Many AI researchers can learn from athletics and appreciate the value of rest. Your mental acuity can drop off faster than your physical peak performance does when not rested. Working too hard forces you to take narrower and less creative approaches. The deeper into the hole of burnout I get in trying to make you the next Olmo model, the worse my writing gets. My ability to spot technical dead ends goes with it. If the intellectual payoffs to rest are hard to see, your schedule doesn’t have the space for creativity and insight.
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Enforced / normative workaholism has come and gone in waves over the past few decades, and we’re clearly in a swelling wave. The worry I have is how long it will take for it to crash and for us to relearn old lessons. Good luck if you have a family or want to start one.
This is an opportunity for companies to build cultures that aren’t simply weak copies of what the big-N are doing and to differentiate themselves, to attract talent and to build something sustainable. Right now we’re in a bit of a pooling equilibrium scenario, where many firms are broadcasting the same work culture regardless of p(success), leaving talent to effectively choose at random beyond 1-2 top firms.
As the market grows and matures, this will become more of a separating equilibrium. If you are talented enough to get hired at a top firm, why would you accept the same working conditions at a firm that offers less in prestige and compensation (but real and potential)? You wouldn’t, and you’d make decisions based on other criteria, such as the culture and working conditions.
Nathan hits a lot of points that I think many people “know” are true but fail to operationalize due to pressure or even fear. Burnout is bad not only for individuals, which is self-evident, but for collectives. It reduces creativity, the quality of work declines, and vulnerability to fresh challengers increases.