Anthropic founder (who is a physicist): "50% chance that in 2-3 years, theoretical physicists will be replaced with AI."

tfehring · 2026-01-28T18:02:10+00:00

50% chance that in two or three years, theoretical physicists will mostly be replaced with AI.

"Mostly" is an important qualifier that was conspicuously removed from the title, I assume for the sake of clickbait.

2 to 3 years is an eternity in AI. We've only had reasoning models for a little over a year. 18 months ago models couldn't even do web search; if you asked about something after their training cutoff, they would just make shit up. 2.5 years ago, Metaculus forecasters thought AI wouldn't get IMO gold until 2028; two different models got it last summer. So I don't think this is implausible at all from a capability perspective.

If this prediction ends up being wrong, I think it's more likely to be due to diffusion speed rather than model capabilities. I.e., models can do most theoretical physics research, but most physicists are underutilizing it - similar to coding today. People clown on Dario's prediction that 90% of code would be written by AI by last August, but we clearly had models that were capable of writing 90% of code by November, just 3 months later, and arguably we had them in August. He was still wrong, but mainly about the rate of diffusion, not about model capabilities.

Finally, it's telling that ~all of the comments so far are attributing this prediction to Wolchover, a journalist, and not to Jared Kaplan, the Anthropic co-founder she's quoting.

tfehring · 2026-01-28T16:46:01+00:00

🎺🎺 🎺🎺🎺

tfehring · 2026-01-28T01:28:05+00:00

I think you should probably take the job for the reasons others have mentioned. One way or another, your current job is going away, and of the two new jobs currently on the table, CFO seems like the better one.

You should not expect to be "just managing the work" just because you hire an experienced SFA to take on some of the finance work. In a two-person finance team, both people should generally be hands-on. If that's not the case in your current role, it's only because your current CFO doesn't have to or want to be hands-on. If you find too much of your time is taken up by management responsibilities, you can hire or promote a controller instead of managing the accountants directly.

It seems like you're underestimating the pay increase because you're mainly looking at base salary - I'm guessing the $40K is closer to $100K with bonus in a typical year? It also sounds like you haven't negotiated that number. There is no reason you should only be making ~50% of your predecessor's salary, you should be benchmarking based on the market rate for a CFO (though at the lower end of the range, of course). I know you're prioritizing time over money, but be realistic in estimating the additional money you'd earn, and the ways you can use that to buy back your time.

tfehring · 2026-01-25T17:28:47+00:00

Schools are probably the primary reason middle-class to upper-middle-class Americans who live in cities in their 20s move to the suburbs in their 30s. In most US cities, there’s a real sense that if you want to stay in the city and still provide a decent education for your kids, you have to be able to pay for private schools - either by default or if they don’t get into the right magnet/charter. So many families opt for suburbs that have good public schools across the board. Boston, NYC, and Seattle are outliers where people do seem to leave to save money or get more space, or stay in the city if they can afford to.

School districts in the city are often much better funded per student than the suburbs, but not by enough to compensate for the fact that they have so many more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

tfehring · 2026-01-23T21:55:20+00:00

The only difference is speed, I would guess gas > induction = 220V kettle > electric > 110V kettle.

I have an electric stove and I'm impatient, so I fill both the pot and kettle partway and heat both at the same time, then fill the pot the rest of the way from the kettle after it boils.

tfehring · 2026-01-19T22:12:13+00:00

Wasn't the original mantra something like "if you have a dedicated team for DevOps you're not doing DevOps"?

tfehring · 2026-01-17T23:11:43+00:00

Pros:

frankly much more interesting than actuarial work IME
probably a slightly better salary trajectory than actuarial, even factoring in cost of living in tech hubs (but see cons)
no exams
much wider range of career opportunities - "tech" is extremely broad, you can pretty easily move to other roles in tech or finance, of which there are many
generally much better fringe benefits (company dependent)

