100-Hour Workweeks Become the Norm for AI Teams

These days, working for America’s AI giants means putting in 80 to 100-hour weeks.

That’s according to a report late Wednesday (Oct. 22) by The Wall Street Journal, which says that many researchers at Silicon Valley artificial intelligence (AI) labs compare the situation to being at war.

“We’re basically trying to speedrun 20 years of scientific progress in two years,” said Josh Batson, a research scientist at Anthropic. Major advances in AI systems are happening “every few months,” he said. “It’s the most interesting scientific question in the world right now.”

According to the report, executives and researchers at tech companies like Anthropic, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI have said they view their work as key to a pivotal historic moment as they compete to broaden the reach of AI. Some of them have become multimillionaires, though several said they have no time to enjoy their new wealth.

As the WSJ notes, the competition of AI talent accelerated earlier this year when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg began wooing workers from competitors with multimillion-dollar salaries, illustrating the value of this relatively small group of researchers and executives.

Now, the report added, companies and the workers themselves are trying to squeeze as much work as possible from these people each day.

“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 researcher at Google’s DeepMind, told the WSJ.

While many of these workers said the pace of their jobs has worn them down and kept them from spending time with family and friends, they also repeatedly said they keep these long hours by choice.

“You have all these good ideas, and you know it’s a competition against time,” Sewak said. “You don’t want to let ideas go unexplored, so when you have free time, you’re working on” and exploring other new ideas.

In related news, this week saw reports that Meta would cut 600 positions in its AI unit to make the division more agile.

The cuts will not impact Meta’s newly-created TBD Lab unit and will instead focus on its FAIR AI research, product-related AI and AI infrastructure units, Axios reported, citing an internal memo from Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang.

“By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang wrote in the memo, per the Axios report.