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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Best line: “So Ant, it was good with you, but it is better without you :)”

A physicist’s farewell to Anthropic, and a window into how frontier AI now feels less like science, more like engineering without a manual.

Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

A year in AI taught him more about systems, scaling, and limits than a decade of theory.

Now he’s joined Google DeepMind.

His reason? “I don’t want my experience biased by a specific lab, especially because core research doesn’t write papers anymore.”

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

And partly for reasons he can’t disclose. His perspective on Anthropic: “Still one of the best places for physicists to start their AI journey.”

His perspective on AI: “Relative to physics, AI moves insanely fast.”

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

At Anthropic, he joined in Oct 2024, working on the Claude 3.7 project.

It was “so exciting to see your research affect frontier capability immediately.”

But he left after a year. Partly over politics, Anthropic is calling China an “adversarial nation.”

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

For physicists, AI feels like the early days of heat theory:
no unified model, no perfect equations, but systematic experiments yield laws that drive real-world revolutions.

Boyle had pressure & volume; AI has tokens & compute.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

He left physics because it “ran out of experiments.”

Without new data, theory becomes speculation, brilliant but ungrounded.

AI, he says, is the opposite: chaotic, empirical, full of scaling laws and surprises. The science is being written live.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

A physicist leaves academia, joins Anthropic, helps build Claude, then quits over politics and joins DeepMind.

His reflection on why physics is stuck, why AI feels like 17th-century thermodynamics, and why he walked away 👇

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Every day without IRS operations adds friction to America’s fiscal system, and the longer it lasts, the more expensive the restart becomes. 💰

Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Bottom line: The shutdown isn’t just closing parks and museums, it’s freezing part of the financial engine that keeps the U.S. government funded.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Why this matters beyond taxes:

- Refund processing and audits pause.
- Enforcement and fraud detection slow down.
- Data and reporting disruptions ripple into Treasury forecasts and budget planning.

When the IRS stalls, federal cash flow stalls too.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Furloughed workers will receive back pay eventually, but an internal memo raised doubts about whether all employees would qualify, triggering new tensions inside the agency.

The uncertainty adds to morale issues after months of restructuring.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

This shutdown comes as the IRS is already down 25% of its workforce after layoffs earlier this year.

From 100,000 employees → 75,000.

With another 34,000 now off duty, the U.S. tax system is effectively running at half capacity

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Roughly 34,000 IRS employees are now furloughed.

Another 39,870 (about 54%) are still working under “excepted” or “exempt” status.

The agency says “most IRS operations are closed.”

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

The IRS just furloughed nearly half its workforce as the U.S. government shutdown enters its 8th day.

Here’s what that means, and why it matters 👇

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

In short: The fight over jobs data isn’t about stats, it’s about who controls the story of the economy itself.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

The vacancy remains.

The Bureau has no confirmed leader since August, just days before another jobs report due this week (which won’t even be released if the government shuts down).

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Trump allies like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Moore had backed Antoni, calling him “the right man to reform BLS.”

But without Senate support, and with growing backlash, the White House quietly pulled the plug.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

The BLS isn’t just another agency.

It’s where the core data on employment, inflation and wages come from, the numbers that move markets and guide the Fed.

Politicising it risks something bigger than bad optics: it undermines public trust in the numbers that define the economy.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Antoni’s nomination collapsed amid bipartisan unease.
Critics, left and right, cited his partisanship and lack of experience, plus controversial remarks about gender and social media posts targeting Kamala Harris.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

E.J. Antoni, a Heritage Foundation economist and outspoken critic of official jobs data, was tapped to lead the BLS, weeks after Trump fired its previous commissioner for releasing a weak jobs report he called “rigged.”

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Trump’s White House just withdrew its pick to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that reports America’s jobs numbers.

Here’s why that matters 👇

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

Bottom line: We didn’t “solve” gender equality in 2021; we borrowed it from flexible work.

Take away the flexibility, and the progress evaporates. Design work around families, and the economy gets the dividend.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

What fixes it?

• Outcome-based performance, not seat-time
• True hybrid options for eligible roles
• Reliable, subsidised childcare
• Manager training + schedule autonomy

Flex isn’t a perk. It’s infrastructure.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

It’s not just personal. Fewer working mums means fewer taxpayers, fewer specialised services delivered, and a weaker talent pipeline.

We trade short-term presenteeism for long-term productivity losses.

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Elvis Eckardt Recruitment @elviseckardtrec.bsky.social · 1d

When flexibility goes, so do mothers. For many, childcare costs swallow an entire paycheque.

If work no longer “works”, they opt out and lose future earnings compounding in the process (the motherhood penalty never truly recovers).

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