Wall Street Journal: AI Workers Are Putting In 100-Hour Workweeks to Win the New Tech Arms Race
With expertise in the field scarce, workers in Silicon Valley are pushing themselves to extremes day after day
https://archive.is/D1KNm
>“We’re basically trying to speedrun 20 years of scientific progress in two years,” said [Josh] Batson, a research scientist at Anthropic. Extraordinary advances in AI systems are happening “every few months,” he said. “It’s the most interesting scientific question in the world right now.”
>Executives and researchers at Microsoft, Anthropic, Alphabet’s Google, Meta Platforms, Apple and OpenAI have said they see their work as critical to a seminal moment in history as they duel with rivals and seek new ways to bring AI to the masses.
>“Everyone is working all the time, it’s extremely intense, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point,” Madhavi Sewak, a distinguished researcher at Google’s DeepMind, said in a recent interview.
>Certain startups have included the expectation of an 80-hour-plus workweek in their employment contracts, people familiar with the matter said. But many companies haven’t had to do so, as top AI employees are motivated by the intense competition with rivals and their own curiosity about new model possibilities.
>The most-intense periods for many come while working on models or new products, when time working extends beyond the “9-9-6” schedule. That stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. One startup executive jokingly referred to the schedule as “0-0-2,” meaning midnight to midnight, with a two-hour break on weekends.
>The breakneck pace is concentrated among a relatively small subset of workers at different companies, many of whom are trying to improve core AI models or take emerging capabilities and embed them into new products. These small teams often work at all hours, even after many lesser-paid colleagues have gone home, workers said.