AI is building itself? CEO’s chilling ‘much bigger than COVID’ warning goes viral

As Artificial Intelligence continues to grow across various fields, an AI startup CEO has warned of its impending dangers, which he described as “much bigger than COVID”. In an article titled ‘Something Big Is Happening’, Hyperwrite CEO Matt Shumer said that AI will eliminate 50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs in the coming years. He added that the latest models have the capability for massive disruption, which can happen by the end of this year. He further warned that AI is now building itself, making it even more intelligent.

“I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort,” Shumer wrote in the nearly 5-word X post published on Tuesday (Feb 10). “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.”

“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,” he added. “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.”

Shumer described how he has already felt the dangers of AI in his work. “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job,” he said. He went on to describe how a simple command can build what he wants, with no further corrections needed. He said that the AI does it better than he could.

AI is building itself

He said that it was the GPT-5.3 Codex model, which was released last week, that “shook” him 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,” he wrote.

Shumer warned that “AI is now building the next AI.” He then cited a document released by OpenAI on its GPT-5.3 Codex, which read: “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,” Shumer said. “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.”

He further said that the current gap between public perception and reality is “dangerous” because it is preventing people from preparing, saying that most people are using free versions of AI tools that are more than a year behind what paying users have access to. “The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what's coming.”