"Fifteen years ago, in the winter of 2010, I was in the final stretch of my PhD and starting to explore the world outside academia. I remember coming back from a job interview for an R&D position during a record-cold Paris winter. Snow everywhere, sitting in a cold regional train. I felt disappointed and vaguely confused. I knew most of the tools this industry's R&D team was using and was confident I could learn the remaining ones fairly easily."
"Correlation or causation , fall 2022 marks the release of ChatGPT, the moment the public discovered what AI models could really do, and when the AI race for improved capabilities truly ignited, initially driven by OpenAI and Anthropic, soon to be joined at the frontier by Google and an increasing number of companies such as xAI, Alibaba (Qwen), DeepSeek, Mistral, and many others."
A job-seeker with a fresh PhD experienced rejection for lacking "experience" despite relevant skills, creating a lasting sense of unfairness. Recent data indicate shrinking entry-level hiring, particularly for software developers. A Stanford analysis found employment for 22–25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed occupations fell roughly 6% between late 2022 and mid-2025, while employment for older workers in those occupations rose about 6–9%. Late 2022, marked by ChatGPT's release, coincides with an acceleration in AI capabilities and competition among major firms. AI models have rapidly improved on coding and real-world tasks, increasing automation potential.
Read at Substack
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