AI: Something Big Is Happening [View all]

(Long - But interesting)

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.

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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.

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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.

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https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening