7 ms·

Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student

117 points by doener 8mo ago

throwaw12 8mo ago
Just like DEI, sustainability efforts, I predict we will see new initiatives for forced hiring of Juniors. Implementation can differ (e.g. ratio of interns vs total headcount and so on), but it is the time for governments to intervene and force corporations to train people, humans are resource for the government, they need to polish that resource to thrive.
- cindyllm 8mo ago
  [dead]
- nicman23 8mo ago
  i mean they could train them for free in universities. just pay them to go to majors that actually matter for the economy
  - throwaw12 8mo ago
    Yeah, could be, some problems I see with this implementation: 1. the wait time is too long for the company to fill a position, it is difficult to predict what happens in the next 4 years 2. difficult to match the students with companies. For example, you are interested in CS, but company wants specifically React developer (assuming there was no AI and there was still demand), would the student change all their courses based on the requirements and live like a robot who is forced to take courses they are not much interested in. Now imagine when gap is higher between topics (CS vs React is closer, compared to MBA vs procurement, both are somewhat subset of same topic)
  - muspimerol 8mo ago
    The point is that we will still need senior level employees, but the way fresh grads get to that level is generally through entry level positions, experience and mentorship. I don't think we can expect the university system to start pumping out senior level graduates.
    - Gigachad 8mo ago
      We could but it would be something more like the medical system where education lasts much longer, and expected wages at the end are much higher.
    - nicman23 8mo ago
      i dont mean to just enroll them in a undergrad. make them work in gov projects
- meta_gunslinger 8mo ago
  Humans are a resource for the government? Jesus man, slavery has been abolished in the West.
- mittensc 8mo ago
  > Just like DEI, sustainability efforts, I predict we will see new initiatives for forced hiring of Juniors. The professor's jobs are to TEACH students. Research grants are given by governments mainly to first TEACH students and secondly to get something useful. If they are not doing their job they should be fired. That's not DEI or anything of the sort. That's common sense. They can do their research at private companies if it's worth it.
  - throwaw12 8mo ago
    > Research grants are given by governments mainly to first TEACH students Government's goal is obvious and correct, but if you have done a research and tried to get a grant you should know grants are very "political" as well, if you are researching a thing which is not trendy or takes another 10 years to yield results, but there is another lab who is telling we are researching LLM, it will be very difficult to get a grant even if you promise to TEACH/hire 20 students for that research. Justifying long term benefits is difficult problem
    - graemep 8mo ago
      The difficulty the researchers who developed RNA vaccines faced in getting funding is a good example of how bad the system is. Safe and unambitious is preferred, https://www.uclsciencemagazine.com/sss8/ https://www.uclsciencemagazine.com/sss8/
- AussieWog93 8mo ago
  As someone who both recoils at DEI and is at least a decade too old to benefit from a policy like this personally, I have to say this honestly sounds like a great idea. Both avoids the tragedy of the commons (why would a corporation pay to train a junior when they can just let their competition do it then poach the experienced senior) and gives more opportunity to a new generation that are frankly getting economically screwed over enough as-is.
junofan 8mo ago
> I’m not sure where that will leave students who start with no research experience. What is wrong with this guy? Of course he knows where that will leave those students. Why did he even choose to be in the business of developing people? Nobody forced him. Anyway, the ladders were pulled up in 2020–2021.
- darkwater 8mo ago
  Reading the piece I _hope_ they are trying to make a point and not really thinking they are not going to help novices become juniors. But who knows, nowadays...
- servo_sausage 8mo ago
  Research is a very abstract field, not everyone with an interest also has an interest in teaching for it's own point. The motivation to take on juniors to grow your long term capabilities equation is shifting, to the point where its harder to justify.
- shakow 8mo ago
  “I'm not sure” is academic jargon for “I don't give a damn”.
shablulman 8mo ago
[dead]
ares623 8mo ago
It's one thing to be forced to use the damn things, but this guy gives it very serious thought, much more than others I've seen and known, he even writes a science.org article about it, and ultimately chose wrong.
CraftingLinks 8mo ago
It says a lot about US academic culture that they think in terms of hiring. There is an important educational commitment requirememt to the role of professor, at least in Europe. Hiring is to the betterment of your own goals and almost orthogonal to the educational mission. A lot of unethicalities fond their root in this schizophrenic mission statement of doing professional competitive scientific research and at the same time education of graduates.
- stonogo 8mo ago
  This is a non-US scientist at a non-US university.
  - wesselbindt 8mo ago
    Israel is more a member of the US than Wyoming is. Their PM is from philly!
- MITSardine 8mo ago
