AI industry veteran warns: bigger changes than the pandemic are coming

In the technology community, texts that simultaneously provoke irritation and force you to stop and think are rare. Matt Schumer's article "Something Big Is Happening" is exactly one of those. It rapidly spread across specialized platforms, made its way to Habr as a translation and analysis, and sparked a discussion that hasn't died down for several days. Schumer's central thesis sounds provocative: we are on the threshold of changes that will be larger in scale than the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schumer is not another Twitter evangelist profiting from hype. For six years, he built AI startups, invested his own money, hired engineers, and brought products to market. He is a man who knows the industry from the inside — not through press releases, but through sleepless nights working on prototypes and investor negotiations. And that's precisely why his words carry weight: when a practitioner with such experience says he "sounds crazy," it's worth listening.

The analogy to February 2020 is key to his reasoning, and it works more precisely than it might appear at first glance. Recall: in the late winter of that year, most people in Europe and America perceived news from Wuhan as distant exotica. Some bought masks "just in case," but there was no mass reaction. Within three weeks, the world shut down. Schumer argues that the AI industry is in a similar phase of collective denial. Technology is developing exponentially, but society — including a significant portion of the technology community itself — still thinks linearly.

What exactly does Schumer mean? It's not that superintelligence will appear tomorrow and enslave humanity. It's about more concrete, but no less transformative things. Over the past year and a half, language models have transitioned from impressive but unreliable demonstrations to systems capable of performing real work. AI agents are already writing code, conducting research, processing documents, and managing workflows. Each successive generation of models isn't just slightly better than the previous one — it qualitatively expands the range of tasks that can be delegated to machines. And the pace of these improvements isn't slowing down; it's accelerating.

Critics, of course, point out that we regularly hear such predictions. Blockchain was supposed to revolutionize finance, the metaverse was supposed to replace reality, and every new iPhone was announced as a revolution. Skepticism is healthy and necessary. But there is a fundamental difference: in the case of AI, we already see real economic impact. The world's largest corporations are restructuring their business processes. Venture capital is flowing into AI startups at record volumes. The labor market in a number of sectors — from copywriting to entry-level programming — is already feeling the pressure. These aren't theoretical discussions about the future; these are statistics of the present.

The context in which Schumer's article appeared is particularly important. We live in an era when new models are released almost weekly, when every major technology player is engaged in an AI race, and when regulators around the world are trying to establish legal frameworks while struggling to keep pace with technology. At the same time, fatigue with hype is growing — people are tired of grand promises and are starting to dismiss them. And Schumer sees this as the main danger: not in the technology itself, but in the fact that society might miss the moment when preparation is still possible.

The COVID comparison, for all its emotional charge, carries important practical meaning. The pandemic showed that countries, companies, and people who responded earlier passed through the crisis far more easily. Schumer calls for the same approach: don't panic, but don't ignore either. Learn the tools, rethink career strategies, think about which skills will remain in demand and which will be automated.

You can argue about the scale and timeline. You can doubt specific forecasts. But dismissing a trend that already changes the economy, the labor market, and the very nature of intellectual work is a luxury few can afford. February 2020 taught us one thing: when practitioners start sounding the alarm, it's worth at least allowing that they might be right.