Life update: I recently graduated from CMU RI, and last year I went through the academic faculty job market in robot learning. I was fortunate to receive a lot of help and support from many people throughout the process. Compared to industry job applications, there are relatively few resources available online about the faculty application process. So I decided to open-source all of my application materials from last year here: docs.google.com/document/d/1… I hope these materials can be helpful to others who are considering pursuing an academic career!

We built a robotics data engine with Astra-level performance at 125x lower cost. And we are open-sourcing the weights today! Introducing Flora, a suite of open models to parse the physical world and turn raw footage into rich training signals. Flora already powers our in-house data engine, labeling 200K hours of videos a day on 500 GPUs. We created it to scale the frontier for robot learning. Now you own the weights too. Flora gives you: - High-quality, timestamped captions to curate and filter human egocentric and robot data; - Dense progress rewards for quality control and RL post-training; - Rubrics scoring for real-world benchmarking Try it today, links in thread:

NVIDIA has just announced a huge investment package into French startups. @nvidia has now committed nearly $10 billion to the European tech ecosystem. The French startups it is investing in include: > Doctolib > Entalpic > Genesis AI > Pigment The company had already invested in other French companies such as Alice & Bob, Gradium and SCINTIL Photonics. This is amazing news for the French and European ecosystem. LETS GO

I’ll take the opposite point, that for the vast majority of people, it probably doesn’t make sense to do a PhD in AI right now, and is better to join industry. I say this with love for Phillip, whose work and philosophy I do admire, and respect for putting this out there! Everything in AI is, generally speaking, working well. Most things come from stacking wins and good ideas over and over again, and if you’re in industry, you have a much better opportunity to learn what is actually working and what doesn’t work, and then push the forefront of what’s possible at a much larger scale. Internships also don’t really feel the same because you’re certainly not working on the most important projects for the company and often come in with a high risk agenda and work alone. In industry, you learn a lot about how to manage budgets, work in large teams, and push projects that require a lot of effort and work to get done. Academic project budgets are generally quite minuscule, maybe being O($1 - $100K) for many projects and you’re often working alone. If you really want to push novel ideas, another route I don’t think most people consider is also a startup, where you may be able to raise 1-100x more money to do the same project you may do in a PhD, with more resources and the ability to hire other people. And, if it goes well, the ability to scale it dramatically. When it comes to hiring, often times, it’s easier to get an offer having worked well with other people in industry and then having them change jobs and bring you over. Doing a PhD can get your foot in the door, but often it’s still for entry level positions after doing a 5-year PhD. In industry too, you also will make a lot of strong connections, similar to those you’d make in academia. Though it might be the case that it’s good to do 1 year of a PhD and then drop out to work in industry at this point to get the benefit of both. Doing a PhD right now is on extremely hard mode, where not much work ends up mattering and even if it works, there’s high cost to change the ways of industry to adapt something that might provide incremental gains when everything generally is working well with enough resourcing and effort.