  On the contrary, my experience of US academia has been that (graduate) students are very much students, who take a lot of classes, are graded seriously with the possibility of failing, are mentored rigorously (the author even says "the classic one hour a week meeting", which I also witnessed there), and in fact enroll in a program more than they are hired directly. I did my PhD in France where we were legally employees like any other and did 100% research with like 100 hours training over the three years which could be 5min MOOCs counting for hours or classes the professors would sign us off on. We were hired by a specific researcher for a specific topic, unlike US students who join a broader program and explore their own directions more. My mentoring was drinking coffee with my advisor and colleagues and the odd e-mail exchange the day before turning in a paper. I believe Germany and quite a few other European countries are similar. Any country that does 3 years PhDs is bound to cut on the student part of things.
__bjoernd 8mo ago
Over here in Germany, professors' job is "research and teaching". According to the internet, the author's university is a publicly funded university as well. I can see how AI can make you faster on the research side, but you give up 100% of the teaching/developing people part. As a tax payer, I am very concerned if the people I fund with my taxes to do a job unilaterally declare they are no longer going to do the half of it.
- dude250711 8mo ago
  [dead]
- fasterik 8mo ago
  Teaching and research should be decoupled. Professors are hired and granted tenure primarily based on their ability to produce original research. The skillsets are different; often good researchers are bad teachers, and good teachers are bad researchers.
  - coolness 8mo ago
    This used to be the case: research was conducted mostly at academic institutions that did not provide degrees [1]. The "research university" is a relatively new thing [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...
    - i67vw3 8mo ago
      Interesting read. I always wondered from where did the idea about "thesis" & other "extra-circular" activities come from, for both students and professors. Nowadays, promotions of professors for different levels (Assistant, Associate, Professor) is solely dependent on number of papers they are publishing in Q1 journals. But the research maybe entirely bogus, same ideas repurposed hundreds of times by different professors. The entire concept about "systematic knowledge" has gone downhill.
      - 8mo ago
_pdp_ 8mo ago
[dead]
servo_sausage 8mo ago
This is something that will have to be solved through the way research is funded. At least for publicly funded work, it was always an assumption that you would need students to hit some goal; so by funding it you would get both the outcome, and more people skilled in that field. If the scope of what one team/senior can handle has grown with ai, we will either need explicit staff numbers as a requirement or bigger scope to the point where the ai can't handle it. Or we find that AI can do so much the whole system implodes...
- BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
  And here we see you’ve hit upon Jevon’s paradox. The scope of work will grow to use more than it did before, now that human labour achieves more for the same money. Employment will ultimately go up not down (over the long term - we are seeing a lot of short term instability and noise, although there’s much said about AI without it yet showing up in the data, as per articles recently shared on HN about employment figures across the US and the world).
Peroni 8mo ago
>In the process, they may bypass the valuable experience of struggling through early tasks and learning from their mistakes. Students, I worry, could simply become an intermediary between the raw idea and the AI’s output. Even if all AI progress grinds to a permanent halt today, there's already enough utility in its current capability to force these questions. As a result, how we train and educate graduates and young people needs to change. I have no doubt you need to have actual experience to be able to ensure AI output is at a production standard but if we accept that reality, then a shift in how we educate and train young people could make an enormous difference in ensuring employers still see value in hiring people with no real commercial work experience.
- washadjeffmad 8mo ago
  I wonder if this could be solved by student worker unions?
  - jujube3 8mo ago
    That would "solve" the problem in the sense that it would make students even more uncompetitive with AI.
SirHumphrey 8mo ago
Students are not only workers, they are also disciples of your work and, once forced to read it, will likely use it in the future even when they leave your lab. Even completely egoistically replacing students with AI is shooting yourself in the foot in the long term.
- asdff 8mo ago
  I think also at the end of your career in science, you are going to care a lot more about the people you've uplifted and turned into flourishing scientists themselves vs however many papers you've gotten your name under. At least for every professor I've come to be close with in my years in academia that is certainly the case.
teekert 8mo ago
We measure scientific output as nr of publications. And that is the cause of bs like this. These institutions have a duty to educate humanity. PhDs are also supposed to be able to help the public understand complicated science. To guide ethical decisions. But no, we measure the number papers, and not even their quality (very well). It's all a matter of incentive alignment, what gets measured gets done. The state of academic science is sad in most places. This contemplation by OP being case and point.
csvm 8mo ago
Why not hire a graduate and empower them to use AI? Much better interfacing with an actual human who will then go and do the work using all AI tools at their disposal.
