AI Is So Hard! We Are Working Hard! Do Not Hit Me in the Head, Mom, Please
October 28, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
I read a pretty crazy “we are wonderful and hard working” story in the Murdoch Wall Street Journal. The story is “AI Workers Are Putting In 100-Hour Workweeks to Win the New Tech Arms Race.” (This is a paywalled article so you will have to pay or pray that the permalink has not disappeared. In either event, don’t complain to me. Tell, the WSJ helpful customer support people or just subscribe at about $800 per year. Mr. Murdoch knows value.)
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
The story makes clear that Silicon Valley AI outfits slot themselves somewhere between the Chinese approach of 9-9-6 and the Japanese goal of karoshi. The shorthand 9-9-6 means that a Chinese professional labors 12 hours a day from 9 am to 9 pm and six days a week. No wonder some of those gadget factories have suicide nets installed on housing unit floors three and higher. And the Japanese karoshi concept is working oneself to death. At the blue chip consulting company where I labored, it was routine to see heaps of pizza boxes and some employees exiting the elevator crying from exhaustion as I was arriving for another fun day at an egomaniacal American institution.
Get this premise of a pivotal moment in the really important life of a super important suite of technologies that no one can define:
Executives and researchers at Microsoft, Anthropic, Alphabet’s Google, Meta Platforms, Apple and OpenAI have said they see their work as critical to a seminal moment in history as they duel with rivals and seek new ways to bring AI to the masses.
These fellows are inventing the fire and the wheel at the same time. Wow. That is so hard. The researchers are working even harder.
The write up includes this humble brag about those hard working AI professionals:
“Everyone is working all the time, it’s extremely intense, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of natural stopping point,” Madhavi Sewak, a distinguished researcher at Google’s DeepMind, said in a recent interview.
And after me-too mobile apps, cloud connectors, and ho-hum devices, the Wall Street Journal story makes it clear these AI people are doing something important and they are working really hard. The proof is ordering food on Saturdays:
Corporate credit-card transaction data from the expense-management startup Ramp shows a surge in Saturday orders from San Francisco-area restaurants for delivery and takeout from noon to midnight. The uptick far exceeds previous years in San Francisco and other U.S. cities, according to Ramp.
Okay, I think you get the gist of the WSJ story. Let me offer several observations:
- Anyone who wants to work in the important field of AI you will have to work hard
- You will be involved in making the digital equivalent of fire and the wheel. You have no life because your work is important and hard.
- AI is hard.
My view is that smart software is a bundle of technologies that have narrowed to text centric activities via Google’s “transformer” system and possibly improper use of content obtained without permission from different sources. The people are working hard for two reasons. First, dumping more content into the large language model approach is not improving accuracy. Second, the pressure on the companies is a result of the burning of cash by the train car load and zero hockey stick profit from the investments. Some numbers person explained that an investment bank would get back its millions in investment by squeezing Microsoft. Yeah, and my French bulldog will sprout wings and fly. Third, the moves by OpenAI into erotic services and a Telegram-like approach to building an everything app signals that making money is hard.
What if making sustainable growth and profits from AI is even harder? What will life be like if an AI company with many very smart and hard working professionals goes out of business? Which will be harder: Get another job in AI at one of those juicy compensation packages or working through the issues related to loss of self esteem, mental and physical exhaustion, and a mom who says, “Just shake it off”?
The WSJ doesn’t address why the pressure is piled on. I will. The companies have to produce money. Yep, cash back for investors and their puppets. Have you ever met with a wealthy garbage collection company owner who wants his multi million investment in the digital fire or the digital wheel? Those meetings can be hard.
Here’s a question to end this essay: What if AI cannot be made better using 45 years of technology? What’s the next breakthrough to be? Figuring that out and doing it is closer to the Manhattan Project than taking a burning stick from a lightning strike and cooking a squirrel.
Stephen E Arnold, October 28, 2025
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