Welcome to the TechBrew Right Home for Wednesday, February 11th, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough today. Forget the chat GPT moment. Is this the COVID moment for AI? The moment when everything has changed, it's just not that everyone knows it yet. More weird musical chairs at the AI startups, TikTok, but for around the block. And do we

finally have a universal translator but for phone calls? Here's what you miss today in the world of

tech. I'm going to lead with something unusual today. It's an essay from AI startup founder Matt Schumer,

where he makes the argument that GPT 5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 can meaningfully contribute to

the improvement of AI models, which he says would be a sign of what's coming for most

knowledge work within five years. It's been a while since I've seen a piece

get this much chatter online, so I'm going to link to it so you can read the whole thing in full,

but also I'm going to summarize it right now. Schumer's essay is essentially a warning memo to

non-tech friends and family. He says we are at a February 2020 moment for AI. We're still in the phase

where normal life looks intact, and most people think the alarm is overblown. He's, of course,

referencing COVID. This is right before the implications become unavoidable, though. He argues this

wave will be much, much bigger than COVID and that the gap between what

insiders are seeing and what the public believes is now dangerously wide. He starts by explaining

why he's breaking social norms to sound dramatic. He says he has spent years building and investing

in AI, but he says he's been giving loved ones a cocktail party version because

the honest version makes him sound unhinged. Now he thinks that's no longer defensible. He also

emphasizes that most people in AI, including him, don't meaningfully control what's about to

happen. The future is being steered by a small set of teams at a few frontier labs where a single training run can shift the entire trajectory of the technology.

The first major claim he makes is the reason tech people are suddenly sounding the alarm is not because they're making distant predictions.

It's because the disruption has already arrived for them.

In his account, AI progress used to feel like

big jumps spaced far enough apart to digest. Then in 2025, the cadence tightened and the margins

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