The author of the viral essay warning about impending AI disruption says he couldn’t wait any longer to get the word out.
“Let’s say there is just a 20% chance of it happening, which is maybe realistic, maybe underselling it,” Matt Shumer, GP of Shumer Capital, said during an interview with Business Insider. “Even if there is a 20% chance of this happening, people deserve to know and have time to prepare.”
The people in tech who previously warned about AI’s impact were mostly speaking to others in the industry, he said. Shumer said he wanted something that spoke to his dad, a lawyer who is just a few years from retirement and is hopeful he can run out the clock on the potential massive change on the horizon.
He’s certainly found an audience.
His essay, titled “Something Big is Coming,” has been viewed over 60 million times on X alone, as of Wednesday evening. In the nearly 5,000-word post, Shumer wrote that AI’s disruption to people’s lives could be “much bigger” than COVID — a comparison that has drawn some pushback online. Shumer’s past controversy over an open-source model he promoted in 2024 has also come under scrutiny, after AI researchers discovered the model didn’t live up to his performance claims. He previously apologized, saying “I got ahead of myself when I announced this project.”
In his essay, Shumer also wrote that what he’s seeing in tech is likely what awaits other industries.
“I don’t know that this is coming for sure, but I think a lot of us in tech really see this progress, and it’s frankly dizzying, and there’s a good chance of this,” he said. “And the more people know, the better.”
Shumer is not alone in his fears about the future.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who is known for writing eyebrow-raising essays of his own, has said that up to half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs may be wiped out in the next one to five years. xAI CEO Elon Musk has called AI a “supersonic tsunami” that will quickly eliminate jobs that don’t involve physical labor.
Shumer said even he is unsettled about the prospects of AI. After all, he’s 26 and still near the beginning years of his career. In 2020, he cofounded OthersideAI, which later spawned HyperWrite, an AI-assisted writing tool.
“I don’t know how many more years of my career there will be if this all actually comes to pass,” he told Business Insider. “So, it’s frankly a little confusing and terrifying for someone like me.”
Part of the issue is that AI is unlikely to affect all industries in the same way or at the same time, making career advice highly dependent on a person’s specific situation.
“If you’re a nurse, you’re probably going to be fine for quite some time,” he told Business Insider, adding that junior associates at law school face significantly more risk because many of the introductory-type tasks they do are already being targeted by AI companies.
In his essay, Shumer wrote that his realization of what’s in store came after his experience with OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex, which was released last week. In its release notes, OpenAI said GPT-5.3-Codex was its “first model that was instrumental in creating itself.” Shumer wrote that AI is now capable of doing his technical work.
As for the other tasks, Shumer has been quite open about how AI helped him write his viral essay about AI. He said he spent hours working with Claude to craft his message.
“It did help a lot,” he told TBPN on Wednesday, “and I think that’s kind of the point.”
It’s why Shumer’s message to everyone who turned away from AI, perhaps after a clunky experience with an early version of ChatGPT years ago, is that they should seize the opportunity to see the breadth of what the technology can do now.
“If you look back 10 years from now and this did come to pass, you’ll be very glad you did,” he told Business Insider.
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