Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree

The most important thing that I think academia has to offer is giving researchers a stable career path to explore long-term questions. I’ve come to appreciate this more after my last phase of work. Working independently was useful to me in earlier stages of research. As public discourse starts to mature, it became more important to have a community... See more

If kids are reading this, depending on who you are, college is probably still worthwhile right now, but 5 years from now, I expect things will be quite different. Peter Thiel has run a really interesting experiment with his Thiel Fellows program whose graduates (including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin) have done far better than university propon... See more

ut working this way, I feel better-equipped to make progress on my ideas than I have in quite some time. Single-user experiments like this emphasize problem- finding and discovery, not precise evaluation. In fact, my work with one student uncovered a startling hypothesis that consumed much of my year: what seems like a problem of forgetting is some... See more

Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) thinks studying philosophy is more important for entrepreneurs than an MBA. Reid is co-founder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock, podcaster, author, and early backer of @OpenAI. But before he did any of these things, he almost became a philosophy professor with a specific focus on Wittgenstein's theories of language a... See more