It’s never a good sign when a CEO warns that something even more destructive than the coronavirus is on the way.
In an essay titled “Something Big is Happening,” Hyperwrite CEO Matt Schumer said that AI can now do all of our technical jobs, and it could be your job next.
“I’m writing this for the people in my life who aren’t… my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me, ‘So what happened to AI?’ And the answers I get don’t do justice to what’s really going on,” Schumer wrote in a nearly 5,000-word post published on X on Tuesday.
As of Wednesday morning, Schumer’s post had been viewed 40 million times and retweeted 18,000 times.
Schumer said the reason people in the technology industry are “ringing the alarm” is because they’ve already experienced what happens to others.
“We are not making predictions,” he wrote. “We are telling you what has already happened in our work and warning you that you are next.”
Schumer said many non-tech people turned away from AI years ago after having a bad experience with an early version of ChatGPT.
“The models available today are indistinguishable from those that existed six months ago,” he wrote. “The debate that has been going on for over a year about whether AI is ‘really progressing’ or ‘hitting a wall’ is over.”
Schumer says this is not the time to panic. Rather, it is best to know more about AI. “This may be the most important year of your career,” he wrote.
“I’m not saying this to stress you out. I’m saying this because there’s a short period right now where most employees at most companies are still ignoring this,” 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.”
He’s not the only one sounding the alarm. Despite disagreements among other technology leaders, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is adamant that up to half of white-collar, entry-level jobs could be eliminated by AI in the next one to five years.
xAI CEO Elon Musk and others have warned that jobs that don’t involve manual labor are likely to be replaced by AI sooner, a view consistent with the expansion of the economic research base.
Schumer’s essay particularly resonated with people in the technology industry. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian replied: “Great article. I strongly agree.”
A16z general partner David Haber wrote, “This is great advice for getting ahead in the workforce today at a large company.”
Great advice to get ahead in a big company right away.
The person who says, “Using AI, we did this analysis in an hour instead of three days” will be the most valuable person in the room. Ultimately not. Right now. Learn these tools. Be skilled. Demonstrate what you have… https://t.co/cBq5s1AH4Y
— David Harbor (@dhaber) February 11, 2026
While the response to this post was overwhelmingly positive, some X users pointed out limitations that still exist in many current AI products, such as hallucinations and general inaccuracies.
What changed Schumer’s mind?
Schumer said this moment feels like February 2020, when news of a growing pandemic was briefly replaced by global chaos unlike anything seen in modern times, and continues to reverberate to this day.
The potential for AI to change the world is “far greater than the coronavirus,” he wrote.
For Shumer, this 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 intended for software engineering. OpenAI says the following about GPT-5.3 Codex in its release notes: ”This is the first model that contributed to its own creation. ”
“It didn’t just follow my instructions,” Schumer writes of his experience using OpenAI’s latest Codex models. “It was making intelligent decisions. For the first time, I felt something like judgment, something like taste. That inexplicable feeling of knowing what the right decision was, which people always said AI would never have.”
AI is now so smart that all you have to do is tell an agent what you want and “you can walk away from your computer for four hours and come back and find your job done. Good job,” Schumer said.
Schumer addressed the viral X post in a LinkedIn post Wednesday morning.
“Every time someone asks what’s going on with AI, I give them a safe answer,” he wrote on Wednesday. “I stopped doing that because the real thing sounded crazy.”
