Matt Shumer, CEO of AI tool company OthersideAI, posted a 5,000-word essay on X called "Something Big Is Happening." It compared AI's trajectory to COVID's early days and warned that most professionals are in denial about how fast their jobs will change. Within days, over 80 million views. On TikTok, the supportive breakdowns got hundreds of thousands of likes. The one dissenting video got 93.

Is the hype real?

1. The Revolution Is Here (Tech Evangelists)

Shumer's essay landed because the benchmarks are genuinely alarming.

The capability curve. METR, a nonprofit that benchmarks AI, found that frontier models' ability to complete real-world software engineering tasks has been doubling roughly every seven months. Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 55,000 jobs cut in 2025 where companies explicitly cited AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.

The COVID parallel. The people who said "it's just the flu" in February 2020 weren't wrong about the data at that moment. They were wrong about the trajectory. Shumer's argument is that linear extrapolation is dangerous when capability curves are exponential.

2. Weaponized Hype (AI Skeptics)

The essay functions simultaneously as analysis and as marketing. When the guy selling umbrellas tells you it's about to rain, you check the sky yourself.

The reliability gap. Gary Marcus called the essay "weaponized hype that tells people what they want to hear, but stumbles on the facts." METR's own data shows frontier models succeed nearly 100% on tasks that take humans under four minutes — but drop below 10% on tasks that take more than four hours. Short-task benchmarks and real-world production work are very different things.

The walkback. Two days after going viral, Shumer told CNBC he "would have thought about certain parts and rewritten some" of them. Bold prediction goes viral, generates tens of millions of views, then gets quietly moderated once the engagement is locked in. The prediction economy rewards alarm, not accuracy.

3. The Jobs Aren't Disappearing (Labor Economists)

The mass displacement hasn't materialized in the numbers.

The data is flat. The Yale Budget Lab found no evidence of massive labor disruption from AI. Unemployment rates in AI-exposed fields remained within historical ranges. Oxford Economics found many companies citing AI as a reason for layoffs were using it as a convenient narrative for restructuring that would have happened anyway.

Adoption is slow. Thomson Reuters found only 26% of legal organizations were actively using generative AI in 2025, up from 14% the year before. Growth, sure. Not revolution. The pattern repeats across industries: executives excited, workers adopting slowly, transformation happening at a human pace.

4. The Tool, Not the Replacement (Practitioners)

The people actually using AI every day aren't panicking and aren't dismissing.

Spreadsheets, not sentience. Practitioners are treating AI the way earlier generations treated spreadsheets or email: a tool that makes certain tasks faster and shifts the skills that matter, without eliminating the need for human judgment. A lawyer who uses AI to draft contract language still needs to know contract law. A developer who uses Copilot still needs to understand the codebase.

"Not yet" is where the tension lives. Shumer might be early rather than wrong. But the tech industry has done this with every major cycle for 30 years: overpromising on the timeline, generating panic, profiting from the attention, and letting reality catch up at its own pace. Blockchain, metaverse, self-driving cars. The technology is real. The timeline is always wrong.

Where This Lands

Tech evangelists say the benchmarks are accelerating. Skeptics say the essay is marketing dressed as prophecy. Labor economists say the data doesn't support mass displacement. Practitioners say the tool is powerful but not autonomous. Nobody actually knows the timeline — not Shumer, not Marcus, not the executives buying AI tools or the workers worrying about them. What we do know is that a CEO selling AI products wrote a viral essay comparing AI to COVID, and the author himself walked it back within 48 hours.

Sources

Matt Shumer, "Something Big Is Happening," February 2026, https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

Fortune, "'Something big is happening': Viral essay compares AI disruption to COVID's February 2020 moment," February 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/02/11/something-big-is-happening-ai-february-2020-moment-matt-shumer/

CNBC, "Investor Matt Shumer says viral essay wasn't meant to scare people," February 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/investor-matt-shumer-says-viral-essay-wasnt-meant-to-scare-people.html

Gary Marcus, "About that Matt Shumer post that has nearly 50 million views," Substack, February 2026, https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/about-that-matt-shumer-post-that

METR, "Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks," March 2025, https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/

Oxford Economics, "Evidence of an AI-Driven Shakeup of Job Markets Is Patchy," 2026, https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/evidence-of-an-ai-driven-shakeup-of-job-markets-is-patchy/

Yale Budget Lab, "Evaluating the Impact of AI on the Labor Market," 2026, https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-labor-market-current-state-affairs

Thomson Reuters, "Future of Professionals Report," 2025