Anthropic researcher tells PhD students: your planned career paths no longer exist
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-10-19
A talk by an Anthropic researcher, "The End of the Anthropocene," delivered to a room of PhD students, is circulating widely. Key points (via FinanceYF5's thread):
- Compute growth: Training compute grew 10 million-fold over the past decade; 2030 compute is projected to reach 10,000x that of 2025.
- Capability trends: The length of tasks AI can complete autonomously doubles every few months; over the past 7 months models have been solving open Erdős problems that stumped mathematicians.
- Industry expectations: Even San Francisco's "long timelines" mean AGI is only 10 years away.
- Advice to students: (1) Use AI daily—stay on the exponential curve; (2) Pick projects that grow more valuable as compute grows; (3) Stop planning careers as stable paths—"safe options" no longer exist.
- Quote: "Writing is thinking. Outsourcing writing means outsourcing thinking."
Related event: Anthropic Researcher Tells PhD Students Their Career Plans No Longer Exist(4 posts)→
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