Economist recounts pure luck of landing at Hinton's lab right as AlexNet dropped
Afinetheorem · x · 2026-10-07
Economist Anton Korinek shares his lucky career path: around 2010, with no plan, he studied innovation diffusion under Joel Mokyr and Ben Jones with a Masters in pure math, then joined the school where Hinton and Ilya Sutskever had just released AlexNet.
He calls it "about as lucky as it gets" — being a scholar of the first two Industrial Revolutions while living through the early years of the fourth is a gift.
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