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Totally agree with Peyman. Professors (like senior managers, btw), especially in elite universities, think that they have significant influence on the success of their students, while it's not true most of the time
While this is an impressive array of talent, over 80% of the researchers Russ brags about were (self-) advised while he was juggling academic duties with major executive roles at Apple or Meta. He's not alone in this respect. Elite programs attract talent that buoys the lab, giving advisors the bandwidth to juggle significant outside roles. I'd be careful about assigning too much credit to the advisor and not enough to the students' raw talent and self-discipline.
While this is an impressive array of talent, over 80% of the researchers Russ brags about were (self-) advised while he was juggling academic duties with major executive roles at Apple or Meta. He's not alone in this respect. Elite programs attract talent that buoys the lab, giving advisors the bandwidth to juggle significant outside roles. I'd be careful about assigning too much credit to the advisor and not enough to the students' raw talent and self-discipline.
I’ve been asked several times whether Zhilin Yang, the founder of @Kimi_Moonshot was my PhD student. The answer is yes and he is absolutely brilliant. But I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with so many outstanding PhD students over the years. So I thought I’d brag a little about them and their career paths (of course there are also many MSc and undergraduate students, sorry if I missed anyone): Founders / Founding Team Members Devendra Chaplot @dchaplot PhD, Founding Member Thinking Machines / Mistral Zhilin Yang PhD, Founder & CEO, Moonshot AI Jimmy Ba @jimmybajimmyba MSc/PhD, Co-founder xAI Hubert Tsai PhD, Co-founder Spuree, Apple Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines; Co-founder Vayu Robotics Charlie Tang PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines, DE Shaw. Professors Paul Liang @pliang279 PhD, MIT Ben Eysenbach @ben_eysenbach PhD, Princeton University Ruosong Wang @RuosongW PhD, Peking University Bhuwan Dhingra @bhuwandhingra PhD, Duke University Roger Grosse @RogerGrosse Postdoc, University of Toronto Alexander Schwing Postdoc, UIUC Research Scientists Shuyan Zhou @shuyanzh36, Postdoc, Meta Superintelligence Lab Tiffany Min @SoYeonTiffMin PhD, Microsoft AI Murtaza Dalal @mihdalal PhD, Tesla AI Minji Yoon @MinjiYoon90 , PhD, Microsoft AI Shrimai Prabhumoye PhD, NVIDIA AI, Mistral Haitian Sun @sun_haitian PhD, Google DeepMind Emilio Parisotto PhD, Google DeepMind Lisa Lee PhD @rl_agent, Google DeepMind Manzil Zaheer @ManzilZaheer PhD, Google DeepMind Jamie Kiros PhD, Google Brain, OpenAI Yuri Burda PhD, OpenAI, Anthropic Cody Severinski PhD, Amazon