Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - Jad Tarifi, the founder of Google’s first generative-AI team, says higher education is on the verge of “becoming obsolete.”
As Gen Z graduates are struggling to land jobs, Tariff
warned that pursuing a doctoral degree to stand out is not the answer.
He said students could end up “throwing away” years of their
lives, as technology is moving so quickly.
He claimed undergraduate degrees have lost their benefits
thanks to AI. This, he said has made young people turn to advanced schooling to
unlock jobs with competitive salaries.
Tarifi urged Gen Z not be so fast to jump on the PhD train,
as even doctoral degrees may have lost their edge due to AI.
"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 told Business Insider.
Tarifi graduated with a PhD in AI in 2012, when the subject
was far less mainstream. But today, the 42-year-old 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 credentials but from cultivating unique perspectives, agency,
emotional awareness, and strong human bonds.
“I encourage young people to focus on two things: the art of
connecting deeply with others, and the inner work of connecting with
themselves.”
“Even studying to become a medical
doctor or lawyer may not be worth the time anymore,” he
said.
Those degrees take so long to complete in comparison with
how quickly AI is evolving that they may result in students just “throwing
away” years of their lives, Tarifi added to Business Insider.
“In the current medical system, what you learn in medical
school is so outdated and based on memorization,” he said.
Tarifi is not alone in his feeling that higher education is
not keeping up with the shifting AI tides. In fact, many tech leaders have
recently expressed concerns that the rising cost of school paired with an
outdated curriculum is creating a perfect storm for an unprepared
workforce.
“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs
that they need to have today,” Mark Zuckerberg said on Theo
Von’s This Past Weekend podcast in April.
“I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the
student debt issues are…really big.
“It’s sort of been this taboo thing to say, ‘Maybe not
everyone needs to go to college,’ and because there’s a lot of jobs that don’t
require that…people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more
now than maybe like 10 years ago,” Zuckerberg added.
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that his company’s
latest AI model can already perform in ways equivalent to those with a
PhD.
“GPT-5 really feels like talking to a PhD-level expert in
any topic,” Altman said earlier this month. “Something like GPT-5 would be
pretty much unimaginable in any other time in history.”
Bill Gates has also admitted that AI is accelerating at a
pace that surprises even him.
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