'Worse than Covid': AI’s rapid evolution could wipe out jobs, warns entrepreneur Matt Shumer

Artificial intelligence is evolving faster than most of the world realises, and one of its closest observers is sounding the alarm.

In a viral essay titled “Something Big Is Happening,” AI entrepreneur Matt Shumer warns that the technology has quietly crossed a critical threshold, transforming from a powerful tool into a self-improving system capable of reshaping economies, jobs, and human decision-making in ways society is not ready for.

Shumer, who co-founded the AI startup HyperWrite, argues that AI has entered an “inflection point”, a stage where it is now helping to build, train and improve itself, creating a feedback loop of exponential progress. What once felt theoretical is already happening inside labs and startups, he says, and the rest of the world is dangerously unaware of how fast the landscape is shifting.

AI has entered its self-building phase

In his essay, Shumer compares today’s AI moment to February 2020, when early warnings about the COVID-19 pandemic were ignored until it was too late. The parallel is clear, a small group of people working closely with the technology can see massive change coming, while the rest of the world continues with business as usual.

According to Shumer, the release of models like GPT-5.3 Codex has shown that AI can now perform complex tasks requiring reasoning, judgement, and independence, skills that were once thought to belong solely to humans. These systems can debug their own code, train newer models, and refine outputs without constant human oversight.

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He describes this as the beginning of an AI acceleration loop, where each generation of models becomes dramatically more capable than the last. The concern isn’t just how powerful these systems are, but how quickly they’re improving, a rate of progress that could outpace regulatory, ethical, and social responses.

A message of urgency

Shumer’s message carries an undertone of urgency. He believes that most people, even in the tech world, underestimate how close AI is to fundamentally disrupting white-collar work, including writing, design, coding, and analysis.

He points out that AI is no longer just automating tasks, but executing entire workflows with minimal supervision.

This shift could redefine what jobs look like, and who performs them. If businesses can deploy models that make strategic decisions or produce complex projects autonomously, the global labour market may need to adapt faster than it ever has before.

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“The world is not ready,” Shumer implies throughout his essay. While policymakers debate ethics and regulation, the technology is already reinventing itself in real time. The sense of inevitability, that a tipping point has been reached and can no longer be contained, gives his warning a distinctly unsettling tone.

An unstoppable acceleration

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of Shumer’s argument is the speed at which AI is advancing. He suggests that the gap between one generation of models and the next is no longer measured in years, but in months, or even weeks. This relentless momentum, driven by AI helping to develop new AI, could soon make it impossible for human governance or oversight to keep up.

The piece ends on a sober note: the world’s failure to recognise the scale of this change could leave entire industries, institutions, and individuals blindsided. For Shumer, “something big” isn’t coming, it’s already here.