The cutthroat race for AI talent has seen tech giants like Meta dangling exorbitant bonuses in the hundreds of millions to lure talent.
But Jad Tarifi, who founded Google’s first generative AI team, told Business Insider that he would not encourage people to get a Ph.D. just to cash in on the AI hype.
“AI itself is going to be gone by the time you finish a Ph.D. Even things like applying AI to robotics will be solved by then. So either get into something niche like AI for biology, which is still in its very early stages, or just don’t get into anything at all,” Tarifi said.
Tarifi, 42, got his Ph.D. in AI from the University of Florida in 2012. He joined Google in 2012 and spent nearly a decade with the search giant. In 2021, Tarifi started his own AI startup, Integral AI.
Tarifi said doctoral studies are an ordeal that only “weird people” — much like he was — should undertake, because it involves sacrificing “five years of your life and a lot of pain.”
“I don’t think anyone should ever do a Ph.D. unless they are obsessed with the field,” Tarifi said.
And now, with the world advancing as fast as it is, you can achieve a lot more outside school, he added.
“If you are unsure, you should definitely default to ‘no,’ and focus on just living in the world,” Tarifi said. “You will move much faster. You’ll learn a lot more. You’ll be more adaptive to how things are changed.”
Degrees that take a long time to complete, like law and medicine, are in trouble, too, Tarifi said.
“In the current medical system, what you learn in medical school is so outdated and based on memorization,” he said, adding that people might end up “throwing away eight years” of their lives for their advanced degrees.
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Tarifi said people who want to thrive in the age of AI should develop social skills and empathy. This is because while the hard sciences can be learned, expertise at prompting and using AI involves “emotional attunement” and “good taste.”
“The best thing to work on is more internal. Meditate. Socialize with your friends. Get to know yourself emotionally,” Tarifi said.
Tarifi said that when it comes to AI, one does not need to master every single detail to work in the industry.
“I have a Ph.D. in AI, but I don’t know how the latest microprocessor works,” Tarifi added. “For example, you can drive a car, but you might not know every single thing about the car. But if you know what to do if something goes wrong, that’s good enough.”
Tarifi isn’t the only one who says that leaning into one’s passions will become critical when navigating a world disrupted by AI.
Paul Graham, the founder of startup incubator Y Combinator, said in an X post on August 5 that low-level programming jobs are “already disappearing” because AI is “good at scutwork.”
“So I think the best general advice for protecting oneself from AI is to do something so well that you’re operating way above the level of scutwork,” Graham wrote.
“It’s hard to do something really well if you’re not deeply interested in it,” he added.