Students sometimes ask me if it still makes sense, in this accelerating age, to pursue a PhD in AI. Perhaps counterintuitively, I think it's a great time to do so. I wrote up some thoughts on this here: web.mit.edu/phillipi/www...
Who's Who of AI
Phillip Isola
Why they matter
Researcher with public evidence across Vision & synthetic media, AI research, Agents & robotics.
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- 23h ago
Associate Professor in EECS at MIT. Neural nets, generative models, representation learning, computer vision, robotics, cog sci, AI.
https://web.mit.edu/phillipi/
What they're sharing
On the Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI web.mit.edu
Robot-use agents web.mit.edu
Articles & links
Recently, there have been a lot of impressive demos of AI agents, like Claude, controlling robots. I wrote a short blog post with my thoughts on the advent of these "robot-use agents." web.mit.edu/phillipi/www... I think it's an important change in the trajectory of robotics!
AI Weekly's analysis
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- Phillip Isola argues newer LLMs like Fable and Astra are eroding the case that models can't yet drive robots in general.
- In his cloud-puppeteer model, any internet-connected robot could gain AI capability via a software update, with no new hardware.
- Isola concedes LLM-controlled robots remain far less performant than dedicated solutions, with latency and reliability still limiting safety-critical use.
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