AI labs are hiring philosophers, the NYT says. The thread counted maybe two dozen

What the NYT actually reported: doing "neuroscience" on models with no skulls

The Times profile (paywalled; archived copy) follows philosophy graduates landing research roles at AI labs. The nonprofit Eleos was hiring machine-learning research scientists to run experiments on model internals, a job one researcher framed vividly: "We can do neuroscience on A.I. systems in a way that we kind of can't with humans," because they "don't have skulls." DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis had earlier mused on a podcast: "Where are they, the great next philosophers, the equivalents of Kant or Wittgenstein or even Aristotle?"

The headline demand-signal comes from NYU's David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness:

"I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It's an area I encourage students to go into."

"There are dozens of them": the revenge, counted

The thread's first move was to check the scale of the wave. The same profile that quotes Chalmers also concedes where the jobs sit, and a reader simply read the two sentences together:

"most of the hiring has been concentrated at DeepMind and Anthropic, each of which employs at least a half-dozen philosophers." So, between 6 and 12 each? — a longtime reader

Which turned the headline into the punchline:

"I would hardly call that the revenge of the philosophy majors." — a 22k-karma reader

And a colder reading of what the role really is:

"Imagine knowing that you're hired to launder regulatory capture for a trillion dollar corporation lol" — a commenter posting from a throwaway account

Where philosophy actually pays off, and it isn't ethics

Underneath the deflation, the thread's practitioners made a more interesting case: the value is real, but it lives in reasoning and language, not consciousness debates. A senior engineer at a Fortune 500 with only a BA in philosophy called it the most underrated degree he has, tracing his coding straight back to the formal-logic classes he shared with the CS majors.

The most concrete example came from prompting:

"Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's work changed how I think about prompts. Instead of asking, 'What words should I use?', I ask, 'What action am I trying to perform?'" — an engineer who leans on philosophy of language for prompting

His own closing line reframed the piece better than the headline did: maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors at all, but people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.