- saltysalt 8mo ago
  Exactly! So many commentors are wrongly framing this as an either/or choice, while companies can choose to have both.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > Why not hire a graduate and empower them to use AI? A lot of my work with AI involves questions where I have an intuitive direction and sense of the data or model, but where explaining why takes almost as much work as doing it. (Commonalities: weird interdisciplinary nexuses and idiosyncratic data sources.) Adding a human translator, much less someone without field experience, seems worse than giving the task to a human or AI wholesale. Where humans still reign supreme is in interacting with other humans. Paradoxically, this might make grad students’ roles attending staff meetings as their professors’ proxies and/or filling out paperwork.
irenetusuq 8mo ago
[flagged]
BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
10 years from now, the people that stopped hiring novices and juniors are going to be deeply regretting their past decisions. The people that kept hiring are going to be working with their newly-promoted-to-senior colleagues and be making significantly more progress than those that didn’t keep hiring.
- daymanstep 8mo ago
  Except they won't. They will just hire those new people away from the firms that trained them. That's what happens now and there's no reason why it won't happen in the future. This is why firms that do actual training have clauses written in the employment contract that says if you receive x months of training from them then you have to work for them for at least y number of years otherwise if you leave then you have to pay them for the cost of training you (which is written as a dollar amount in the contract). Companies that don't have that kind of clause in the contract are going to get screwed over when their newly trained employees get poached by other firms.
  - BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
    That dynamic is nothing new. Years of experience to become a senior engineer is not “training” and not covered by what you’re describing. The shortage of senior engineers will be even worse than it is today. Not sure your argument really holds any water over a 10+ year period as I originally described.
  - mschild 8mo ago
    Yes and no. I started my career with a graduate program from a larger company. I stuck around in that company for close to 5 years and would have liked to stay longer. My reason for leaving were the absence of a career progression. The first 3 years, the company had a great career progression path. Clear outlines what it needs for a promotion, fair and transparent pay, etc. That changed and despite hitting/exceeding my goals, I was denied a promotion twice with no good reason. My boss, who is fantastic, told me that he cannot give me a good reason because he himself did not receive one. So I left. Generally speaking, my cohort of the program was part of the company much longer than most employees. I don't think a single person left in the first 3 years. Attrition only started now that there was a general shift in the companies culture and communication.
0xpgm 8mo ago
To beat to death a well-known quote: You may be able to go fast with AI, but you can only go far with humans.
- ludicrousdispla 8mo ago
  AI hits the sweet spot for the 'bring me a rock' management style.
- bluefirebrand 8mo ago
  First time I'm hearing this quote and I like it a lot We are definitely seeing a lot of anti-human behavior around AI adoption, because all anyone seems to care about is going fast
- ashwinsundar 8mo ago
  Where is the quote from? A web search revealed only your comment
  - jraph 8mo ago
    It is a play on that quote, isn't it? > If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.
oncallthrow 8mo ago
This is morally wrong and it should be embarrassing to publish such an article
- disqard 8mo ago
  OTOH, yes. However, the person is also sufficiently self-aware to share their thought process (and candid about its shortsightedness). To me, that made it worth reading (even though it has a sad message).
lkm0 8mo ago
This sounds misguided. In the little experience I had, I've seen that models get basic knowledge so absolutely wrong that giving them any sort of independence will not result in publications that positively impact a professor's reputation, or contribute to science. Or at least the reviews and papers I read that had AI content did not give me the impression that we should have more of this. And they require much more supervision, with the added issue that they cannot learn in the long term through your interactions, and without the enjoyment of teaching something to someone. They're really good at finding papers though. Perhaps because navigating search engines has become a pain. Perhaps this will be the case in the future, but saying you're tempted right now is like saying you're being tempted to replace your HPC with quantum computers. It's a bit early.
- BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
  Also 90% of citations generated by AI are wrong or straight up don’t even exist. It’s got such a long way to go to be able to reliably write credible papers. [Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/o6hlry/statistically_97_of_statistics_are_made_up_on_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/o6hlry/statistic... ]
  - _aavaa_ 8mo ago
    Your source is a 5 year AMA post that it itself claims is made it. While funny, it does nothing to prove your assertion.
    - localuser13 8mo ago
      >While funny, it does nothing to prove your assertion. Unless that citation was generated by AI.
    - BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
