Anthropic researcher tells PhD students their career path no longer exists as compute scales 10,000x
anselm · x · 2026-10-19
In a talk titled "The End of the Anthropocene," an Anthropic researcher told a room of PhD students their planned careers no longer exist. Key data: training compute grew 10 million-fold over the past decade; the length of tasks AI completes autonomously doubles every few months; models have been cracking open Erdős problems for 7 months; and in San Francisco a "long timeline" means thinking AGI is 10 years out. He projects 2030 compute will be 10,000x that of 2025 — "we're still at the start of the exponential." His advice: use AI every day, and pick projects that improve as compute scales, since everything else will be solved first.
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