i sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS’24 – Kyunghyun Cho
last week at NeurIPS’24, one extremely salient thing was the anxiety and frustration felt and expressed by late-year PhD students and postdocs who were confused by the job market that looks and feels so much different from what they expected perhaps when they were applying for PhD programs five or so years ago. and, some of these PhD students and postdocs are my own under my supervision. this makes me reflect upon what is going on or what has been going on in artificial intelligence research and development. this post will be more of less a stream of thoughts rather than a well-structured piece (though, as if i ever wrote a well-structured, well-thought-out, well-prepared blog post.) the past decade or so has been an interesting time for machine learning, or more broadly artificial intelligence. starting with speech recognition in 2010 or so, deep learning has shown dramatic improvements over then-existing states of the art in a variety of challenging and also practical problems, such
last week at NeurIPS’24, one extremely salient thing was the anxiety and frustration felt and expressed by late-year PhD students and postdocs who were confused by the job market that looks and feels so much different from what they expected perhaps when they were applying for PhD programs five or so years ago. and, some of these PhD students and postdocs are my own under my supervision. this makes me reflect upon what is going on or what has been going on in artificial intelligence research and development. this post will be more of less a stream of thoughts rather than a well-structure
related reading
- The AI research job market shit show (and my experience)interconnects.ai
- A Survival Guide to a PhDkarpathy.github.io
- Is a PhD on Language Models Worth it in 2025?ruiqizhong.substack.com
- When We Did Research By Handnightingal3.github.io
- Surprising lessons from my research scientist job search | Yong Zheng-Xinyongzx.github.io
- Letter to a PhD studentsubstack.com
- Neel Nanda on leading a Google DeepMind team at 26 – and advice if you want to work at an AI company (part 2) | 80,000 Hours80000hours.org
- Thoughts on the job market in the age of LLMsinterconnects.ai
- "How Do You Feel About Grad School?"alexirpan.com
- Hallucinations in AIluttig.substack.com
- ML Job Interviews: The Ultimate Guide – Silvia Saporasilviasapora.github.io
- machine learning imindslice.substack.com