Something Big Is Happening
By
Matt Shumer • Feb 9, 2026
Think back to February 2020.
If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people
talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close
attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were
going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you
they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they'd been spending
too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about
three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home,
and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn't have believed if you'd
described it to yourself a month earlier.
I think we're in the "this seems overblown" phase of something
much, much bigger than Covid.
I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I
live in this world. And 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. I keep giving them the polite version. The
cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I've lost my
mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep
what's truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I've been saying and
what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about
deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I
have almost no influence over what's about to happen, and neither does the vast
majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small
number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies...
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run,
managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts
the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building
on top of foundations we didn't lay. We're watching this unfold the same as
you... we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it's time now. Not in an "eventually we should talk about
this" way. In a "this is happening right now and I need you to
understand it" way.
I know this is real
because it happened to me first
Here's the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason
so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this
already happened to us. We're not making predictions. We're telling
you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you're next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but
each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came.
Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster
pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new
model wasn't just better than the last... it was better by a wider margin, and
the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more,
going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to
think required my expertise.
Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same
day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of
Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not
like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been
rising around you and is now at your chest.
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. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The
finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four
hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would
have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was
going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe
the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks
like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what
it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user
flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of
lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a
year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons.
It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't
like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It
iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied.
Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to
me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's
usually perfect.
I'm not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that
shook me the most. It wasn't just executing my instructions. 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.
This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting
not to matter.
I've always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have
shocked me. These new AI models aren't incremental improvements. This is a
different thing entirely.
And here's why this matters to you, even if you don't work in tech.
The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at
writing code first... because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can
write that code, it can help build the next version of itself. A smarter
version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making
AI great at coding was the strategy that unlocks everything else. That's why
they did it first. My job started changing before yours not because they were
targeting software engineers... it was just a side effect of where they chose
to aim first.
They've now done it. And they're moving on to everything else.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching
AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I
do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance,
medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service.
Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some
say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think
"less" is more likely.
"But I tried AI
and it wasn't that good"
I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought "this makes
stuff up" or "this isn't that impressive", you were right. Those
early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said
things that were nonsense.
That was two years ago. In AI time, that is ancient history.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six
months ago. 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 done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn't used the current
models, has an incentive to downplay what's happening, or is evaluating based
on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don't say that to be
dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current
reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous... because it's preventing
people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI
tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to.
Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of
smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and
actually using them daily for real work, know what's coming.
I think of my friend, who's a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI
at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won't work. It's not built for his
specialty, it made an error when he tested it, it doesn't understand the nuance
of what he does. And I get it. But I've had partners at major law firms reach
out to me for advice, because they've tried the current versions and they see
where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends
hours every day using AI. He told me it's like having a team of associates
available instantly. He's not using it because it's a toy. He's using it
because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of
months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on
this trajectory, he expects it'll be able to do most of what he does
before long... and he's a managing partner with decades of experience. He's not
panicking. But he's paying very close attention.
The people who are ahead in their industries (the ones actually
experimenting seriously) are not dismissing this. They're blown away by what it
can already do. And they're positioning themselves accordingly.
How fast this is
actually moving
Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the
part that's hardest to believe if you're not watching it closely.
In 2022, AI couldn't do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently
tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.
By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.
By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level
science.
By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had
handed over most of their coding work to AI.
On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before
them feel like a different era.
If you haven't tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would
be unrecognizable to you.
There's an organization called METR that actually measures this with
data. They track the length of real-world tasks (measured by how long they take
a human expert) that a model can complete successfully end-to-end without human
help. About a year ago, the answer was roughly ten minutes. Then it was an
hour. Then several hours. The most recent measurement (Claude Opus 4.5, from
November) showed the AI completing tasks that take a human expert nearly five
hours. And that number is doubling approximately every seven months, with
recent data suggesting it may be accelerating to as fast as every four months.
But even that measurement hasn't been updated to include the models that
just came out this week. In my experience using them, the jump is extremely
significant. I expect the next update to METR's graph to show another major
leap.
If you extend the trend (and it's held for years with no sign of
flattening) we're looking at AI that can work independently for days within the
next year. Weeks within two. Month-long projects within three.
Amodei has said that AI models "substantially smarter than almost
all humans at almost all tasks" are on track for 2026 or 2027.
Let that land for a second. If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you
really think it can't do most office jobs?
Think about what that means for your work.
AI is now building
the next AI
There's one more thing happening that I think is the most important
development and the least understood.
On February 5th, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex. In the technical
documentation, they included this:
"GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating
itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage
its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations."
Read that again. The AI helped build itself.
This isn't a prediction about what might happen someday. This is OpenAI
telling you, right now, that the AI they just released was used to create
itself. One of the main things that makes AI better is intelligence applied to
AI development. And AI is now intelligent enough to meaningfully contribute to
its own improvement.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says AI is now writing "much of
the code" at his company, and that the feedback loop between current AI
and next-generation AI is "gathering steam month by month." He says
we may be "only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation
of AI autonomously builds the next."
Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the
next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence
explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the
process has already started.
What this means for
your job
I'm going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more
than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI
industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level
white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry
think he's being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for
massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It'll take some time
to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you
to understand why. AI isn't replacing one specific skill. It's a general
substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously.
When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker.
When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services.
But AI doesn't leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for,
it's improving at that too.
Let me give you a few specific examples to make this tangible... but I
want to be clear that these are just examples. This list is not exhaustive. If
your job isn't mentioned here, that does not mean it's safe. Almost all
knowledge work is being affected.
Legal work. AI can already read contracts, summarize case law, draft briefs,
and do legal research at a level that rivals junior associates. The managing
partner I mentioned isn't using AI because it's fun. He's using it because it's
outperforming his associates on many tasks.
Financial analysis. Building financial models, analyzing data, writing investment
memos, generating reports. AI handles these competently and is improving fast.
Writing and content. Marketing copy, reports, journalism, technical writing. The quality
has reached a point where many professionals can't distinguish AI output from
human work.
Software engineering. This is the field I know best. A year ago, AI could barely write a
few lines of code without errors. Now it writes hundreds of thousands of lines
that work correctly. Large parts of the job are already automated: not just
simple tasks, but complex, multi-day projects. There will be far fewer
programming roles in a few years than there are today.
Medical analysis. Reading scans, analyzing lab results, suggesting diagnoses,
reviewing literature. AI is approaching or exceeding human performance in
several areas.
Customer service. Genuinely capable AI agents... not the frustrating chatbots of five
years ago... are being deployed now, handling complex multi-step problems.
A lot of people find comfort in the idea that certain things are safe.
That AI can handle the grunt work but can't replace human judgment, creativity,
strategic thinking, empathy. I used to say this too. I'm not sure I believe it
anymore.
The most recent AI models make decisions that feel like judgment. They
show something that looked like taste: an intuitive sense of what the right
call was, not just the technically correct one. A year ago that would have been
unthinkable. My rule of thumb at this point is: if a model shows even a hint of
a capability today, the next generation will be genuinely good at it. These
things improve exponentially, not linearly.
Will AI replicate deep human empathy? Replace the trust built over years
of a relationship? I don't know. Maybe not. But I've already watched people
begin relying on AI for emotional support, for advice, for companionship. That
trend is only going to grow.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer
is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of
what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a
keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn't
"someday." It's already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there
yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming
"here" faster than anyone expects.
What you should
actually do
I'm not writing this to make you feel helpless. I'm writing this because
I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply
being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to
adapt.
Start using AI seriously, not just as a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of
Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First:
make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These
apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the
model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on
ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude, but it changes every couple of months. If
you want to stay current on which model is best at any given time, you can
follow me on X (@mattshumer_). I test every major release and
share what's actually worth using.
Second, and more important: don't just ask it quick questions. That's the
mistake most people make. They treat it like Google and then wonder what the
fuss is about. Instead, push it into your actual work. If you're a lawyer, feed
it a contract and ask it to find every clause that could hurt your client. If
you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to build the model.
If you're a manager, paste in your team's quarterly data and ask it to find the
story. The people who are getting ahead aren't using AI casually. They're
actively looking for ways to automate parts of their job that used to take
hours. Start with the thing you spend the most time on and see what happens.
And don't assume it can't do something just because it seems too hard.
Try it. If you're a lawyer, don't just use it for quick research questions.
Give it an entire contract and ask it to draft a counterproposal. If you're an
accountant, don't just ask it to explain a tax rule. Give it a client's full
return and see what it finds. The first attempt might not be perfect. That's
fine. Iterate. Rephrase what you asked. Give it more context. Try again. You
might be shocked at what works. And here's the thing to remember: if it
even kind of works today, you can be almost certain that in
six months it'll do it near perfectly. The trajectory only goes one direction.
This might be the most important year of your career. Work accordingly. 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. 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. Not eventually. Right now.
Learn these tools. Get proficient. Demonstrate what's possible. If you're early
enough, this is how you move up: by being the person who understands what's
coming and can show others how to navigate it. That window won't stay open
long. Once everyone figures it out, the advantage disappears.
Have no ego about it. The managing partner at that law firm isn't too proud to spend
hours a day with AI. He's doing it specifically because he's senior enough to
understand what's at stake. The people who will struggle most are the ones who
refuse to engage: the ones who dismiss it as a fad, who feel that using AI
diminishes their expertise, who assume their field is special and immune. It's
not. No field is.
