and OpenAI's GPT-5.3 Codex. Both models are primarily aimed at software engineering.

"The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago," Shumer wrote. "The debate about whether AI is 'really getting better' or 'hitting a wall' — which has been going on for over a year — is over."

OpenAI said in its release notes that GPT-5.3 Codex "is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself."

"It wasn't just executing my instructions," Shumer wrote of his experience with OpenAI's latest Codex model. "It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have."

The COVID Comparison

Shumer drew a direct parallel to February 2020, when news of a spreading pandemic gave way to worldwide upheaval.

"The potential of what AI will change is much bigger than COVID," he wrote.

He's far from alone in sounding the alarm. Despite disagreement from other tech leaders, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has remained adamant that AI could wipe out up to half of white-collar, entry-level jobs in the next one to five years.

xAI CEO Elon Musk has warned that if your job doesn't involve physical labor, it's likely to be replaced by AI much more quickly.

The Counterargument

Not everyone agrees. Some X users pointed out limitations still present in many current AI products, including hallucinations and general inaccuracies. MIT Technology Review notes that AI-generated code "may not always do what it's designed to" and that even AI coding assistants struggle with large, complex codebases.

A Washington Post report highlighted how AI is already contributing to fewer entry-level jobs in the tech sector—so while coding assistants may help with existing jobs, they won't necessarily help land new ones.

What Shumer Recommends

"This might be the most important year of your career," he wrote. "The person who walks into a meeting and says 'I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of three days' is going to be the most valuable person in the room. Not eventually. Right now."

His final message was straightforward: "Learn these tools. Get proficient. Demonstrate what's possible."

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Sources:

• •Matt Shumer's Viral Essay on X
• •Business Insider: AI CEO Warning
• •MIT Technology Review: Generative Coding