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Yesterday, I told my advisors that I would be dropping out of my PhD program at the University of Michigan's School of Information. I was nervous about how to break the news to them. There was already some tension in our weekly meetings: I often voiced my dissatisfaction with the pace of academia, my interests had been drifting away from theirs, and, most of all, we disagreed on the severity of the risks AI posed.
When I walked into the room, they told me something I would have loved to hear months earlier:
“We think it’s time to get you started on some research.”
All I could say was, “I think it’s a little too late for that.”
For months, I had been proposing projects that bridged my interests with theirs, such as running studies that treated humans and LLMs as equal subjects, but they were usually turned down for not being “exciting enough”. My advisors wanted me to start with small, unpublished surveys that would ‘help me ask the right questions’ and “develop research taste” in Human-Computer Interaction before I could propose a full study. I understood why they wanted me to gain experience first, but I felt held back after every meeting, and grew restless alongside my ambition and sense of urgency.
“I’ve been doing machine learning research independently,” I told them.
“I discovered some really interesting stuff about how to interpret neurons inside of LLMs. It’s garnered some attention, and some people are even open to funding my work. I’ll be withdrawing and moving to San Francisco at the end of the semester.”
“I had a feeling,” one of them said. “I had the opportunity to work in industry when I was in your shoes. It’s an exciting time to be in the Bay.”
I had heard that last part about the Bay countless times from people I'd met online over the last few months, and, more recently, from friends I made a week ago at an AI safety retreat in Wisconsin. They didn’t mean the same thing, though. My advisors saw the move as a career opportunity. In contrast,