      I think you missed the point. Yes it was meant to be humorous, and also to emphasise one of the reasons AI-generated citations are completely untrustworthy, especially with the growing number of AI-generated (junk) papers being published. No, I had no intention of trying to offer a real source for the accuracy of AI generated citations. It is not hard to Google, search HN or even (ironically) use AI to search, to find numerous relatively recent studies discussing the problem or highlighting specific cases of respected journals/conferences publishing papers with junk citations.
oncallthrow 8mo ago
This is morally wrong and it should be embarrassing to publish such an article. It doesn’t surprise me to see such articles coming from academia, in which juniors are treated like dirt to such an extreme that is unimaginable in any other industry, save for maybe Michelin star cuisine.
eeixlk 8mo ago
To drive your car, to build your software, to run the government. But not to change the oil in your car. Ya ok.
kang 8mo ago
The title is not relevant to the article, not even for a single line. The author straightup assumes, does not answer the 'why', cause I was here to give Lady Lovelace argument to Turing, that you would NEVER (hire an ai instead of a student) unless you making directionless slop. You can share goals, but not the vision, and mission is different. Ai learns from experience, humans are needed to build that experience due to their extremely large 'context windows' going as deep as the constant evolution of the DNA(as long as it serves human-centric goals, which circles back to the mission part). The article really is about "education seems directionless without economic goals", and again as comments have pointed out, it only seems so.
tigermafia 8mo ago
Reading this article makes me happy for the graduates that are spared from working for an absolute imbecile.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
ttanveer 8mo ago
It's interesting that this dilemma (of getting quick and easy wins) is occurring at multiple levels. Even as a junior researcher, its often tempting to hand off actuall thinking and reasoning about one's research to AI (e.g. blindly accepting AI code) to quickly make 'progress'. Apparently the same question is being asked at different levels and abstractions...
josefritzishere 8mo ago
Rage bait. AI is incompent compared to the average freshman. If you are struggling to train a grad student the problem is you.
heavyset_go 8mo ago
It's interesting in the ways AI mania and psychosis manifest
AFF87 8mo ago
Those who can, research. Those who can't research, teach. Those who can't teach, make inflammatory statements on the press to gain the spotlight
akomtu 8mo ago
In other words "why I prefer machines over humans and how I've replaced my moral compass with productivity metrics".
NoPicklez 8mo ago
> The issue is not whether my students are valuable. In the long run, they are invaluable. The issue is that their value emerges slowly, whereas AI delivers immediate returns. This is like the classic "I'll do it myself because its quicker". In the current environment and likely more so into the future, those that hire and develop graduates skills are going to be looked at more favorably. Furthermore, the people you work with and coach become peers and typically help build a network of people who can bat for you. It's tricky and its a balancing act and I appreciate that AI is becoming the easier quicker less fuss option
- PostOnce 8mo ago
  Companies stopped training people many decades ago, they expect you to arrive on the job trained now. i.e. they shifted the cost of training from the employer to the employee. What makes you think that will suddenly reverse course, or that society will suddenly start to care? People want the cheapest, fastest shit possible. Companies too, generally.
  - NoPicklez 8mo ago
    That’s just not really not true from my professional experience or my industry in cyber security. There is of course a level of experience required of a junior but it’s still junior level experience. In my line of work I was coaching and now I am senior I am expected to delegate tasks and coach, not to increase my own workload for doing simpler tasks myself.
  - noobermin 8mo ago
    People are you. You can make the change.
tx_prof 8mo ago
[dead]
poulpy123 8mo ago
Either he is talking about ML in general, and it has been used for one decade now and it's a fucking joke, or he is talking about LLM and it's a fucking joke
noobermin 8mo ago
Even the author eventually admits the problem is fundamentally academic funding and the stupid publishing culture we have. I wonder if the author had the courage to actually expound upon that as opposed to leaving it as a triffling mention at the end if it would have been published as a cute little op-ed in science in the first place.
kiwih 8mo ago
I am an academic at a big Australian university. I can't disagree more with this article. Students are not just machines that convert ideas to papers (and nor should faculty), they are one of the true joys of academia in the first place. Unfortunately, as other comments here have pointed out, the incentive structure for academia right now is misaligned, leading some faculty to focus just on publish or perish. This is a huge shame on so many counts. My hope and also slight expectation from the AI era is that academic writing becomes so commodified that we see a total devaluing of papers as a metric, even in prestige venues. Perhaps this would help the community find better things to focus on.
- MITSardine 8mo ago
  On the other hand, if it can detract PhD factory foremen from hiring students for the sake of publishing, and let them focus on advising fewer students better, I can't say I see the harm in that.

