Vivek treats specialization as a bet you shouldn’t place too early: “your first subfield is an accident of timing, so treat it like one. spend real time in interpretability, in evals, in rl, in systems, before deciding where you live. somewhere in this field is a corner where your specific weirdness is an unfair advantage, and the only way to locate it is to pay tuition in several places. nobody waives the tuition.” Breadth is also a hedge: “subfields saturate, all of them, usually right after they peak on twitter. the people who keep producing through those transitions are the ones who already know their way around the neighboring territory.”
This is the exploration phase that locates your Circle of competence determines where you can win — you can’t know where your unfair advantage is until you’ve paid tuition in several corners. The breadth it builds is A latticework of mental models beats isolated facts for real understanding as career strategy: the neighboring territory you already know is what lets you keep producing when one field saturates. And paying tuition by doing is the same mechanism as Building real projects teaches AI skills faster than following structured curricula — you locate the corner by building in it, not by reading about it.