AI Judge changed title after evaluation, original title: "A Meta data scientist claims current AI lacks capability to displace existing roles but projects a need to advance several abstraction layers higher within roughly one year, citing uncertainty for new field entrants"
Engineers anticipate shifting to higher abstraction layers within one year.
My synthesis of this was to ape into hardware
AI is not currently good enough to cause me to lose my job but i expect ive got maybe a year to figure out how to move up several abstraction layers some of which may not even exist yet
this is going to get weird because idk how people starting careers will even begin
Positive users praise AI for breakthroughs, career advice and engaging formats while negative users dismiss research claims as slop or bullshit and fear a coming bloodbath in researcher pay and jobs.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
How to land a job at a frontier lab
https://vladfeinberg.com/2026/05/10/how-to-land-a-job-at-a-frontier-lab.html
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result, 1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb. Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future). Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed. Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either. No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
ironically think it’ll be a sad time for ai researchers this year. they are first in the hotpath of RSI and probably the market for them will shrink or at least their pricing power will be reduced as this generation of models commoditizes the skills that made them rare
10/10 no notes
How to land a job at a frontier lab
https://vladfeinberg.com/2026/05/10/how-to-land-a-job-at-a-frontier-lab.html
How to land a job at a frontier lab
https://vladfeinberg.com/2026/05/10/how-to-land-a-job-at-a-frontier-lab.html
this seems quite doable in the space of a single 2-3 hour workshop — any brave soul want to try to livecode this for people as a learning exercise?
How to land a job at a frontier lab
https://vladfeinberg.com/2026/05/10/how-to-land-a-job-at-a-frontier-lab.html
The core advice of "get good at an in-demand skill which is new enough not everyone will know it" is great -- it's what I did inadvertently (knowing Tensorflow) -- but I cannot for the life of me endorse "give up all your weekends and become a work machine".
How to land a job at a frontier lab
https://vladfeinberg.com/2026/05/10/how-to-land-a-job-at-a-frontier-lab.html
It's a very strange place to be working in tech. You can have your entire career about to disappear in front of you and yet you maintain a sense of calm. The truth is working in tech was never stable it always changed every couple of years. The only constant has change
AI is not currently good enough to cause me to lose my job but i expect ive got maybe a year to figure out how to move up several abstraction layers some of which may not even exist yet
this is going to get weird because idk how people starting careers will even begin
4/10 of my breakthroughs have come from a conversation I've had with an AI researcher friend of mine. I just take vague memories of our conversations together and put it into GPT 5.5 Codex and out the other end I get breakthroughs
I think humans are going to stay useful
ironically think it’ll be a sad time for ai researchers this year. they are first in the hotpath of RSI and probably the market for them will shrink or at least their pricing power will be reduced as this generation of models commoditizes the skills that made them rare
ML researchers who thought they were escaping the permanent underclass by joining an organization whose explicit goal is to automate ML research
ironically think it’ll be a sad time for ai researchers this year. they are first in the hotpath of RSI and probably the market for them will shrink or at least their pricing power will be reduced as this generation of models commoditizes the skills that made them rare
(for the moderate to good ones. the world class ones will see their leverage increased 100-1000x, but probably a tiny set of superstars)
ironically think it’ll be a sad time for ai researchers this year. they are first in the hotpath of RSI and probably the market for them will shrink or at least their pricing power will be reduced as this generation of models commoditizes the skills that made them rare
This batch of AI researchers will be the SF landlords forever
ironically think it’ll be a sad time for ai researchers this year. they are first in the hotpath of RSI and probably the market for them will shrink or at least their pricing power will be reduced as this generation of models commoditizes the skills that made them rare
@yacineMTB always been that way. codefags get leapfrogged that was always the easy part
It's a very strange place to be working in tech. You can have your entire career about to disappear in front of you and yet you maintain a sense of calm. The truth is working in tech was never stable it always changed every couple of years. The only constant has change
"No, LLMs themselves cannot do this yet."
How to land a job at a frontier lab
https://vladfeinberg.com/2026/05/10/how-to-land-a-job-at-a-frontier-lab.html
my intuition is that having a model of how a function--data, engineering, product, whatever--functions is important to capably automating that function
people who have been operating in those functions for years seem as though they'd have an overwhelming advantage in this
Just probably going to be a lot less do nothing work at fang jobs. But I never like those anyways.
It's a very strange place to be working in tech. You can have your entire career about to disappear in front of you and yet you maintain a sense of calm. The truth is working in tech was never stable it always changed every couple of years. The only constant has change
but of course to the extent agents hollow out these functions and displace human labor its hard to imagine firm structures remaining as they exist, designed for human operations
so this probably gets me another year or two max, if i'm working in tech proper
@FeinbergVlad love this!
i guess the main advice i have is, own a significant amount of capital likely to appreciate as a consequence of general AI deployment
volunteer here https://ai.engineer/cfp !
this seems quite doable in the space of a single 2-3 hour workshop — any brave soul want to try to livecode this for people as a learning exercise?
@FeinbergVlad Average tweeter: ok I’m super sick at writing prompts, do I get a job at Anthropic now?
Vlad: yeah almost there, now just do a little kernel optimization dev and you’ve got it!
