Soumith Chintala: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And how do you reconcile that with how we started the discussion about intrinsic versus extrinsic kind of like accomplishment or success? How should people think about that especially when they're doing a PhD or early in their career? I think in Europe, I walked through a lot of the posters and whatnot, there seems to be mode collapse in a way in the research, a lot of people working on the same things. Is it worth for a PhD to not take a bet on something that is maybe not as interesting just because of funding and visibility and whatnot? Or yeah, what suggestions would you give? I think there's a baseline level of compatibility you need to have with the field. Basically, you need to figure out if you will get paid enough to eat, right? Like whatever reasonable normal lifestyle you want to have as a baseline. So you at least have to pick a problem within the neighborhood of fundable. Like you wouldn't wanna be doing something so obscure that people are like, I don't know, like you can work on it. Would a limit on fundability, I'm just observing something like three months of compute, right? That's the top line, that's the like max that you can spend on any one project.…

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