Matt Shumer's Essay on AI's Disruptive Power Draws 80 Million Views on X
Matt Shumer, chief executive of HyperWriteAI, published an essay on his website on February 9 titled "Something Big Is Happening."
The post, which he shared on X the next day, has accumulated more than 80 million views on the platform.
Shumer, who has spent six years building AI companies and investing in the sector, wrote the piece as a direct message to his family, friends and others outside the technology industry.
He compared the moment to February 2020, when early reports of a virus spreading overseas drew little widespread notice before upending daily life within weeks.
"I think we're in the 'this seems overblown' phase of something much, much bigger than Covid," Shumer wrote in the essay.
He detailed changes in his own work as chief executive.
Shumer said he now describes desired outcomes in plain English, and the AI systems produce complete, functional results without further input from him.
"I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job," he stated in the now-viral AI article and added further: "I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing."
Shumer pointed to model releases on February 5 from OpenAI and Anthropic as a turning point.
He said GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI demonstrated capabilities beyond instruction-following, including what he described as judgment and taste in decision-making.
"But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most," he wrote. "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 essay outlined how AI labs first advanced coding abilities to accelerate their own development, creating a feedback loop.
Matt Shumer noted in his viral essay on AI that OpenAI documented the use of early versions of GPT-5.3 Codex in debugging, deployment and evaluation of its own training.
He cited predictions from Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.
Shumer said the underlying capabilities for such shifts are emerging now across fields including law, finance, medicine and design.
Shumer appeared on CNBC's "Power Lunch" on February 13.
He addressed the reaction to the essay.
"I want to be very clear about this, the article wasn’t meant to scare people in this way," he told the program.
Fortune published an adapted version of the essay on February 11, which included similar accounts of Shumer's experiences and calls for immediate engagement with advanced AI tools.
The original post on X has drawn more than 100,000 likes and thousands of comments as of February 14. Shumer has since conducted interviews with CNN and other outlets to discuss the content and his original intentions.
You can read his full article here.
