Ex-Google AI engineer cautions students, 'Don't get PhD in AI because…'

Ever wondered how will AI affect computer science degree at the university level? Ex-Google engineer Jad Tarifi of the pioneering gen-AI team has warned about the dangers of getting a university-level degree in such a scenario, proving how AI can make their learning irrelevant in five years!

Tarifi, a former member of Google's original generative AI team and now co-founder of Integral AI, believes that it is not a viable choice for most future technologists to get a traditional PhD in the field. The ever-accelerating rate at which AI is evolving implies that when a student has finished an AI doctoral program, Tarifi argues, the expertise that they have in their area of specialty will be obsolete.

Former Google engineer says AI PhD is not needed

Speaking to Business Insider, Tarifi warned students who get a PhD just to "cash in on the AI hype" will be completely disillusioned. "AI itself will be obsolete before you've done a Ph.D.," he asserted, forecasting the technology underpinning it would be replaced by better ones. He went on to say that the science is developing at record speed and amazing robotics, medicine, and natural language system advances occur on a practically daily basis within industry research labs and new start-up companies. Generative AI technology will have exploded into even bigger ideas and applications before a fresh PhD graduate can even get a job.

What, then, is a technology student to do?

Tarifi is a hands-on person. Tarifi had earned his PhD in AI from the University of Florida in 2012 and worked for ten years at Google before starting an independent firm, Integral AI. In retrospect, he believes that a long academic career can be "sacrificing years of one's life" without being in a place to keep up with the speed of the industry of the real world.

He suggests that it's only worth doing a PhD for the "odd people" who are "properly obsessed with research" for its own sake, not for career.