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I'm going to bring this up just because its in the back of my mind and I'm going to reserve some small amount of probability for it.
But I can imagine the scenario where Sam himself arranges for these (pretty ineffective, obviously) attacks against his home as a counter to the bad press and to make sure he keeps his grasp on power, as he's already been ousted once.
Yes, it's implausible that he'd pull a Jussie Smollet, it is VASTLY more likely to be actual random violence. But I have enough distrust for Altman that I think he'd be willing to do something like this, especially if it carried minimal risk of personal harm.
Holy cow.
I guess the high achievers are technically the MOST likely to feel this anxiety, because they can directly perceive their competition is no longer just other high achievers... but this machine that can outperform them on every single metric that matters for success.
And as a former High School Valedictorian myself... I don't have a good answer here.
Its patently absurd to say he should toss out his academic achievement and instead divert into blue collar/physical work.
But to continue in academics would be a doomed play.
Uhhh get him in a gym and possibly doing some martial arts STAT, if only for the mental health benefits.
At this point he's considering law, because lawyers decide what's allowed or not in this country. His opinion is that it'll be one of the last safe fields left.
Law hasn't been a great field for a while either. Source: I'm a law school dropout.
Around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, tons of universities added law schools. They basically bring in the same amount of revenue as medical schools, but with waaaaay less overhead. The legal job market got flooded in the mid 10's. I'm sure supply and demand have normalized a bit since then, but law isn't nearly as surefire a way to be wealthy as it used too be.
i.e. a genius.
Yes and no. Hiring is up, but I think there's significant turnover too. Some law firms realized that when you have a surplus of desperate new grads, you can churn your associates harder and replace them easier.
Right now the churn is more in recent grads leaving for what they perceive to be greener pastures. The problem right now isn't so much a shortage of lawyers as it is a shortage of experienced lawyers. I work at a smaller firm, and just a couple months ago a younger guy who clerked for a judge after law school and whose wife works across the street from us quit to take a different job. I don't even know if the pay is any better, but it seems like everyone under the age of 35, and several people who are older, think that whatever job they're doing is unsatisfying and wants to do something closer to what they imagined the practice of law would look like. In the meantime, we can't find anyone to replace these people. Hiring out of law school only makes the situation worse because it takes several months to get an attorney to the point where they're actually making money for the firm, and they're unwilling to do that for a guy who is going to bolt in six months.
How is AI upending the profession in your case? Are there interesting avenues undergrads can pursue that have an opportunity to reinvigorate the profession in some sense? Or is it all fairly mundane?
I haven't used AI for work and I don't know of anyone who does. I honestly don't know what I would even use it for. I guess I could theoretically load deposition transcripts in case I needed to see if there was one taken in the past where a witness said something I could use, but that would literally require millions of tokens of input context, assuming it was even capable of handling such a request, and the utility of that would be limited, i.e. I'd do it if it were cheap enough but there's no way it would be cheap enough. People bring up research a lot and it might be useful there, but I do research like twice a year.
Not saying it would or wouldn't work well for this, but even Opus 4.6 is $5 per million input tokens. You probably wouldn't want to feed in all the transcripts at once though.
Well, that's the problem, since it's only worth doing if I can feed in all the transcripts at once. If I knew which transcripts I needed, I wouldn't need an LLM to tell me! We're talking literally tens of thousands of transcripts here, most of them well over 100 pages. If I have to curate them to fit inside a reasonable context window, then I've already done 99% of the work, since it only takes a few minutes for me to look in the index and see if there's any relevant testimony. Even by my conservative calculations, at $5/token it would be prohibitively expensive to do anything, even if a large enough context window existed, and with that much context the LLM's accuracy would start to break down pretty quickly.
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