As undergraduate degrees have lost their payoffs thanks to AI, young people have turned to advanced schooling to unlock jobs with salaries exceeding $200,000 (or in some cases, a $100 million signing bonus). However, one former Google leader says Gen Z should not be so fast to jump on the PhD train, as even doctoral degrees may have lost their edge.
“AI itself is going to be gone by the time you finish a PhD. Even things like applying AI to robotics will be solved by then,” Jad Tarifi, the founder of Google’s first generative-AI team, told Business Insider.
Tarifi himself graduated with a PhD in AI in 2012, when the subject was far less mainstream. But today, the 42-year-old says, time would be better spent studying a more niche topic intertwined with AI, like AI for biology—or maybe not a degree at all.
“Higher education as we know it is on the verge of becoming obsolete,” Tarifi said to Fortune. “Thriving in the future will come not from collecting credentials but from cultivating unique perspectives, agency, emotional awareness, and strong human bonds.
“I encourage young people to focus on two things: the art of connecting deeply with others, and the inner work of connecting with themselves.”
Tech’s warning for education on the changing AI tide
Even studying to become a medical doctor or lawyer may not be worth ambitious Gen Z’s time anymore. Those degrees take so long to complete in comparison with how quickly AI is evolving that they may result in students just “throwing away” years of their lives, Tarifi added to BI.
“In the current medical system, what you learn in medical school is so outdated and based on memorization,” he said.
Tarifi is not alone in his feeling that higher education is not keeping up with the shifting AI tides. In fact, many tech leaders have recently expressed concerns that the rising cost of school paired with an outdated curriculum is creating a perfect storm for an unprepared workforce.
“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today,” said Mark Zuckerberg on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast in April. “I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are…really big.
“It’s sort of been this taboo thing to say, ‘Maybe not everyone needs to go to college,’ and because there’s a lot of jobs that don’t require that…people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago,” Zuckerberg added.
Moreover, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that his company’s latest AI model can already perform in ways equivalent to those with a PhD.
“GPT-5 really feels like talking to a PhD-level expert in any topic,” Altman said earlier this month. “Something like GPT-5 would be pretty much unimaginable in any other time in history.”
The pipeline from PhD to six-figure job offer remains strong—for now
For existing AI-focused PhD students, the private sector jobs pipeline remains strong. In fact, in 2023, some 70% of all AI doctoral students took private sector jobs postgrad, a jump from just 20% two decades ago, according to MIT.
However, this increase has some academic leaders worried about a “brain drain” that could result from too many experts electing to work at tech companies—versus staying back and teaching the next generation as professors.
Henry Hoffmann, the chair of the University of Chicago’s department of computer science, recently told Fortune that he’s seen his PhD students get courted for decades—but the salary lures have only grown. One student with zero professional experience recently dropped out to accept a “high six-figure” offer from ByteDance.
“When students can get the kind of job they want [as students], there’s no reason to force them to keep going,” Hoffmann said.
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