On The Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI
Many students who are just now embarking on a PhD in AI are understandably anxious. It feels like our field is zooming forward ever faster. Our clever methods are often surpassed before they are published.
- ▪Many students who are just now embarking on a PhD in AI are understandably anxious.
- ▪It feels like our field is zooming forward ever faster.
- ▪Our clever methods are often surpassed before they are published.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 29 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Doing math together in the age of AI — Short, Fat Matrices
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,846 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Mit |
| Canonical URL | https://web.mit.edu/phillipi/www/writing/PhD-in-age-of-AI.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:53:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T13:56:22.460Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T13:56:22.460Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | UH1-FZB9RZWA · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Many students who are just now embarking on a PhD in AI are understandably anxious. It feels like our field is zooming forward ever faster. Our clever methods are often surpassed before they are published. Our deep insights seem less critical to frontier lab progress. AI is automating aspects of the research process that used to require years of specialized training. In this age, then, is there still value in doing a PhD? I think there is! In fact, I think this is one of the most exciting times to begin such a journey. Here are ten reminders I tell my students (and myself!) as the following questions inevitably bubble up: 1.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Mit.