Discussion
A Survival Guide to a PhD
setheron: 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.
teiferer: 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.
BinRoo: 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.
nine_k: How did you keep the motivation up?(I tried doing a PhD while working full time, and quit the idea after 3 years.)
chrisaycock: 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.
LPisGood: 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.
wald3n: 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. Other than conferences of course - those are great
