Professor Who Turned Down OpenAI in 2018 Reflects on PhD Anxiety in the AI Era
SharonYixuanLi · x · 2026-10-30
Sharon Yixuan Li, professor at UW-Madison, published a blog post 'Time in the Chaos' addressing PhD students' anxiety as AI accelerates scientific discovery.
Key threads from her career:
- 2015: her first ICLR paper, when the conference had fewer than 300 submissions and Bengio personally emailed about the work.
- 2017: joined Meta AI, working on one of the earliest large-scale vision foundation models trained on billions of Instagram images — and experienced an early version of the scaling race that eroded her curiosity.
- 2018: was recruited by OpenAI, visited its SF office, saw the Rubik's Cube robotic hand training curves, and walked away.
She calls it '100% a bad decision financially' — OpenAI is now one of the most valuable AI companies — but has no regrets: the quietness outside the wave gave her space to read, think, and build her own research identity and lab. The post is meant as reassurance for students navigating this strange time.
Related event: Wisconsin Professor Addresses PhD Anxiety in the AI Era(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Amazon blocks shopping agents, but these 11 retailers still welcome them — thisiskp_ · 2026-10-30
- Lab insiders know alignment is unsolvable but can't say it until the Overton window shifts — danfaggella · 2026-10-30
- ML veteran Andriy Burkov calls 'money won't matter post-superintelligence' nonsense — burkov · 2026-10-30
- Northwestern's Hullman: Verification is not knowledge — AI science needs humans who can answer for results — JessicaHullman · 2026-10-30
- Kevin Roose's Machine Gods pod: why scientists are mad at OpenAI solving their hardest problems — kevinroose · 2026-10-30
- Ethan Mollick on AI and work: 'You're a hand-weaver in a world of power looms' — emollick · 2026-10-30