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Illustration by Fernando Capeto and Samantha Lee via Google Gemini AI<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPublished on\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAugust 7, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
AGI \u2014 a theoretical AI that can do many of the same tasks as humans can \u2014 could come within a decade. College students, including from elite universities, are abandoning school now to work full-time on preventing it from turning on humanity.<\/p>\n
Illustration by Fernando Capeto and Samantha Lee via Google Gemini AI<\/p>\n
When Alice Blair enrolled\u00a0in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman in 2023, she was excited to take computer science courses and meet other people who cared about making sure artificial intelligence is developed in a way that\u2019s good for humanity.<\/p>\n
Now she\u2019s taking a permanent leave of absence, terrified that the emergence of \u201cartificial general intelligence,\u201d a hypothetical AI that can perform a variety of tasks as well as people, could doom the human race.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was concerned I might not be alive to graduate because of AGI,\u201d said Blair, who is from Berkeley, California. \u201cI think in a large majority of the scenarios, because of the way we are working towards AGI, we get human extinction.\u201d She\u2019s lined up a contract gig as a technical writer at the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit focused on AI safety research, where she helps with newsletters and research papers. Blair doesn\u2019t plan to head back to MIT. \u201cI predict that my future lies out in the real world,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Blair\u2019s not the only student afraid of the potentially devastating impact that AI will have on the future of humanity if it becomes sentient and decides that people are more trouble than they\u2019re worth. \u201cExtinction-level\u201d risk is possible given how fast AI is being developed, according to a 2024 U.S. Department of State-commissioned\u00a0report<\/a>. Efforts to build AI with safeguards to prevent this from happening have exploded in the last few years, both from\u00a0billionaire-funded nonprofits<\/a>\u00a0like the Center for AI Safety and companies like Anthropic.<\/p>\n A<\/a>\u00a0lot<\/a>\u00a0of<\/a>\u00a0researchers disagree with that premise\u2014\u201chuman extinction seems to be very very unlikely,\u201d New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus, who studies the intersection of psychology and AI, told\u00a0Forbes. \u201cBut working on AI safety is noble, and very little current work has provided answers.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, the field of AI safety and its promise to prevent the worst effects of AI is motivating young people to drop out of school.<\/p>\n \u201cIf your career is about to be automated by the end of the decade, then every year spent in college is one year subtracted from your short career.\u201d<\/p>\n Nikola Jurkovi\u0107<\/p>\n Physics and computer science major Adam Kaufman left Harvard University last fall to work full-time at Redwood Research, a nonprofit examining deceptive AI systems that could act against human interests.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m quite worried about the risks and think that the most important thing to work on is mitigating them,\u201d said Kaufman. \u201cSomewhat more selfishly, I just think it\u2019s really interesting. I work with the smartest people I\u2019ve ever met on super important problems.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s not alone. His brother, roommate and girlfriend have also taken leave from Harvard for similar reasons. The three of them currently work for OpenAI.<\/p>\n Other students are terrified of AGI, but less because it could destroy the human race and more because it could wreck their career before it\u2019s even begun. Half of 326 Harvard students\u00a0surveyed<\/a>\u00a0by the school\u2019s undergraduate association and AI safety club were worried about AI\u2019s impact on their job prospects.<\/p>\n \u201cIf your career is about to be automated by the end of the decade, then every year spent in college is one year subtracted from your short career,\u201d said Nikola Jurkovi\u0107, who graduated from Harvard this May and served as the AI safety group\u2019s AGI preparedness lead. \u201cI personally think AGI is maybe four years away and full automation of the economy is maybe five or six years away.\u201d<\/p>\n Already, some companies are\u00a0hiring fewer<\/a>\u00a0interns and recent graduates because AI is capable of doing their tasks. Others are\u00a0conducting<\/a>\u00a0mass layoffs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei\u00a0has warned<\/a>\u00a0that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and cause unemployment to rise to 20% in the next few years.<\/p>\n \t\t \t\t\t Students are terrified that this shift will dramatically accelerate when true AGI arrives, though when that might happen is up for debate. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman\u00a0thinks<\/a>\u00a0AGI will be developed before 2029, while Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis predicts that it\u2019ll come in the next five to 10 years. Jurkovi\u0107 believes it might arrive even sooner: He co-authored a\u00a0timeline forecast<\/a>\u00a0for the AI Futures Project, which aligns with the prediction that most white-collar jobs could be automated by 2030.<\/p>\n Others disagree: \u201cIt is extremely unlikely that AGI will come in the next five years,\u201d Marcus said. \u201cIt\u2019s just marketing hype to pretend otherwise when so many core problems (like hallucinations and reasoning errors) remain unsolved.\u201d Marcus\u00a0has noted<\/a>\u00a0that throwing more and more data and computing power at AI models has so far failed to produce models sophisticated enough to do many of the same kinds of tasks as humans.<\/p>\n While questions remain about when AGI will occur and how valuable a college degree will be in a world upended by human-level artificial intelligence, students are itching to pursue their careers now, before, they worry, it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n That\u2019s led many to drop out to start their own companies. Since 2023, students have been\u00a0leaving college<\/a>\u00a0to chase the AI gold rush, drawn to the success stories of generations past like Altman and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Anysphere CEO Michael Truell, now 24, and Mercor CEO Brendan Foody, 22, dropped out of MIT and Georgetown University respectively to pursue their startups. Anysphere was last valued at $9.9 billion, while Mercor has raised over $100 million. With AGI threatening to completely replace human labor, some students see a ticking clock\u2014and a huge opportunity.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt that there\u2019s a limited window to act in order to have a hand on the steering wheel,\u201d said Jared Mantell, who was studying economics and computer science at Washington University in St. Louis before dropping out to focus full-time on his startup dashCrystal, which aims to automate design of electronics. The company has raised over $800,000 so far at a valuation of around $20 million.<\/p>\n Dropping out means losing out on the benefits of a college degree. According to the Pew Research Center, younger adults with a bachelor\u2019s degree or more\u00a0generally make<\/a>\u00a0at least $20,000 more than their peers without one. And in a world where entry-level jobs are being decimated by AI, lacking a degree could limit job prospects for young people even more.<\/p>\n Even the cofounder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator known for funding young founders who have dropped out, thinks students should stay in school. \u201cDon\u2019t drop out of college to start or work for a startup,\u201d Paul Graham\u00a0posted<\/a>\u00a0on X in July. \u201cThere will be other (and probably better) startup opportunities, but you can\u2019t get your college years back.\u201d<\/p>\n Blair doesn\u2019t think that dropping out of school is for everyone. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult and taxing to drop out of college early and get a job,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is something that I would only recommend to extremely resilient individuals who felt they have been adequately prepared to get a job by college already.\u201d<\/p>\n This story was originally published on forbes.com<\/a> and all figures are in USD.<\/p>\n Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world.\u00a0Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0become a member here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published on August 7, 2025 AGI \u2014 a theoretical AI that can do many of the same tasks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,5476,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-53763","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-investing","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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