The Washington Times ran a national piece on whether the reported $250K–$400K salaries for philosophers training AI models are a real trend or overhyped — featuring voices from Carnegie Mellon, Duke, and the University of Maryland’s philosophy departments.
“When we design an AI agent that briefs a lobbyist every morning, someone has to decide what ‘important’ means for that person, how to represent conflicting sources fairly, and when the system should admit it doesn’t know. Candidates trained to interrogate concepts and spot hidden assumptions do this way better than candidates who only learned to code.”
— Jimmy Carter, co-founder & CEO of Daemo AI
Article header and quote from The Washington Times, July 16, 2026.
Related LinkedIn Post
My take on why the “why-chain” matters more than clean code, and where the philosophy-in-AI trend actually lives — not just at frontier labs, but at startups hiring every engineer through this lens.
Jimmy Carter
Building Daemo AI | Mechanical Engineering @ Yale | Goldman Sachs
3d \u00b7 Edited
We reject engineers who code well. Here’s the test they fail. →
Grateful to be the founder voice on this topic in yesterday’s The Washington Times piece on philosophy majors and AI jobs, alongside professors from Carnegie Mellon, Duke, and Maryland.
So… the test. It’s not a coding assessment. It’s one word, asked recursively:
“Why?”