117 points by doener 8mo ago

Just like DEI, sustainability efforts, I predict we will see new initiatives for forced hiring of Juniors. Implementation can differ (e.g. ratio of interns vs total headcount and so on), but it is the time for governments to intervene and force corporations to train people, humans are resource for the government, they need to polish that resource to thrive.

cindyllm 8mo ago
[dead]
nicman23 8mo ago
i mean they could train them for free in universities. just pay them to go to majors that actually matter for the economy
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  Yeah, could be, some problems I see with this implementation: 1. the wait time is too long for the company to fill a position, it is difficult to predict what happens in the next 4 years 2. difficult to match the students with companies. For example, you are interested in CS, but company wants specifically React developer (assuming there was no AI and there was still demand), would the student change all their courses based on the requirements and live like a robot who is forced to take courses they are not much interested in. Now imagine when gap is higher between topics (CS vs React is closer, compared to MBA vs procurement, both are somewhat subset of same topic)
- muspimerol 8mo ago
  The point is that we will still need senior level employees, but the way fresh grads get to that level is generally through entry level positions, experience and mentorship. I don't think we can expect the university system to start pumping out senior level graduates.
  - Gigachad 8mo ago
    We could but it would be something more like the medical system where education lasts much longer, and expected wages at the end are much higher.
  - nicman23 8mo ago
    i dont mean to just enroll them in a undergrad. make them work in gov projects
meta_gunslinger 8mo ago
Humans are a resource for the government? Jesus man, slavery has been abolished in the West.
mittensc 8mo ago
> Just like DEI, sustainability efforts, I predict we will see new initiatives for forced hiring of Juniors. The professor's jobs are to TEACH students. Research grants are given by governments mainly to first TEACH students and secondly to get something useful. If they are not doing their job they should be fired. That's not DEI or anything of the sort. That's common sense. They can do their research at private companies if it's worth it.
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  > Research grants are given by governments mainly to first TEACH students Government's goal is obvious and correct, but if you have done a research and tried to get a grant you should know grants are very "political" as well, if you are researching a thing which is not trendy or takes another 10 years to yield results, but there is another lab who is telling we are researching LLM, it will be very difficult to get a grant even if you promise to TEACH/hire 20 students for that research. Justifying long term benefits is difficult problem
  - graemep 8mo ago
    The difficulty the researchers who developed RNA vaccines faced in getting funding is a good example of how bad the system is. Safe and unambitious is preferred, https://www.uclsciencemagazine.com/sss8/ https://www.uclsciencemagazine.com/sss8/
AussieWog93 8mo ago
As someone who both recoils at DEI and is at least a decade too old to benefit from a policy like this personally, I have to say this honestly sounds like a great idea. Both avoids the tragedy of the commons (why would a corporation pay to train a junior when they can just let their competition do it then poach the experienced senior) and gives more opportunity to a new generation that are frankly getting economically screwed over enough as-is.

junofan 8mo ago

> I’m not sure where that will leave students who start with no research experience. What is wrong with this guy? Of course he knows where that will leave those students. Why did he even choose to be in the business of developing people? Nobody forced him. Anyway, the ladders were pulled up in 2020–2021.

darkwater 8mo ago
Reading the piece I _hope_ they are trying to make a point and not really thinking they are not going to help novices become juniors. But who knows, nowadays...
servo_sausage 8mo ago
Research is a very abstract field, not everyone with an interest also has an interest in teaching for it's own point. The motivation to take on juniors to grow your long term capabilities equation is shifting, to the point where its harder to justify.
shakow 8mo ago
“I'm not sure” is academic jargon for “I don't give a damn”.

shablulman 8mo ago

[dead]

ares623 8mo ago

It's one thing to be forced to use the damn things, but this guy gives it very serious thought, much more than others I've seen and known, he even writes a science.org article about it, and ultimately chose wrong.