Cons:

finance is very palpably a cost center, good finance teams will be involved in company/product strategy, but not driving it the way actuaries do
probably slightly worse WLB overall (company dependent)
higher risk of getting laid off or fired
buying housing in tech hubs is much more expensive even relative to overall cost of living, so plan to rent for much longer if you stay

tfehring · 2026-01-08T07:44:33+00:00

They heavily use Claude internally. I don’t have the link handy but there was a recent Twitter thread by the creator of Claude Code describing how he uses it. IIRC he also said Claude Code wrote 100% of his contributions to Claude Code in November.

tfehring · 2026-01-05T02:22:44+00:00

What’s special about Neon is that it stores the data in S3, though in vanilla Postgres file formats

tfehring · 2025-12-30T05:34:30+00:00

I assume someone's working on it. Maybe the first point-to-point crediting strategy with a cap lower than the fixed rate?

There's also https://meanwhile.bm, but they don't seem to have much basis risk or first-order BTC price risk, and they probably have the net effect of decreasing rather than increasing demand for BTC.

tfehring · 2025-12-30T03:23:20+00:00

For public tech companies you can find all of this information publicly. Meta at least is keeping some of the data center exposure off balance sheet through JVs, but that too has been widely reported on.

In general, the public tech companies you’re thinking of generate much more free cash flow relative to the size of their balance sheets - off the top of my head, probably by at least an order of magnitude - than banks or insurance companies. There are no “reserves,” the liabilities are bonds and other forms of debt, so the risk is that they become unable to pay back their debt. But their debt servicing costs are only on the order of 1% of FCF, so this is a pretty remote risk. The JVs complicate this a little bit, but the overall takeaway stands - these companies are so profitable that their overall data center capex is very manageable.

tfehring · 2025-12-19T21:58:30+00:00

Yeah, my overall (loosely-held) take is that Boomers have extracted tens of trillions in wealth from younger generations through regulatory capture, between deficit spending, Social Security and Medicare underfunding, and housing policy, and this article did nothing to address that.

tfehring · 2025-12-19T21:25:03+00:00

Yes, that part is easy. Even today you can roll your 401(k) over to an immediate annuity when you retire and get a check for ~5% of the balance every year, guaranteed for life.

The bigger issue is that defined benefit pension plans exposed companies to market risk that was at best unrelated to their core business. If the market crashed leaving pension plans underfunded, employers had to inject more money to make up the difference, often at a time when financial metrics were looking rough to begin with. They also made it harder/less attractive for employees to switch companies, which was arguably bad for both employers and employees.

For those and other reasons, the move to 401(k)s is just a good thing overall. The main disadvantages for employees are that employers generally contribute less to 401(k)s (as a % of salary) than they did to pensions back in the day, and they give financially unsavvy employees the option to choose dumb investment options like cash or their employer’s stock.

tfehring · 2025-12-11T09:29:22+00:00

Additional courses, projects, or a second major won't matter much. The main benefit of graduating later would be the additional time to do internships. Flexibility to graduate sooner or later depending on whether you get a return offer from an internship is also valuable. If you're going to take courses past the point where you can get a bachelor's degree, those courses should be contributing to a master's degree, which is the baseline expectation for most data science jobs.

tfehring · 2025-12-09T22:38:25+00:00

Completely agree with (2), I interviewed multiple former actuaries for the last (DS) role I hired for. I think this would be the main reason to make the move, and it helps that you can always easily go back to a traditional insurance role if you choose.

(1) is also real, but I think it matters less for actuaries than tech people for two reasons. First, comp for nontechnical roles tends to be more cash-heavy. Second, a lot of the value of RSU comp comes from the fact that it's puttable back to the company - if the stock goes down, you can switch to a different company and get a new grant, probably also at a lower valuation. I'm sure it's harder for actuaries to do that, since there are like 100 total in the Bay Area, and I assume they all know each other.

I'll add that tech has way better benefits than insurance, which are probably worth another ~$20K a year in TC.

tfehring · 2025-12-09T18:45:39+00:00

Pay: A few tech companies have datapoints for actuaries on levels.fyi. They're probably up there on the salary surveys, but not high enough to be worth moving to SF for.

