The one piece of advice I give new PhD students is to maintain a list of your references for a bibliography ahead of time. For every paper you read, copy the citation in BibTeX format and write a couple of sentences to remind yourself what the paper was about. Do this for every source, even if it doesn't seem important at the time.
Zotero and AI have this covered now. If there's one thing AI is good at it's summarising crappy formatted papers. Never understood the 2 and 3 column thing. Horrendous way to format something.
Karpathy is an interesting case of PhD gone industry and he mentions this topic in the article. In my field of computational social science it is sadly very taboo to happily leave the academy. Yet, they don’t do much to make it more appealing. My biggest win was to find a group of people outside of my research group that I liked collaborating with. Research is more fun as a team sport.
I did a bachelor degree part time later in life around work and family life. I'm doing a masters full time around work and family life. My experience with academia so far have put me off further study. I really don't get the research thing, and the whole experience seems like bullshit to me. Out of all my experiences doing these things the best has been on the taught modules, that I enjoyed and I didn't feel were out of date, the worse has been the dissertations where you're doing "research". Think of a project off the top of your head and "research" it. Nonsense.
I can imagine that this will be similar to the "Emacs/Vim in the AI age" article - it will just be considered to matter less in the AI age. Why spend 3-5 years of your life with a sometimes frustrating experience to obtain this PhD degree if you have powerful models at your disposal that will just be able to solve everything for you? (Similar to why learn Elisp/VimScript/...) Especially considering the current trajectory, expecting where things will be in 5 or 15 years. It will just feel less and less appealing to get an in-depth education, especially a formal one.
Which is quite ironic, considering who wrote the article.
LLMs fall victim to "garbage in, garbage out." Claude can solve open problems if you know what you're doing, but it can also incorrectly convince you it's right if you don't know what you're doing.
A PhD teaches you how to think, how to learn, and how to question the world. That's a vital set of skills no matter what tool exists.
The one piece of advice I give new PhD students is to maintain a list of your references for a bibliography ahead of time. For every paper you read, copy the citation in BibTeX format and write a couple of sentences to remind yourself what the paper was about. Do this for every source, even if it doesn't seem important at the time.
Zotero and AI have this covered now. If there's one thing AI is good at it's summarising crappy formatted papers. Never understood the 2 and 3 column thing. Horrendous way to format something.
Karpathy is an interesting case of PhD gone industry and he mentions this topic in the article. In my field of computational social science it is sadly very taboo to happily leave the academy. Yet, they don’t do much to make it more appealing. My biggest win was to find a group of people outside of my research group that I liked collaborating with. Research is more fun as a team sport.
I did a bachelor degree part time later in life around work and family life. I'm doing a masters full time around work and family life. My experience with academia so far have put me off further study. I really don't get the research thing, and the whole experience seems like bullshit to me. Out of all my experiences doing these things the best has been on the taught modules, that I enjoyed and I didn't feel were out of date, the worse has been the dissertations where you're doing "research". Think of a project off the top of your head and "research" it. Nonsense.
I finished a PhD while working full time with 3 young kids. Feel free to reach out if you've been interested and I can share my experience with you.
How did you keep the motivation up?
(I tried doing a PhD while working full time, and quit the idea after 3 years.)
I can imagine that this will be similar to the "Emacs/Vim in the AI age" article - it will just be considered to matter less in the AI age. Why spend 3-5 years of your life with a sometimes frustrating experience to obtain this PhD degree if you have powerful models at your disposal that will just be able to solve everything for you? (Similar to why learn Elisp/VimScript/...) Especially considering the current trajectory, expecting where things will be in 5 or 15 years. It will just feel less and less appealing to get an in-depth education, especially a formal one.
Which is quite ironic, considering who wrote the article.
LLMs fall victim to "garbage in, garbage out." Claude can solve open problems if you know what you're doing, but it can also incorrectly convince you it's right if you don't know what you're doing.
A PhD teaches you how to think, how to learn, and how to question the world. That's a vital set of skills no matter what tool exists.
It seems your question largely boils down to: “why do anything when AI could do it instead?”
I think there are many answers to this, not the least of which is that AI can’t really do it instead.