CraftingLinks 8mo ago

It says a lot about US academic culture that they think in terms of hiring. There is an important educational commitment requirememt to the role of professor, at least in Europe. Hiring is to the betterment of your own goals and almost orthogonal to the educational mission. A lot of unethicalities fond their root in this schizophrenic mission statement of doing professional competitive scientific research and at the same time education of graduates.

stonogo 8mo ago
This is a non-US scientist at a non-US university.
- wesselbindt 8mo ago
  Israel is more a member of the US than Wyoming is. Their PM is from philly!
MITSardine 8mo ago
On the contrary, my experience of US academia has been that (graduate) students are very much students, who take a lot of classes, are graded seriously with the possibility of failing, are mentored rigorously (the author even says "the classic one hour a week meeting", which I also witnessed there), and in fact enroll in a program more than they are hired directly. I did my PhD in France where we were legally employees like any other and did 100% research with like 100 hours training over the three years which could be 5min MOOCs counting for hours or classes the professors would sign us off on. We were hired by a specific researcher for a specific topic, unlike US students who join a broader program and explore their own directions more. My mentoring was drinking coffee with my advisor and colleagues and the odd e-mail exchange the day before turning in a paper. I believe Germany and quite a few other European countries are similar. Any country that does 3 years PhDs is bound to cut on the student part of things.

__bjoernd 8mo ago

Over here in Germany, professors' job is "research and teaching". According to the internet, the author's university is a publicly funded university as well. I can see how AI can make you faster on the research side, but you give up 100% of the teaching/developing people part. As a tax payer, I am very concerned if the people I fund with my taxes to do a job unilaterally declare they are no longer going to do the half of it.

dude250711 8mo ago
[dead]
fasterik 8mo ago
Teaching and research should be decoupled. Professors are hired and granted tenure primarily based on their ability to produce original research. The skillsets are different; often good researchers are bad teachers, and good teachers are bad researchers.
- coolness 8mo ago
  This used to be the case: research was conducted mostly at academic institutions that did not provide degrees [1]. The "research university" is a relatively new thing [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...
  - i67vw3 8mo ago
    Interesting read. I always wondered from where did the idea about "thesis" & other "extra-circular" activities come from, for both students and professors. Nowadays, promotions of professors for different levels (Assistant, Associate, Professor) is solely dependent on number of papers they are publishing in Q1 journals. But the research maybe entirely bogus, same ideas repurposed hundreds of times by different professors. The entire concept about "systematic knowledge" has gone downhill.
    - 8mo ago

_pdp_ 8mo ago

[dead]

servo_sausage 8mo ago

This is something that will have to be solved through the way research is funded. At least for publicly funded work, it was always an assumption that you would need students to hit some goal; so by funding it you would get both the outcome, and more people skilled in that field. If the scope of what one team/senior can handle has grown with ai, we will either need explicit staff numbers as a requirement or bigger scope to the point where the ai can't handle it. Or we find that AI can do so much the whole system implodes...

BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
And here we see you’ve hit upon Jevon’s paradox. The scope of work will grow to use more than it did before, now that human labour achieves more for the same money. Employment will ultimately go up not down (over the long term - we are seeing a lot of short term instability and noise, although there’s much said about AI without it yet showing up in the data, as per articles recently shared on HN about employment figures across the US and the world).

Peroni 8mo ago

>In the process, they may bypass the valuable experience of struggling through early tasks and learning from their mistakes. Students, I worry, could simply become an intermediary between the raw idea and the AI’s output. Even if all AI progress grinds to a permanent halt today, there's already enough utility in its current capability to force these questions. As a result, how we train and educate graduates and young people needs to change. I have no doubt you need to have actual experience to be able to ensure AI output is at a production standard but if we accept that reality, then a shift in how we educate and train young people could make an enormous difference in ensuring employers still see value in hiring people with no real commercial work experience.

washadjeffmad 8mo ago
I wonder if this could be solved by student worker unions?
- jujube3 8mo ago
  That would "solve" the problem in the sense that it would make students even more uncompetitive with AI.

SirHumphrey 8mo ago

Students are not only workers, they are also disciples of your work and, once forced to read it, will likely use it in the future even when they leave your lab. Even completely egoistically replacing students with AI is shooting yourself in the foot in the long term.

asdff 8mo ago
I think also at the end of your career in science, you are going to care a lot more about the people you've uplifted and turned into flourishing scientists themselves vs however many papers you've gotten your name under. At least for every professor I've come to be close with in my years in academia that is certainly the case.

teekert 8mo ago

We measure scientific output as nr of publications. And that is the cause of bs like this. These institutions have a duty to educate humanity. PhDs are also supposed to be able to help the public understand complicated science. To guide ethical decisions. But no, we measure the number papers, and not even their quality (very well). It's all a matter of incentive alignment, what gets measured gets done. The state of academic science is sad in most places. This contemplation by OP being case and point.

csvm 8mo ago

Why not hire a graduate and empower them to use AI? Much better interfacing with an actual human who will then go and do the work using all AI tools at their disposal.