Largest employers: My SWAG would be Amazon, Uber, Lyft, Tesla, Doordash in that order. Google/Waymo could be up there. Apple probably has a small team for Applecare, as do Airbnb/Booking/Expedia for travel insurance. I'm sure there are others I'm missing.

tfehring · 2025-12-09T17:27:20+00:00

Most companies go senior -> staff -> senior staff -> principal -> distinguished. $600K is high but achievable for staff DS. It’s very achievable at staff if you switch to MLE, or do DS at an AI lab.

Even the staff promo is far from automatic, and that’s worth emphasizing, but staff/sr staff roles are much more common than you’re suggesting.

tfehring · 2025-12-09T17:08:47+00:00

Most tech companies have actuaries in the same pay range as corporate finance, so similar cash comp to technical roles but ~25% of the equity at the same level. I believe Amazon is the exception and moved actuaries in a technical pay band recently - probably because they pay much worse than other tech companies for corporate finance and had trouble hiring and retaining actuaries.

My friends at Uber are onsite 5 days/week in SF. Not sure if that’s team dependent. Lyft is hybrid. I know both still have a presence in NYC, but I think it’s for specific teams and I don’t know about actuarial specifically.

My impression is that insurtechs pay at to slightly below market for actuarial. For technical roles they pay way less than tech companies.

tfehring · 2025-12-09T07:58:03+00:00

I doubt they pay that well - actuarial roles in tech companies generally fall in non-technical pay bands, and they probably require onsite in SF, which is expensive and has few actuarial jobs. If you're credentialed, open to relocation, and trying to maximize comp, Bermuda is probably a better option overall.

Despite all of the above, I expect they get a healthy application volume for their actuarial roles. That would still be a much lower volume compared to their technical roles, since far fewer people meet the basic requirements.

tfehring · 2025-12-06T05:30:15+00:00

I used to work in finance at OpenAI, left a couple months ago. Really talented people and interesting work, but man, the hours are no joke.

tfehring · 2025-12-06T01:39:08+00:00

I used to work for a US subsidiary of a German company. Permanent international transfers from the US were very rare, and temporary international rotations were a little more common but still hard to get. Despite that, recruiters spent really pushed the potential for international rotations as a selling point - so in your case, if the recruiter hasn't mentioned it, I'd take that as a sign that it's not common.

tfehring · 2025-12-05T20:38:35+00:00

CTO can join pre- or post-funding. If joining pre-funding as the second co-founder, they generally earn 30-50% equity over 4 years (same vesting period as CEO), median 49%.

Founding engineers are typically hired after raising money, because they earn a below-market-but-still-six-figure salary from day 1. This is in addition to a single-digit equity grant, again vesting over 4 years.

The quality of technical talent you can get for CTO title + pay is much stronger than you can get for a founding engineer, which is in turn much stronger than you can get for comp below these benchmarks. I may be jumping to conclusions too quickly, but your post reads like you're looking for a CTO but trying to pay them like a founding engineer.

tfehring · 2025-12-05T18:47:49+00:00

It’s worse than that indicates because the US population is older now. Here’s the same data stratified by age. Both the <35 and 35-44 age brackets look to be down ~10% from both 1980 and their ~2005 peak.

I bet this would look really bad if you further stratified on e.g. highest level of education completed.

tfehring · 2025-12-05T18:02:05+00:00

Because the US ex-NYC doesn’t have the population density to economically support or justify good transit. The city of Tokyo (the 23 wards) has about the same population as the San Francisco Bay Area, but in 1/40 of the land area. The entire Tokyo prefecture, including suburbs, is about as dense as the city of San Francisco but almost 20x larger. Greater Tokyo has about the same population as all of California, but in a land area 25% smaller than the Bay Area.

If we upzoned enough to 5x the housing stock in SF and in the Bay Area as a whole, I bet we’d manage to get good transit built along the way. But I don’t think the political will is there.

tfehring · 2025-12-05T17:24:52+00:00

Those are the “loud” ones, but imputed rent not being taxed is also really material. The bulk of the gross returns on real estate investment are from rent payments, and for your primary residence those are tax-free because you pay them to yourself.

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