I met so many people (students, researchers, and even investors) say they are so interested in understanding intelligence. Yet, they never bother to prepare themselves with the basic mathematical background. They wouldn't be able to understand anything even if a perfect theory is developed and presented to them. Truth about intelligence is not for the superficial nor the faint-hearted.
🪘Lecturer in Medical Imaging and Modelling. Keywords: representation learning from multimodal data, generative AI for building virtual patient populations, causality and fairness in ML for in silico trials, geometric deep learning, and physics-informed ML https://t.co/PMZzpGVcGe
I get asked a lot: why stay in academia, all the excitement in AI is happening in industry with massive compute. And I am seeing some profs leaving academia, but also seeing lots of researchers in industry looking to go back to academia, especially those who don’t work on LLMs.
I have spent some time and actively working with industry, and it has been a great experience, but for me the answer is simple:
1. Students: Nothing can replace working with really smart & amazing students.
2. Academic freedom: In general, industry will one way or another dictate what you should work on. Today it is LLMs, tomorrow it is something else. The good old days of "here is a cool idea, let me investigate and publish" are pretty much over. But as an academic, I can work on whatever I want: I can start working on "black holes" tomorrow if I choose to.
3. And my favourite one: No reorgs -- big tech really loves reorgs that happen every few months.
Finally, as an academic, I can always take some time off, work in industry or start-up, and come back if I want to. Going into industry is usually a one-way street: It is far easier to go to industry from academia and much harder the other way around.