By Preston Fore
Publication Date: 2026-02-11 13:57:00
As undergraduate degrees have lost their payoffs thanks to AI, young people have turned to advanced schooling to unlock jobs with salaries exceeding $200,000 (or in some cases, a $100 million signing bonus). However, one former Google leader says Gen Z should not be so fast to jump on the PhD train, as even doctoral degrees may have lost their edge.
“AI itself is going to be gone by the time you finish a PhD. Even things like applying AI to robotics will be solved by then,” Jad Tarifi, the founder of Google’s first generative-AI team, told Business Insider.
Tarifi himself graduated with a PhD in AI in 2012, when the subject was far less mainstream. But today, the millennial says, time would be better spent studying a more niche topic intertwined with AI, like AI for biology—or maybe not a degree at all.
“Higher education as we know it is on the verge of becoming obsolete,” Tarifi said to Fortune. “Thriving in the future will come not from collecting…
