I looked into the AI Index report from Stanford today. PhD researchers like Ilya Sutskever published great academic papers like “Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks” in 2014. “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the Transformer architecture and attention mechanism (Thanks to google researchers), was published in June 2017. If you check out the graph below of academic publications, you do not feel the AI “wake-up call” happened in November 2022 after the release of ChatGPT-3.5 by OpenAI. Yes. Just look at the number of research publications in AI and see how academic researchers had a head start; universities could do better, but what happened?
Since 2018, industry started to invest on AI startups, build models like GPT, put lots of money and take all knowledge of academia, hire the best of academia then reach the point that you can call AI industry, a top rank university. Academia is behind industry in many fields, but they are certainly far behind in AI.
So, I did this to make sure I made the right decision and I am not crazy, like everyone said: “You dropped your PhD in the last year after all these works and publications?”
The industry I am in now is more innovative in AI. But I wish I hadn’t been that crazy to drop out! Maybe the PhD degree was worth it, to be called Dr. E?
Source:
Mohsin With E 