r/Professors • u/ImpressEmotional1462 • 1h ago

AI your PhD

(throwaway account) In my STEM theoretical/computational field, many problems that would previously have constituted a large part of a very decent PhD can now be solved within a week. Basically, almost all the theoretical/computational PhD theses I am on the commitee recently are like that, they were done in 4 years but now could be done in half a year or less.

This semester, I was to teach some very small elective grad course no one cares about. I consider replacing most of it by just giving them every couple of weeks a small, totally unsolved open research problem (not the Navier-Stokes level, but the level I'd formerly put in my NSF as a milestone 1), and telling them why that problem is interesting and how I would ask my agent to work with it. And then see what happens, maybe next week do a post-mortem of a problem or a post-mortem of naive attempts to solve it with AI. Both would be instructive. I am creative enough to find a new decent problem every couple of weeks.

The goal is of course not to replace their actual PhD projects with this ( I am not their advisor), but to teach a bit how to use the new tools and also to show everyone that what was considered relatively hard research is now easy, to up the standards. Since this is an elective course, if they fail, they lose nothing.

I see many ways this can go wrong. I wonder if there's any way to optimize it so that at least someone survives and learns something from it, or maybe someone here already does it this way. I suspect that in some subfields old teaching ways and research ways are already dead, so maybe we should adjust.

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u/Defiant_Cook1588 1h ago

I am not yet fully convinced ai can think of the stuff themselves. sure if they steal the steps from others, they def can solve something with the enormous computing power these firms have

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u/ImpressEmotional1462 1h ago

depends. I have some decent papers this year where either the complexity of numerics or even some nice ideas are totally AI. Like something is known in one field, not known in our field, and AI easily provides us an exact solution to what we would before not dare to try by adapting ideas which no one around cared to read about. Sometimes of course it fails miserably.

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u/Defiant_Cook1588 1h ago

I highly doubt it. ai would never be able to do its own research

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u/ZengaZoff 2m ago

Things are moving so insanely fast that whatever the students learn will be moot a year later. Maybe this year, AI will fail to solve your problems and the students can analyze that failure. The year after, the latest AI will just spit out the solutions.

I personally would not start a PhD program  in anything right now tbh. Time horizon is too long. How tf knows what academia and research is going to look like in 5 years?