GoKawiilIn one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they do not believe there is a place for them in the future.
The other story arrives by email. PhD students who cannot wait to graduate, because they want to join a frontier lab and they have concluded that research in academia is meaningless. They are counting the years until they can leave.
I believe both stories are wrong, and wrong for the same reason. They assume the future of research belongs to whoever has the most GPUs. I think the opposite is true. Academia is probably about to have a renaissance, and the most exciting work of the next decade will happen in university labs — not in spite of their limited resources, but because of them.
This week is our argument for that claim, and we are making it in code rather than in prose.
This post has six parts: why a lab like ours now publishes ecosystems instead of papers; what is actually in this open-source week; why the pessimism I keep running into is mistaken; what to let go of, and what to hold on to; what research will look like once you have let go of it; and why the renaissance happens in academia.
The unit of research is no longer the paper
Something changed in the last year, and most of us have not updated our habits to match it.
With agents, research per projects have become easy and quick. Work that used to take a year of engineering and experimentation now takes weeks, sometimes days. Here is the part that took me longer to see: when every individual project becomes easy, piecemeal work stops being good research. A paper here, a paper there, each one self-contained, each one asking the reader to stitch the pieces together themselves — that is a format from a world where every piece was expensive.
The difficulty did not disappear. It moved. It is no longer hard to publish a paper. It is hard to publish a coherent ecosystem.
The unit of research is the ecosystem.
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