AI CEO warns AI's disruption will be 'much bigger' than COVID: 'The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming'

• An AI CEO wrote a viral essay warning that AI will change society more than COVID-19 did.
• Hyperwrite CEO Matt Shumer said AI can now replace his technical work, and AI will disrupt move than engineers.
• As of Wednesday morning, Shumer's post had 40 million views and 18,000 retweets.

It's never a good sign when a CEO warns something more disruptive than COVID is heading our way.

In an essay titled "Something Big Is Happening," Hyperwrite CEO Matt Shumer said AI can now do all of his technical work — and he thinks your job could be next.

"I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't... my family, my friends, the people I care about 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," Shumer wrote in his nearly 5,000-word post published Tuesday on X.

As of Wednesday morning, his post had 40 million views and 18,000 retweets. Shumer is a cofounder of OthersideAI, which features Hyperwrite, an AI-assisted writing tool.

Shumer said that the reason people in tech "are sounding the alarm" is that they have already experienced what's coming for everyone else.

"We're not making predictions," he wrote. "We're telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you're next."

Shumer said that many people outside tech wrote off AI years ago after a clunky experience with an early edition of ChatGPT.

"The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago," he 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."

It's not the time to panic, Shumer said. Instead, the best thing to do is to become deeply familiar with AI. "This might be the most important year of your career," he wrote.

"I don't say that to stress you out. I say it because right now, there is a brief window where most people 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 far from alone in sounding the alarm. Despite disagreement from other tech leaders, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei remains 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 and others have warned that if your job doesn't involve physical labor, it's likely to be replaced by AI much more quickly, a view that dovetails with a growing base of economic research.

Shumer's essay struck a chord, especially with those in tech. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian replied, "Great writeup. Strongly agree."

"Great advice for how to get ahead in your job at any large company right now," A16z general partner David Haber wrote.

While the response to the post has been overwhelmingly positive, some X users pointed out the limitations still present in many current AI products, like hallucinations and general inaccuracies.

What changed Shumer's mind

Shumer said that this moment feels like February 2020, when in a short span of time, news of a spreading pandemic gave way to a worldwide upheaval unseen in modern times that continues to reverberate to this day.

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

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 aimed at software engineering. 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."

AI is now so intelligent, Shumer said, that he can tell the agent what he wants and "walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well."

In a post on LinkedIn Wednesday morning, Shumer addressed his viral X post.

"Every time someone asks me what's going on with AI, I give them the safe answer," he wrote on Wednesday. "Because the real one sounds insane. I'm done doing that."