Togelius on young researchers: AI can write the paper, your vision is the scarce resource
davidfromkansas · x · 2026-11-11
Julian Togelius, currently recruiting a new lab from hundreds of PhD/postdoc applications, published "Advice for young researchers" on how to build a research career when AI agents can already produce a solid paper from a single prompt.
Key observations:
- Two years ago agents were mediocre at coding and bad at math; today they are in some senses superhuman at both. Agent-generated papers tend to be solid but boring — incremental work that used to be a respectable PhD first paper — and their ability to run research pipelines will keep improving.
His advice:
- Be yourself, broaden and deepen your interests, seek friction that leads to learning, and treat your identity as a researcher like being an artist.
- Papers need to be interesting. As research gets automated, the scarce resource is your own vision, narrative, and personality — choosing a next step perhaps only you understand, and explaining why it matters.
- Combinations of knowledge vastly outnumber facts, so a unique set of interests yields unique research directions; if your interests are all discussed on AI Twitter, read outside your lane.
- Learn to work with AI agents and manage "understanding debt", but always write your own first draft: if it's not worth your time to write, it's not worth anyone else's time to read.
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