Anthropic's Jascha Sohl-Dickstein tells PhD students their career plans no longer exist
udmrzn · x · 2026-10-20
A viral talk by Jascha Sohl-Dickstein (inventor of diffusion models, now at Anthropic) warns young researchers: "Knowing AGI arrives in 3 years, do you still plan a PhD, postdoc, and professorship?"
The stark facts he presents
- Training compute grew 10 million-fold in a decade, approaching a human brain's lifetime compute
- The task time-horizon AI can complete doubles every few months; in the last 7 months models have begun solving long-unsolved Erdős problems
- In SF, a "long timeline skeptic" means "AGI within 10 years"; 2030 compute is projected at 10,000x 2025
- On a linear chart, today's dramatic progress is still indistinguishable from zero
Advice to students
- Use AI daily: he treats Claude like a grad student—"brilliant executor, terrible research taste"—and no longer writes code himself
- Pick problems that improve with compute, or per Sutton's Bitter Lesson your 2-year project will be solved before it's done
Related event: Anthropic Researcher Tells PhD Students Their Career Plans No Longer Exist(4 posts)→
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