To outside observers, AI researchers are in an enviable position. They’re sought after by tech giants. They’re taking home eye-popping salaries. And they’re in the hottest industry of the moment.
But all this comes with intense pressure.
More than half a dozen researchers TechCrunch spoke with, some of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the AI industry’s breakneck pace has taken a toll on their mental health. Fierce competition between AI labs has fomented an isolating atmosphere, they say, while the rising stakes have ratcheted up stress levels.
“Everything has changed virtually overnight,” one researcher told me, “with our work — both positive and negative results — having huge impacts as measured by things like product exposure, and financial consequences.”
Just this past December, OpenAI hosted 12 livestreams during which it announced over a dozen new tools, models, and services. Google responded with tools, models, and services of its own in a dizzying array of press releases, social media posts, and blogs. The back-and-forth between the two tech giants was remarkable for its speed — speed that researchers say comes at a steep cost.
Grind and hustle
Silicon Valley is no stranger to hustle culture. With the AI boom, however, the public endorsement of overwork has reached troubling heights.
At OpenAI, it isn’t uncommon for researchers to work six days a week — and well past quitting time. CEO Sam Altman is said to push the company’s teams to turn breakthroughs into public products on grueling timelines. OpenAI’s ex-chief research officer, Bob McGrew, reportedly cited burnout as one of the reasons he left last September.
There’s no relief to be found at competing labs. The Google DeepMind team developing Gemini, Google’s flagship series of AI models, at one point stepped up from working 100 hours a week to 120 hours to fix a bug in a system. And engineers at xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, regularly post about working nights that bleed into the wee hours of the morning.
Why the relentless push? AI research today can have a sizeable impact on a company’s earnings. Google parent Alphabet lost some $90 billion in market value over the aforementioned bug, which caused Google’s Gemini chatbot to generate controversial depictions of historical figures.
“One of the biggest pressures is competitiveness,” Kai Arulkumaran, a research lead at AI services provider Araya, said, “combined with rapid timescales.”
Leaderboards above all
Some of this competition plays out very publicly.
On a monthly — and sometimes weekly — basis, AI companies gun to displace one another on leaderboards like Chatbot Arena, which rank AI models across categories like math and coding. Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for several Google Gemini developer tools, said in a post on X that Chatbot Arena “has had a nontrivial impact on the velocity of AI development.”
Not all researchers are convinced that’s a good thing. The industry’s velocity is such, they say, that they find their work at risk of being obsolesced before it can even ship …