Advice for young researchers

I’m currently in the process of recruiting a whole new research lab, as I’m moving to a new university. I’m sifting through several hundred PhD student and postdoc applications in order to hire a handful of people initially, and more soon. The quality of the candidates is excellent, and several of them have impressed me deeply in interviews. (It also makes me wonder how I ended up getting a PhD position back in 2004; I was way less prepared then than my top candidates are now.) The selection work is hard but fun, as work should be.I’m doing this against a backdrop of things moving fast, to say the least. Two years ago AI agents were mediocre at coding and terrible at maths; today they are, in some senses, superhuman at both. You can now simply give an AI agent a research idea, and it goes away and does the work and gives you a finished paper. You can even ask the damn thing to come up with the research idea itself. In my field and experience, the result is typically a fairly solid but…

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