Let's hypothetically say I'm a PHD student who is half way through my studies and I have a halfway written version of one of these "preprints" - what do I do?
Seems like a lot of PHD students are doing to have to pivot the entire structure of their PHD studies? Or just produce something which is already written by OpenAI?
Let me give you some perspective: my entire phd was made obsolete by CRISPR. It was a wonderful thing.
Interesting. If you don't mind, could you please share a little bit about that ? You already finished your dissertation ? It was about the works of Doudna and Charpentier ?
No, back in the late 90s and early 00s, people were trying to engineer custom nucleases and transcription factors, my work was on doing molecular dynamics simulations to optimize TF sequence specificity (similar to engineered zinc fingers) for gene therapy. I wrote up my dissertation and published it in 2001, and then went off to find enough compute, IO, and smart people to make it happen (https://research.google/blog/groundbreaking-simulations-by-g...).
My approach would require custom engineering for every different sequence we'd want to target. With CRISPR, you just "program" the system with a guide sequence, you don't need to do massive engineering to solve a protein design problem.
So it's not the situation they described at all, you didn't waste time during the PhD having to scramble to change topics as it happened after you were done.
For every door that shuts another one opens - great if you're not a cabinet-maker.
This happens all the time, even without AI. Other researchers or PhD students can publish the same results before you. I say that based on my experience during my PhD.
Yes and no. It's pretty normal for students to get scooped, sometimes even multiple times (ask me how I know...).
It's much less common for students to have their entire thesis direction removed from under them, as might be the case for someone working in fine-grained complexity assuming 3SUM has no subquadratic algorithms, or working assuming ~UGC. Both of which (publicly) seemed like perfectly valid research directions until a couple hours ago.
There might be stuff to salvage from their conditional results anyway, but this is not your average scooping.
Use whatever is published as the new base for your research. Use AI tools to help you going forward.
In other words, you've already taken a gambit with the first half of your PhD, now take a second gambit, praying that you have something to publish by the end of your PhD.
It has to feel awful to be in this position.
Could be worse, imagine having years of experience in a profession these things can now handle by themselves.
:)
It's worse for those who will face the job market (or maybe tenure review) in the next 2–3 years. If you have more time before you have to justify your continued employment, you can pivot to something else. Theorems and proofs may be cheap now, but there is a lot of value in figuring out what is worth studying.
Verification is equally important, if not more so.
I think eventually companies won't get as much stuff that's usable for marketing, so they'll stop investing so much into ai for math, so eventually cheap and poor graduate students will be able to do relevant work again without worrying about getting scooped by a company with a million GPUs :-/
This has always been a challenge for PhD students and researchers, it's just far more likely to occur now it seems. Getting scooped doesn't feel good, but it's a signal you've been thinking about things other people care about.
Perhaps consider switching to a more applied field. Experiments in the physical realm hold value, especially if you document the process.
> what do I do?
Very hard question.
Your work makes you one of the very few people who really understands the problem and solution and its significance.
It could still be interesting if your approach to the problem was different to theirs.
Don’t paste your research into these AI because they will train on it and then scoop you.
I think that happened after word of the project reached OpenAI and they allocated resources to it.
Don't worry, if you use openAI and get lucky they might offer to share credit with you for your work.
> what do I do?
Precisely what all NLP researchers and the ML community at large did in the last few years: embrace the frontier and realize that attention is all you need.
Ask OpenAI for money when you don't have a job or future?
I guess the only answer is to adapt with the tools. If we can't do that, then yeah, we're in trouble.
That’s always been a thing, it’s called “getting scooped”
Killing with knives has always been a thing. Now, we have the machine gun.
That would be unfortunate but the world does not owe you anything and is not going to stop for you. Which is also a valuable thing to learn in your 20s (ideally earlier).
> Let's hypothetically say I'm a PHD student who is half way through my studies and I have a halfway written version of one of these "preprints" - what do I do?
I did get my PhD...before AI. And my honest advice (to myself back then, even) would be: quit the PhD, become an electrician, and work hard to buy a tiny house in the middle of nowhere to watch the world burn in this madness.
Look forward to being obsolete I guess
Yes, and?