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I sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS 24

last week at NeurIPS’24, one extremely salient thing was the anxiety and frustration felt and expressed by late-year PhD students and postdocs who were confused by the job market that looks and feels so much different from what they expected perhaps when they were applying for PhD programs five or so years ago. and, some of these PhD students and postdocs are my own under my supervision.

this created a great discrepancy between supply and demand of deep learning talents, forcing these companies, who were able to see this revolution earlier than the others could, to aggressively recruit PhD students from a small number of labs across the world. in other words, these new generations of brilliant PhD’s have successfully brought the future into the present by productizing deep learning in the forms of large-scale conversational language models and their variants. furthermore, during the past few years, universities have somewhat caught up with the demand and started to educate, train and graduate undergraduate and master’s students on fundamentals and practical ideas behind these new technologies.

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