I SENSED ANXIETY AND FRUSTRATION AT NEURIPS'24

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Late-year PhD students and postdocs at NeurIPS'24 expressed anxiety and frustration as the job market looks and feels very different from what they expected when they were applying for PhD programs five or so years ago. Years ago, competition for artificial intelligence researchers with PhDs was fierce - companies were recruiting them to prepare themselves for a revolution. Many of the researchers, who were paid well, were free to choose what they wanted to work on and publish whatever they wanted to publish. This incentivized a large number of brilliant students to apply to PhD programs. Universities have started to train undergraduate, graduate, and master's students on these technologies, making PhDs less valuable to companies.