, Columnist
The AI Boom Is Rewarding Stanford’s Worst Instincts
Tech’s corridors of power?
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Earlier this month, an engineer at leading AI lab Anthropic PBC visited Stanford University to give a visiting lecture to roughly 100 computer science students. They were weeks away from graduation, and worried, like their peers booing mentions of AI at recent commencement speeches, about what the future holds for them in an industry that’s replacing swathes of coders with artificial intelligence tools. They peppered him with questions seeking career advice. Yet while the engineer had only graduated from Stanford two years earlier, the calculus had dramatically shifted.
“If I were in your shoes,” he admitted, “I would have no idea what to do.”