Oh… that’s the same person (in the image at least) who said “Yeah AI is going to take those creative jobs, but those jobs maybe shouldn’t have existed in the first place”.
Will GPT-7 then be a burntout startup founder?
Ah. The synchronicity.
If AI was that capable then using human workers would eventually become cost prohibitive. If we’re still stuck having to work to live under a capitalist system by then, there’s gonna be serious problems. A post-labor economy doesn’t need to charge for even a modestly comfortable standard of living, and the overwhelming majority of people will go looking for things to do no matter how many politicians swear otherwise.
Ah yes, ph.d intelligence, but the wisdom of a toddler.
Why yes, you CAN put a tomatoes in your fruit salad. It is a fruit after all.
By this logic I can finally add pizza to my salad!
“Kids aren’t going to eat a slice of pizza drenched in tomato sauce”
Lmao what a quote, as a former kid I’m going to have to agree with that haha
After all… why not? Why shouldn’t I eat one small rock a day?
mmm, unironically sounds like me. According to my iq test i had PhD level intelligence at 18, and what am i doing at 24? unemployed, playing video games, and crying
It’s alright, you can keep going for a bit, I’m about to hit 30 playing video-games and crying
I’m 30. Almost have a PhD.
Also playing video games and crying
Wait until you’re 40 talking about that IQ test like the Al Bundy of brains
nah IQ tests are more or less bullshit, they’re incredibly flawed and biased, only situation you’d see me talking about them at lenght is bashing the entire concept of trying to quantify general intelligence
but the wisdom of a toddler.
Sounds like an improvement to me lol
They’ll give it all the social interaction and wisdom scraped from YouTube clips.
Book Smart Street Smart
Wisdom implys it has intelligence, it does not. It’s a word predictor.
No it won’t.
Yes it will
NO IT WON’T
YES IT WILL
NO IT WON’T
YES IT WILL
Don’t fight, guys. This is academia. You’re both wrong.
No we’re not
NFTs will keep their value forever…
Is it weird that I still want to go for my PhD despite all the feedback about the process? I don’t think I’ve ever met a PhD or candidate that’s enthusiastically said “do it!”
I generally tell people the only reason to do it is if your career pursuits require it, and even then I warn them away unless they’re really sure. Not every research advisor is abusive, but many are. Some without even realizing it. I ended up feeling like nothing more than a tool to pump up my research advisor’s publication count.
It was so disillusioning that I completely abandoned my career goal of teaching at a university because I didn’t want to go anywhere near that toxic culture again. Nevertheless, I did learn some useful skills that helped me pivot to another career earning pretty good money.
So I guess I’m saying it’s a really mixed bag. If you’re sure it’s what you want, go for it. But changing your mind is always an option.
+1 to all of this. See also: https://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1296
It’s a lot of fucking work. If you enjoy hard work, learning about the latest advancements in your field, and can handle disappointment / criticism well, then it’s something to look into.
that and if you can find lab/group with recent publications and funding. not sticking too hard to failed ideas also helps
Having a shitload of money is also quite handy for such endeavors.
ideally not your money, but money from grants, that’s why i mentioned it
Ideally. Also if you’re in social science . . . ehh. It’s your money.
i mean, that’s the point that in the process grant money becomes your money
And best of luck to anyone who wants to try.
No, not weird at all. PhD’s are pain, but certain people like the pain. If you’re good with handling stress, and also OK with working in a fast-paced, high-impact environment (for real, not business talk BS), then it may be the right decision for you. The biggest thing that I would say is that you should really, really think about whether this is what you want, since once you start a PhD, you’ve locked the next 6 years of your life into it with no chance of getting out
Edit: Also, you need to have a highly sensitive red-flag radar. As a graduate student, you are highly susceptible to abuse from your professor. There is no recourse for abuse. The only way to avoid abuse is by not picking an abusive professor from the get-go. Which is hard, since professors obviously would never talk badly about themselves. Train that red-flag radar, since you’ll need to really read between every word and line to figure out if a professor is right for you
It’s like being drafted to a war while you only receive vague orders and you slowly realize what the phrase “war is a racket” means. You suffer and learn things that you didn’t plan on learning.
If you have a good understanding of what grad school actually is, you know it’s not going to be college+, and you’re still excited? Go for it! Just go in with the attitude that this is the start of a career path (not school) with many branches along the way. Most people you’ll work with will act like your options are 1) aim for TT at an R1 or 2) cut your losses and go into industry. Those are both legit paths, but pay attention to what you’re loving and hating about the experience.
Maybe you absolutely love teaching or mentorship or grant-writing or data analysis or giving conference talks or science communication or managing a lab or any of the other billion things you have to be responsible for at some point. There are career paths between the extremes that can let do so the stuff you actually like doing, and they exist both in and outside of academia. If you go in letting yourself get excited about whatever the hell you actually get excited about, you can figure out what the path you actually want could look like and prioritize those things that don’t make you miserable.
- a PhD who voluntarily pursued an instructional faculty track at an R1 where I never again have to backseat the needs of my students and my love of pedagogy behind desperately looking for research funding because publish-or-perish even though o have at bare minimum 3 months a year to devote entirely to whatever research I am excited about in the moment…or play video games if I prefer
Allow me to just simply say DON’T DO IT. DON’T FUCKING DO IT. There are very few examples of regretting something you haven’t tried but this is one
the only thing this chatbot will be able to simulate is unreasonable persistence
deleted by creator
Yeah? Well… GPT-7 will be a CEO on LinkedIn!
Now it can not only tell you to eat rocks, but also what type of rock would be best for your digestion.
I prefer moon rocks, they’re a little meatier
One of these days Alice, bang, zoom, straight to the moon.
A PhD makes a person knowledgeable, not intelligent. And GPT-4 was already extremely knowledgeable.
We agree 100% on that. I wonder if we agree on the implications.
GPT-10 will do my mom
If she wants it to. At some point, all the chat bots are going to be given bodies. We all know it.
What a bunch of bullshit. I’ve asked ChatGPT recently to do a morphological analysis of some Native American language’s very simple sentences, and it gave absolute nonsense as an answer.
And let’s be clear: It was an elementary linguistics task. Something that I did learn to do on my own by just doing a free course online.
Yesterday, I asked it to help me create a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table. The answers it gave were completely wrong. Each time, I would tell it the error that Excel was displaying and it would respond with “Sorry about that. You can’t use that function there for [x] reasons.”
So it knows the reason why a combination of DAX functions won’t work but recommends them anyways. That’s real fucking useful.
Was it GPT 5?
PhD level intelligence? Sounds about right.
Extremely narrow field of expertise ✔️
Misplaced confidence in its abilities outside its area of expertise ✔️
A mind filled with millions of things that have been read, and near zero from interactions with real people✔️
An obsession over how many words can get published over the quality and correctness of those words ✔️
A lack of social skills ✔️
A complete lack of familiarity of how things work in the real world ✔️“Never have I been so offended by something I 100% agree with!”
You just listed out the reasons I stopped at MSc! I’m all of those but only like half as much.
Translation: GPT-5 will (most likely illegally) be fed academic papers that are currently behind a paywall
I mean, GPT 3.5 consistently quotes my dissertation and conference papers back to me when I ask it anything related to my (extremely niche, but still) research interests. It’s definitely had access to plenty of publications for a while without managing to make any sense of them.
Alternatively, and probably more likely, my papers are incoherent and it’s not GPT’s fault. If 8.0 gets tenure track maybe it will learn to ignore desperate ramblings of PhD students. Once 9.0 gets tenured though I assume it will only reference itself.
I guess then we would be able to tell it to recite a paper for free and it may do it.