In the heart of Silicon Valley, the world’s leading AI engineers are pushing themselves to the limit — often working 80 to 100 hours a week. At labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, and Meta, researchers describe a relentless cycle of breakthroughs, competition, and exhaustion. What’s driving them is not only the lure of innovation but also the pressure to outpace rivals in creating the next generation of large language models. “We’re basically trying to speedrun 20 years of scientific progress in two years,” said Josh Batson, a research scientist at Anthropic, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Life inside the labs
Executives and researchers say their schedules blur together, with many comparing the atmosphere to wartime urgency. Some startups now include 80-hour expectations in contracts, though most say employees push themselves voluntarily. At Meta’s AI division, new hires work in person near Mark Zuckerberg’s desk, part of an internal “TBD Lab” tasked with developing the company’s next big AI model. Meals are served around the clock, and some companies even assign “captains” to monitor model performance during overnight shifts.
Work without pause
At Google’s DeepMind, researcher Madhavi Sewak says “everyone is working all the time.” She describes the pace as “extremely intense” with “no natural stopping point.” Employees are driven by the sense that every week brings a new advance — or the risk of falling behind. Microsoft’s chief product officer for AI, Aparna Chennapragada, called the current rush unlike any previous tech boom, noting that nearly all Fortune 500 companies are already using AI products. “The gap between research and product,” she said, “is now between Thursday and Friday.”
The toll behind the triumph
Despite soaring pay — many are now multimillionaires — few have time to enjoy it. Researchers speak of missing family time, holidays, and friendships. Sewak notes that even as AI tools transform productivity, the humans behind them live on borrowed hours. “People don’t have time for their hobbies or the people they love,” she said. “All they do is work.”
Why they keep going
For many, the grind is powered by both curiosity and conviction. Anthropic’s Batson says the unpredictability of AI development — where model behaviour often surprises even its creators — keeps him glued to the lab. He compares the intensity to his pandemic-era lab work: “You don’t exactly know what you’ll get until it’s deployed in the wild.” Despite fatigue, he believes the mission of building ethical, human-aligned AI makes the struggle worthwhile.
The human cost of a digital revolution
What’s emerging in Silicon Valley is a new industrial rhythm, one measured not in shifts but in model releases. As AI becomes the defining technology of the age, its creators are caught in their own experiment — racing to accelerate machines while slowing down their own lives. “Nerds are having our moment,” Sewak said. “But no one’s figured out how to live it yet.”
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