> If I was a Ph.D. student today, I'd probably do a thesis on cheap verifiers for LLM agents. Since LLM agents are not reliable and therefore not very useful without it, that is a trillion dollar problem.

PhD thesis are for (ideally) setting up a new world standard in some research area (at the end, you build your PhD thesis out of the deep emotional shards of this completely destroyed life dream), and not for some personal self-discovery project of which you hope that it will turn you into the popular kid on the block.

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dataviz1000 a day ago | parent [-]

That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP. I'm framing it as an analogous problem. What is missing is a cheap verification process.

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aleph_minus_one a day ago | parent [-]

> That is like telling students to never do a PhD thesis on superscalar out-of-order execution, stochastic gradient descent, or UDP.

No decent PhD advisor would let their PhD student base their PhD thesis on such well-known concepts: a doctoral study programme is a journey into something never-seen-before (with a very high likelihood of faling and shattering your life). Anything else is failure.

(Obvious exception: either he or the PhD student can convince the other one that there could be something really, really deep in, say, "superscalar out-of-order execution", "stochastic gradient descent" or UDP be found that generations of researchers overlooked, and which once discovered might necessitate rewriting all the standard textbooks about this topic).

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