Products are selected by our editors, we may earn commission from links on this page.
Jad Tarifi spent years helping build artificial intelligence at Google before anyone was talking about it at the dinner table. Now 42 and running his own startup, he has a blunt message for ambitious young people eyeing law school or medical school: the math no longer works. According to Tarifi, AI is moving so fast that students could finish their degrees and find the profession they trained for already transformed beyond recognition.
Tarifi is not some AI skeptic predicting a far-off future. He founded Google’s first generative-AI team and earned his own PhD in AI back in 2012, when the field was still a niche academic pursuit. That personal history makes his warning harder to dismiss. He told Business Insider that students pursuing lengthy degrees risk “throwing away” years of their lives chasing credentials that technology may already have made obsolete by graduation day.
The timing of his warning is notable. Gen Z graduates are already struggling in a job market rattled by automation. Many responded by going back to school for advanced degrees, betting that more credentials would insulate them from displacement. But Tarifi is now arguing that doubling down on long academic programs could be exactly the wrong move, and the culprit he blames is the one already reshaping everything else.
Why Law and Medicine Are the Degrees He Singles Out
Tarifi does not spread his concern evenly across all disciplines. He reserves his sharpest criticism for degrees that take the longest to complete, medicine and law being the clearest examples. A student entering medical school today faces nearly a decade of training before entering full practice. That timeline, he argues, is a liability in an era when AI is already reading scans, flagging diagnoses, and drafting legal documents that once required junior professionals.
“In the current medical system, what you learn in medical school is so outdated and based on memorization,” Tarifi told Business Insider. That critique cuts at the core of how these professions train their people. Medical and legal education still runs largely on a model built for a world where human recall was the primary tool. AI does not memorize — it processes, and at a scale no student can match. Tarifi believes this gap will only widen before most students ever sit for their licensing exams.
His concern about PhDs is just as direct. “AI itself is going to be gone by the time you finish a PhD,” he said to Business Insider. “Even things like applying AI to robotics will be solved by then.” That is not a knock on academic rigor — it is a timing problem. The field students spend years studying may no longer exist in its current form when they finally have the credentials to enter it. And that problem, Tarifi argues, only gets worse the longer the degree takes.
Silicon Valley Is Saying the Same Thing
What might sound like one executive’s contrarian take starts to look more like a movement when you line up who else is saying it. Mark Zuckerberg, speaking on Theo Von’s podcast, said he is “not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today.” He called student debt “really big” and acknowledged that questioning whether everyone needs college is no longer the taboo it once was. His comments landed alongside rising frustration from employers who say credentials are not translating to capability.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went further on the question of what AI can already do. He has said that GPT-5 performs like talking to “a PhD-level expert in any topic” — a statement that, if taken seriously, reframes what a doctoral degree actually certifies. If an AI can replicate the output of a PhD holder in a given conversation, the credential no longer signals exclusivity. It signals that someone spent several years learning something the world can now access for free, in seconds.
The data shows the market is already responding. According to MIT research, roughly 70% of AI doctoral graduates in 2023 went directly into private sector jobs rather than academia. One University of Chicago PhD student dropped out entirely after ByteDance offered a high six-figure salary with no professional experience required. “When students can get the kind of job they want as students, there’s no reason to force them to keep going,” said Henry Hoffmann, chair of the university’s computer science department.
So What Should Gen Z Actually Do?
Tarifi does not leave young people with a warning and nothing else. His alternative is less credential-focused and more human-centered than most career advice coming out of Silicon Valley. He told Fortune that “thriving in the future will come not from collecting credentials but from cultivating unique perspectives, agency, emotional awareness, and strong human bonds.” It is advice that sounds soft until you consider who is giving it: someone who built AI systems for a living and watched them accelerate past every assumption.
He suggested that if a student is unsure whether to pursue an advanced degree, the answer should default to no. “Focus on just living in the world,” he told Business Insider. “You will move much faster. You’ll learn a lot more. You’ll be more adaptive to how things change.” For those still drawn to formal study, he points toward narrow, evolving fields where th FORMER GOOGLE EXEC WARNS ABOUT LAW AND MEDICINE DEGREE e human-AI intersection is still being written, subjects like AI for biology, where human insight still outpaces the machine.
Critics push back, and their concern is fair. AI still lacks ethical judgment, accountability, and the kind of contextual reasoning that medicine and law actually demand in courtrooms and clinical settings. Reforming education, not abandoning it, may be the more grounded answer. But Tarifi’s core point holds regardless: a system that takes eight years to train someone for a profession that AI is actively reshaping in real time has a timeline problem. And that problem, for the next generation of students, is not hypothetical. Well, it is already here.