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My PhD Grind (1): All the Friends Who Worked on Theory Have Switched to LLMs / 我的PhD Grind（1）：23年申phd时认识的那群朋友至此都转了LLM | Jinyan Su

jinyansu1.github.io · 3,218 words · saved by 2 readers

By 2026, almost every friend I met while applying for PhDs in 2023 who worked on theory had switched to LLMs. On giving up proofs for code, quiet friendships that survive years of silence, and three short years of a PhD that feel like a very long time.

(The original version by the author is in Chinese without using any LLM, but for English version, the author use Claude to do the translation and then manually edited and rewrite some of them that she thought inaccurate.) (Note: In order to preserve the privacy of the people that I mentioned, I didn’t use their real name, but instead, using the name “Jack”, “Frank”, “Leo” instead.) I had originally wanted to give this the structure of a perfect book: a prelude, three distinct chapters (not for the sake of literary completeness, but because my PhD really did come in stages, almost neatly…

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