MIT's Phillip Isola argues the AI PhD is still worth it

"Many students who are just now embarking on a PhD in AI are understandably anxious." That is the opening line of an essay published today by MIT's Phillip Isola, dated September 28th, 2026, that tries to talk them out of quitting.

Isola structures the piece as ten questions he says students are actually asking. They include "How can I contribute anything if I'm not at a frontier lab?", "Anything I do this year will be done better by an AI next year", "Okay, but how will I get credit?", "How will I make money?" and, bluntly, "Why should I do a PhD?"

His answers push back on the assumption that only the frontier labs matter. "You have arguably more leverage on shaping the future if you do your work in public rather than in secret," he writes. On the student "working on algorithms for cancer diagnosis" who has heard that "AI will cure cancer in N years", his response is short: "There's value in saving those lives. There's value in the present."

On the worry that AI systems will out-know any human expert, he leans on process: "Progress is fastest when you first take the time to deeply understand your subject." He adds that "Human expertise is going to matter for a long time." On the fear that the good problems are gone, he is briskest: "Do we have a complete theory of intelligence? No? Then let's get on it!"

The closing move is not an instrumental one. When the practical answers run out, Isola writes: "At the end of the day, a sufficient answer can just be this: for the love of the game." Two of the researchers we track had already shared the post by the time we saw it.