I can imagine that this will be similar to the "Emacs/Vim in the AI age" article - it will just be considered to matter less in the AI age. Why spend 3-5 years of your life with a sometimes frustrating experience to obtain this PhD degree if you have powerful models at your disposal that will just be able to solve everything for you? (Similar to why learn Elisp/VimScript/...) Especially considering the current trajectory, expecting where things will be in 5 or 15 years. It will just feel less and less appealing to get an in-depth education, especially a formal one.

Which is quite ironic, considering who wrote the article.

LLMs fall victim to "garbage in, garbage out." Claude can solve open problems if you know what you're doing, but it can also incorrectly convince you it's right if you don't know what you're doing.

A PhD teaches you how to think, how to learn, and how to question the world. That's a vital set of skills no matter what tool exists.

I don’t really know how to optimize for a world where AIs would be smarter than everyone and able to do everything.

If that comes to pass, I guess there won’t be any economic cost to having done my PhD because the entire economy will be AI driven and we’ll hopefully just be their happy pets.

If that doesn’t come to pass, and AIs just remain good at summarizing and remixing ideas, I guess people with experience generating research will still be useful.

Because you may have fun working in a scientific environment and doing research.

I liked my job at the university - independent of the final PhD. I enjoyed what I was doing. Most of the time I also enjoyed writing my dissertation, since I was given the opportunity to write about my stuff. And mostly I could write it in a way how I felt things are supposed to be explained.

It seems your question largely boils down to: “why do anything when AI could do it instead?”

I think there are many answers to this, not the least of which is that AI can’t really do it instead.

Doing hard things has consistently made me more generally (not only in the narrow hard thing) competent and comfortable with myself.

Why go to the gym if you don't need physical strength? One needs to do something to not degenerate into a miserable state.

Models can solve the problem, but they can't tell you if the problem was worth solving in the first place.

Why spend your life doing anything at all? I'm biased on the topic since im writing up atm, but it was, if nothing else, a very itnerseting way to spend 4 years of my life.

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