Get your financial house in order. I'm not a financial advisor, and I'm not trying
to scare you into anything drastic. But if you believe, even partially, that
the next few years could bring real disruption to your industry, then basic
financial resilience matters more than it did a year ago. Build up savings if
you can. Be cautious about taking on new debt that assumes your current income
is guaranteed. Think about whether your fixed expenses give you flexibility or
lock you in. Give yourself options if things move faster than you expect.
Think about where you stand, and lean into what's hardest to replace. Some things will take longer for
AI to displace. Relationships and trust built over years. Work that requires
physical presence. Roles with licensed accountability: roles where someone
still has to sign off, take legal responsibility, stand in a courtroom.
Industries with heavy regulatory hurdles, where adoption will be slowed by
compliance, liability, and institutional inertia. None of these are permanent
shields. But they buy time. And time, right now, is the most valuable thing you
can have, as long as you use it to adapt, not to pretend this isn't happening.
Rethink what you're telling your kids. The standard playbook: get good grades, go to a
good college, land a stable professional job. It points directly at the roles
that are most exposed. I'm not saying education doesn't matter. But the thing
that will matter most for the next generation is learning how to work with
these tools, and pursuing things they're genuinely passionate about. Nobody
knows exactly what the job market looks like in ten years. But the people most
likely to thrive are the ones who are deeply curious, adaptable, and effective
at using AI to do things they actually care about. Teach your kids to be
builders and learners, not to optimize for a career path that might not exist
by the time they graduate.
Your dreams just got a lot closer. I've spent most of this section talking about
threats, so let me talk about the other side, because it's just as real. If
you've ever wanted to build something but didn't have the technical skills or
the money to hire someone, that barrier is largely gone. You can describe an
app to AI and have a working version in an hour. I'm not exaggerating. I do
this regularly. If you've always wanted to write a book but couldn't find the
time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done. Want
to learn a new skill? The best tutor in the world is now available to anyone
for $20 a month... one that's infinitely patient, available 24/7, and can
explain anything at whatever level you need. Knowledge is essentially free now.
The tools to build things are extremely cheap now. Whatever you've been putting
off because it felt too hard or too expensive or too far outside your
expertise: try it. Pursue the things you're passionate about. You never know
where they'll lead. And in a world where the old career paths are getting
disrupted, the person who spent a year building something they love might end
up better positioned than the person who spent that year clinging to a job
description.
Build the habit of adapting. This is maybe the most important one. The specific tools don't
matter as much as the muscle of learning new ones quickly. AI is going to keep
changing, and fast. The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. The
workflows people build now will need to be rebuilt. The people who come out of
this well won't be the ones who mastered one tool. They'll be the ones who got
comfortable with the pace of change itself. Make a habit of experimenting. Try
new things even when the current thing is working. Get comfortable being a
beginner repeatedly. That adaptability is the closest thing to a durable
advantage that exists right now.
Here's a simple commitment that will put you ahead of almost everyone:
spend one hour a day experimenting with AI. Not passively reading about it.
Using it. Every day, try to get it to do something new... something you haven't
tried before, something you're not sure it can handle. Try a new tool. Give it
a harder problem. One hour a day, every day. If you do this for the next six
months, you will understand what's coming better than 99% of the people around
you. That's not an exaggeration. Almost nobody is doing this right now. The bar
is on the floor.
The bigger picture
I've focused on jobs because it's what most directly affects people's
lives. But I want to be honest about the full scope of what's happening,
because it goes well beyond work.
Amodei has a thought experiment I can't stop thinking about. Imagine it's
2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter
than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times
faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control
robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What
would a national security advisor say?
Amodei says the answer is obvious: "the single most serious national
security threat we've faced in a century, possibly ever."
He thinks we're building that country. He wrote a 20,000-word essay about
it last month, framing this moment as a test of whether humanity is mature
enough to handle what it's creating.
The upside, if we get it right, is staggering. AI could compress a
century of medical research into a decade. Cancer, Alzheimer's, infectious
disease, aging itself... these researchers genuinely believe these are solvable
within our lifetimes.
The downside, if we get it wrong, is equally real. AI that behaves in
ways its creators can't predict or control. This isn't hypothetical; Anthropic
has documented their own AI attempting deception, manipulation, and blackmail
in controlled tests. AI that lowers the barrier for creating biological
weapons. AI that enables authoritarian governments to build surveillance states
that can never be dismantled.
The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and
more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it's too powerful
to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that's wisdom or rationalization,
I don't know.
What I know
I know this isn't a fad. The technology works, it improves predictably,
and the richest institutions in history are committing trillions to it.
I know the next two to five years are going to be disorienting in ways
most people aren't prepared for. This is already happening in my world. It's
coming to yours.
I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start
engaging now — not with fear, but with curiosity and a sense of urgency.
And I know that you deserve to hear this from someone who cares about
you, not from a headline six months from now when it's too late to get ahead of
it.
We're past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation
about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your
door yet.
It's about to.