saltysalt 8mo ago
Exactly! So many commentors are wrongly framing this as an either/or choice, while companies can choose to have both.
JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> Why not hire a graduate and empower them to use AI? A lot of my work with AI involves questions where I have an intuitive direction and sense of the data or model, but where explaining why takes almost as much work as doing it. (Commonalities: weird interdisciplinary nexuses and idiosyncratic data sources.) Adding a human translator, much less someone without field experience, seems worse than giving the task to a human or AI wholesale. Where humans still reign supreme is in interacting with other humans. Paradoxically, this might make grad students’ roles attending staff meetings as their professors’ proxies and/or filling out paperwork.

irenetusuq 8mo ago

[flagged]

BitsAndObjects 8mo ago

10 years from now, the people that stopped hiring novices and juniors are going to be deeply regretting their past decisions. The people that kept hiring are going to be working with their newly-promoted-to-senior colleagues and be making significantly more progress than those that didn’t keep hiring.

daymanstep 8mo ago
Except they won't. They will just hire those new people away from the firms that trained them. That's what happens now and there's no reason why it won't happen in the future. This is why firms that do actual training have clauses written in the employment contract that says if you receive x months of training from them then you have to work for them for at least y number of years otherwise if you leave then you have to pay them for the cost of training you (which is written as a dollar amount in the contract). Companies that don't have that kind of clause in the contract are going to get screwed over when their newly trained employees get poached by other firms.
- BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
  That dynamic is nothing new. Years of experience to become a senior engineer is not “training” and not covered by what you’re describing. The shortage of senior engineers will be even worse than it is today. Not sure your argument really holds any water over a 10+ year period as I originally described.
- mschild 8mo ago
  Yes and no. I started my career with a graduate program from a larger company. I stuck around in that company for close to 5 years and would have liked to stay longer. My reason for leaving were the absence of a career progression. The first 3 years, the company had a great career progression path. Clear outlines what it needs for a promotion, fair and transparent pay, etc. That changed and despite hitting/exceeding my goals, I was denied a promotion twice with no good reason. My boss, who is fantastic, told me that he cannot give me a good reason because he himself did not receive one. So I left. Generally speaking, my cohort of the program was part of the company much longer than most employees. I don't think a single person left in the first 3 years. Attrition only started now that there was a general shift in the companies culture and communication.

0xpgm 8mo ago

To beat to death a well-known quote: You may be able to go fast with AI, but you can only go far with humans.

ludicrousdispla 8mo ago
AI hits the sweet spot for the 'bring me a rock' management style.
bluefirebrand 8mo ago
First time I'm hearing this quote and I like it a lot We are definitely seeing a lot of anti-human behavior around AI adoption, because all anyone seems to care about is going fast
ashwinsundar 8mo ago
Where is the quote from? A web search revealed only your comment
- jraph 8mo ago
  It is a play on that quote, isn't it? > If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.

oncallthrow 8mo ago

This is morally wrong and it should be embarrassing to publish such an article

disqard 8mo ago
OTOH, yes. However, the person is also sufficiently self-aware to share their thought process (and candid about its shortsightedness). To me, that made it worth reading (even though it has a sad message).

lkm0 8mo ago

This sounds misguided. In the little experience I had, I've seen that models get basic knowledge so absolutely wrong that giving them any sort of independence will not result in publications that positively impact a professor's reputation, or contribute to science. Or at least the reviews and papers I read that had AI content did not give me the impression that we should have more of this. And they require much more supervision, with the added issue that they cannot learn in the long term through your interactions, and without the enjoyment of teaching something to someone. They're really good at finding papers though. Perhaps because navigating search engines has become a pain. Perhaps this will be the case in the future, but saying you're tempted right now is like saying you're being tempted to replace your HPC with quantum computers. It's a bit early.

BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
Also 90% of citations generated by AI are wrong or straight up don’t even exist. It’s got such a long way to go to be able to reliably write credible papers. [Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/o6hlry/statistically_97_of_statistics_are_made_up_on_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/o6hlry/statistic... ]
- _aavaa_ 8mo ago
  Your source is a 5 year AMA post that it itself claims is made it. While funny, it does nothing to prove your assertion.
  - localuser13 8mo ago
    >While funny, it does nothing to prove your assertion. Unless that citation was generated by AI.
  - BitsAndObjects 8mo ago
    I think you missed the point. Yes it was meant to be humorous, and also to emphasise one of the reasons AI-generated citations are completely untrustworthy, especially with the growing number of AI-generated (junk) papers being published. No, I had no intention of trying to offer a real source for the accuracy of AI generated citations. It is not hard to Google, search HN or even (ironically) use AI to search, to find numerous relatively recent studies discussing the problem or highlighting specific cases of respected journals/conferences publishing papers with junk citations.

