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AI entrepreneur and investor Matt Shumer warns that artificial intelligence is advancing at a pace that could upend white-collar jobs far sooner than most people expect.
AI differs from past automation waves because it is a general substitute for cognitive work, improving simultaneously across tasks rather than replacing one skill at a time.
A long post by AI entrepreneur and investor Matt Shumer, the chief executive officer of HyperWrite, has gone viral on X, clocking more than 68 million views between February 10 and February 12, after he warned that artificial intelligence is advancing at a pace that could upend white-collar jobs far sooner than most people expect.
Titled ‘Something Big Is Happening’, the post compares the current moment in AI development to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when risks were visible to a small group but widely dismissed until disruption became unavoidable.
“I think we’re in the ‘this seems overblown’ phase of something much, much bigger than Covid,” Shumer wrote, arguing that the gap between public perception and the reality inside AI labs has become “dangerously large”.
‘This already happened to us’
Shumer, who says he has spent six years building and investing in AI startups, stresses that his warning is not speculative.
“We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next,” he wrote.
According to him, a rapid acceleration in AI capability began in 2025, driven by new model-training techniques that shortened the time between major breakthroughs while widening performance gains. The shift, he says, became unmistakable after February 5, when OpenAI and Anthropic released new models on the same day.
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears,” Shumer wrote, describing AI systems that can independently design, code, test and refine full software applications without human intervention.
Why coding came first, and why that matters
Shumer argues that AI’s rapid progress in software development was deliberate.
“They focused on making AI great at writing code first… because building AI requires a lot of code,” he wrote. “If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself.”
He says this explains why technology roles are feeling the impact first, but warns that law, finance, medicine, consulting, writing and design are next.
“The experience that tech workers have had over the past year…is the experience everyone else is about to have,” he wrote, adding that this could happen within one to five years, and possibly sooner.
‘AI is now building the next AI’
One of the most striking claims in the post relates to AI systems contributing directly to their own development.
Shumer quoted OpenAI’s technical documentation stating: “GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself.”
He also cited Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has said AI is already writing “much of the code” at his company, with feedback loops between current and next-generation models “gathering steam month by month”.
Amodei has publicly warned that AI could eliminate 50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years, a view Shumer says many in the industry believe is conservative.
Which jobs are at risk?
Shumer argues that AI differs from past automation waves because it is a general substitute for cognitive work, improving simultaneously across tasks rather than replacing one skill at a time.
He lists several areas already seeing rapid change:
Legal work: contract review, case law research and drafting
Finance: modelling, analysis and report writing
Writing and content: journalism, marketing and technical writing
Software engineering: multi-day projects handled end-to-end
Medical analysis: scans, diagnostics and literature review
Customer service: complex, multi-step issue resolution
“If your job happens on a screen… then AI is coming for significant parts of it,” he wrote.
What people should do now
Rather than urging panic, Shumer frames his post as a call to act early.
“The single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early,” he wrote.
Shumer Suggests:
- Use paid versions of AI tools, which he says are far ahead of free tiers
- Apply AI directly to real work, not just quick questions
- Build financial resilience amid potential job disruption
- Focus on roles involving trust, accountability, regulation or physical presence
- Develop adaptability rather than mastering a single tool
“Spend one hour a day experimenting with AI… If you do this for six months, you will understand what’s coming better than 99% of the people around you,” he wrote.
Bigger than jobs
Shumer ends by placing AI within a broader geopolitical and societal context, citing Amodei’s warning that a future population of super-intelligent AI systems could represent “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century”.
At the same time, he highlights the upside — accelerated medical research, scientific discovery and dramatically lower barriers to building businesses and creative work.
“We’re past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future,” Shumer wrote.
“The future is already here. It just hasn’t knocked on your door yet. It’s about to.”
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February 12, 2026, 14:47 IST
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