These career skills matter the most in the AI era, says former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee

9 hours ago 4

A person's finger types on a lit-up keyboard on their laptop.

As artificial intelligence reshapes the workplace, this former OpenAI researcher has some advice for how professionals can succeed.

"For motivated, ambitious, early-career individuals, I now have a clearer perspective on what skills are valuable in the coming decade," Phil Chen, who has since gone on to found an AI startup, recently said in an online post titled "Career advice in the age of AI."

Chen, who previously worked as a software engineer at Google DeepMind and Scale AI, wrote that as AI becomes more capable of handling "complex, well-defined problems," the people who will have the greatest impact will be those who excel at identifying important problems "and then allocating tokens and time to solving them."

"The most important skills will be the ones related to problem selection and resource allocation," Chen said.

At the top of his post, Chen wrote, "AI models get better at anything you can write a loss function for," and argued that school is "mostly loss functions: well-defined problems graded against known answers."

"Therefore," he said, "the valuable work of the next decade is everything that can't be graded within the span of model training."

Chen advised early-career professionals to focus on what he called the only "truly limited" resources: "time, relationships, and reputation."

Capital is easier than ever to secure, he argued, but strong, human connections are still hard to come by.

"Proven excellence in past, related endeavors remains of the highest signal, so my concrete advice is to spend time doing good work and ensuring it's known to other reputable people who themselves do good work," he wrote.

Chen added, "Relentlessly prioritize your time so that whatever you work on, whether it be school, projects, or internships, you focus on problems that you find meaningful."

He also encouraged young professionals to "work on the most ambitious form of a problem" and "sprint the last mile."

Looking further ahead, Chen said that he does not believe that artificial superintelligence will replace humans in what he called "knowledge work jobs" because "humans have differential capabilities in selecting meaningful problems for ASI to solve, and in allocating capital to solve these problems."

"Not every opportunity will materialize into a goal, but being in the right position to see the opportunities is the first step to scoring goals," he wrote. "This again comes down to reputation and expertise."

Natalie is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Business News team.She was previously on BI's Legal Affairs team where she covered major cases out of state and federal court, as well as bankruptcy. Her coverage often focused on stories at the intersection of law, business, politics and technology. Natalie has covered Donald Trump’s criminal and civil cases, the wave of lawsuits against the second Trump administration, the indictment and criminal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the legal battles facing Elon Musk and his companies. Natalie came to Business Insider in June 2021 as a breaking news reporter, focusing on the most interesting angles around the trending news of the day. Natalie largely drove BI’s coverage around the fatal “Rust” shooting involving Alec Baldwin and the disappearance and murder of Gabby Petito.Prior to joining BI, Natalie worked for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and The Brooklyn Paper. She has an extensive background covering crime and courts. During her more than 12-year journalism career, she did a stint covering the police beat out of the headquarters for the New York Police Department. Natalie, a Brooklyn native, graduated from Brooklyn College in 2012 with a journalism degree. Popular articles