11–20 of 81 posts
We’re at the point of learning that some things that used to matter no longer do, and some things we used to think mattered never did. It’s a going to be a shock to everyone, and this same phenomenon is happening everywhere, not just academia or software engineering. My bet: a lot of the things we used to do were habit, ceremony and gatekeeping much more than being necessities.
Not to everyone though...
> In the past, the path to a math Ph.D. cultivated resilience, resourcefulness, critical thinking, and a healthy skepticism (…) but suddenly you can produce a passable Ph.D. thesis with the push of a button But actually nothing changed. Or maybe a path to "resilience, resourcefulness and critical thinking". Because human brains still needs to be shaped by years of training on some quality "literature", of some form.…
The photoelectric effect/quanta? I'm not sure I understand the supposed connection to communism.
I submitted my thesis this month at a QS top 10 uni after nearly 4 years of work. LLMs were available for most of that time. I don't really feel that it has diminished the value of my thesis by much really.
I am not sure what point the author is even trying to make here. On the one hand, he seems to complain about how AI has virtually made the traditionally PhD thesis obsolete, but on the other hand, he also states: > Consider that most PhD theses were never good. How often do you rush to read a PhD thesis? The vast majority of them are painful to read. You learn little if anything. So, it sounds like nothing of much va…
Very soothing and moves fast.
The largest output of a PhD has always been the training to the student, not the thesis itself, hence why we're called 'students'. Anyone claiming that a thesis can be generated by AI is missing the point. AI can also do everything an undergrad can do, we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits. At best, we say we need better modes of evaluation, and perhaps that's true for PhDs as well. I submitt…
It’s an interesting subject. Makes me want to vibe code a PhD generator just like in the tweet. Maybe I will.
And so on. I could bet that some of his scientific questions where generated, and that's no surprise to me, it's just SO easy this way and if the PhD advisor just says "ok that's good" and no one ever complain during the PhD defense then for sure this will keep going.
But regarding OP's link, when Lemire says I kept my mouth shut. I am never rude on purpose. You can't say that and complain that academia "is blown to bits". It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it.
If AI disrupts your field, the culprit is most likely not AI.
The author is a mathematician and I think to a certain extend the tweet reflects the current panic among (some) mathematicians. So ~~second sentence~~ third paragraph the claim that somehow ai could right now write a phd in physics or sociology is something we don't observe (at the moment). What we observe is, that ai can find counter examples to well established conjectures in mathematics quite well, but the thing i…
A lot of Innovations or insights are obvious in hindsight, but no one thought to consider the problem, and put the pieces of the solution together. In this sense a well defined problem is a large portion of the solution as well.
I mention this because I feel AI software agents have a huge advantage due the body of prior work available to them and how provable solutions can be. This I feel gives the impression that the agents are more generally intelligent than they actually are.
Is this another example of that perhaps?
I have a PhD and I completely support AI disrupting the field. If AI disrupts your field, the culprit is most likely not AI.