Yep. A communications professor where I did my MS says a 200usd/mo claude sub (which ant gives for free) does as much work as 5 grad students. It's mostly like you said, trying out new ideas rapidly.
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The purpose of hiring grad students isn’t to advance science, it’s to train experts.
Perhaps this is the fundamental problem that can be solved with AI. As a non-scientist, I'd very much prefer to have massive amounts of scientific breakthroughs instead of massive amounts of well-trained experts.
This is a misunderstanding of how scientific research works, why it is done and how it is done. Reducing the number of people who can do science will not pay off in the long run.
Scientific research has been getting a bit too Pharisees-like in the last two decades, and it's causing a lot of people to drop out and join industry. I think enabling people to make discoveries on their own without the grad school hazing will yield MORE people who can do science, not less.
Yes. They have grad students too. This is just like having more grad students that don't need to be trained so the work you can get done is not bottlenecked by the number of people you can train.
It's 90% to advance science via cheap labor and 10% to train a small group of future experts who will hire grad students to 90% advance science via cheap labor etc.
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