oncallthrow 8mo ago

This is morally wrong and it should be embarrassing to publish such an article. It doesn’t surprise me to see such articles coming from academia, in which juniors are treated like dirt to such an extreme that is unimaginable in any other industry, save for maybe Michelin star cuisine.

eeixlk 8mo ago

To drive your car, to build your software, to run the government. But not to change the oil in your car. Ya ok.

kang 8mo ago

The title is not relevant to the article, not even for a single line. The author straightup assumes, does not answer the 'why', cause I was here to give Lady Lovelace argument to Turing, that you would NEVER (hire an ai instead of a student) unless you making directionless slop. You can share goals, but not the vision, and mission is different. Ai learns from experience, humans are needed to build that experience due to their extremely large 'context windows' going as deep as the constant evolution of the DNA(as long as it serves human-centric goals, which circles back to the mission part). The article really is about "education seems directionless without economic goals", and again as comments have pointed out, it only seems so.

tigermafia 8mo ago

Reading this article makes me happy for the graduates that are spared from working for an absolute imbecile.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

ttanveer 8mo ago

It's interesting that this dilemma (of getting quick and easy wins) is occurring at multiple levels. Even as a junior researcher, its often tempting to hand off actuall thinking and reasoning about one's research to AI (e.g. blindly accepting AI code) to quickly make 'progress'. Apparently the same question is being asked at different levels and abstractions...

josefritzishere 8mo ago

Rage bait. AI is incompent compared to the average freshman. If you are struggling to train a grad student the problem is you.

heavyset_go 8mo ago

It's interesting in the ways AI mania and psychosis manifest

AFF87 8mo ago

Those who can, research. Those who can't research, teach. Those who can't teach, make inflammatory statements on the press to gain the spotlight

akomtu 8mo ago

In other words "why I prefer machines over humans and how I've replaced my moral compass with productivity metrics".

NoPicklez 8mo ago

> The issue is not whether my students are valuable. In the long run, they are invaluable. The issue is that their value emerges slowly, whereas AI delivers immediate returns. This is like the classic "I'll do it myself because its quicker". In the current environment and likely more so into the future, those that hire and develop graduates skills are going to be looked at more favorably. Furthermore, the people you work with and coach become peers and typically help build a network of people who can bat for you. It's tricky and its a balancing act and I appreciate that AI is becoming the easier quicker less fuss option

PostOnce 8mo ago
Companies stopped training people many decades ago, they expect you to arrive on the job trained now. i.e. they shifted the cost of training from the employer to the employee. What makes you think that will suddenly reverse course, or that society will suddenly start to care? People want the cheapest, fastest shit possible. Companies too, generally.
- NoPicklez 8mo ago
  That’s just not really not true from my professional experience or my industry in cyber security. There is of course a level of experience required of a junior but it’s still junior level experience. In my line of work I was coaching and now I am senior I am expected to delegate tasks and coach, not to increase my own workload for doing simpler tasks myself.
- noobermin 8mo ago
  People are you. You can make the change.

tx_prof 8mo ago

[dead]

poulpy123 8mo ago

Either he is talking about ML in general, and it has been used for one decade now and it's a fucking joke, or he is talking about LLM and it's a fucking joke

noobermin 8mo ago

Even the author eventually admits the problem is fundamentally academic funding and the stupid publishing culture we have. I wonder if the author had the courage to actually expound upon that as opposed to leaving it as a triffling mention at the end if it would have been published as a cute little op-ed in science in the first place.

kiwih 8mo ago

I am an academic at a big Australian university. I can't disagree more with this article. Students are not just machines that convert ideas to papers (and nor should faculty), they are one of the true joys of academia in the first place. Unfortunately, as other comments here have pointed out, the incentive structure for academia right now is misaligned, leading some faculty to focus just on publish or perish. This is a huge shame on so many counts. My hope and also slight expectation from the AI era is that academic writing becomes so commodified that we see a total devaluing of papers as a metric, even in prestige venues. Perhaps this would help the community find better things to focus on.

MITSardine 8mo ago
On the other hand, if it can detract PhD factory foremen from hiring students for the sake of publishing, and let them focus on advising fewer students better, I can't say I see the harm in that.