# A magic machine that gives us work (slim)

> Vlad Cealicu on an idea from a Reddit thread, credited to reasonmonkey. The models now come up with more testable hypotheses than anyone can check, from OpenAI's claimed disproof of the Exponential Time Hypothesis to Google's Co-Scientist, and testing them in the real world needs people. I think testing and validating from anywhere is one of the answers to office jobs going away, for the young people struggling to find work, and someone should build the company that does it.

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By Vlad Cealicu, 3 November 2026. 955 words, about 4 min to read.

- 2 days: for Google's Co-Scientist to suggest five explanations, the top one matching a lab's own hypothesis
- 30,000+: contractors a week paid by Mercor, over $2 million a day
- 19%: below expected employment for 22 to 25 year olds in the jobs most exposed to AI

Coming up with ideas, and checking them.

On Tuesday 3 November I was answering comments on r/accelerate under the link to [my post about GPT-6 Astra editing a small model's weights](/blog/editing-the-weights), and we got into what the singularity is.

By my definition we're not there yet, we can still understand the why and it just takes us a long time.

Then reasonmonkey wrote, "Verification is where a ton of the jobs are going to be.

Google DeepMind made much the same argument to science funders in July.

So our workload doesn't only come from society any more, we now have a magic machine that gives us work, and I don't dislike it.

There are a lot of people who could do this work.

I think testing and validating from anywhere is one of the answers to office jobs going away.

## What I'm not sure about

Maths might not stay a job for people for long.

If reasonmonkey reads this, thanks, I hadn't thought of checking as a job before that thread.

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More in [Opinion](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/opinion/index.md)

- Older: [Everyone says this is the singularity, and I think we're far from it](https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/editing-the-weights.md)
- All posts: https://www.anchorterminal.com/blog/index.md

## References

Read on 3 November 2026. Quotes are as published.

[1] Reddit, r/accelerate, 3 November 2026, the comment thread under my link to "Everyone says this is the singularity, and I think we're far from it".

[2] reasonmonkey, 3 November 2026, a comment on r/accelerate.

[3] reasonmonkey, 3 November 2026, a comment on r/accelerate.

[4] Engadget, 27 October 2026, "OpenAI announces new discoveries in mathematics, computer science and physics".

[5] Don Wallace, Conor Griffin, Sean O'Neill, Thang Luong and Owen Larter, July 2026, "Conjecture Machines, AI agents and the new validation bottleneck in science", Google DeepMind public policy.

[6] Mercor, 7 May 2026, "When you go from $2 million a month to $2 million a day".

[7] Dealroom, 6 July 2026, "Mercor doubles to $2B gross revenue run rate as AI labs buy expert data", citing The Information.

[8] Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, 12 August 2026, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence", Stanford Digital Economy Lab, on ADP payroll data.