A Statistician’s Journey

Last week, I caught up with a friend since middle school, who was visiting Philadelphia for a large language model (LLM) conference. He now works in tech, having been pursuing his M.S. and Ph.D. in natural language processing (NLP) and computer sciences at Carnegie Mellon and The University of Washington and is interning at Meta. It definitely felt a bit surreal to me that the last time we met face-to-face was in the winter of 2021, when I visited him and stayed at his place in Seattle, Washington. To compensate for this huge gap in time, I drove to Philadelphia twice over three days to spend a good chunk of time together and walked with him around Philly’s historic Center City.

We had a number of topics to talk about. Having not been on top of the deep magics of LLMs, I did not dwell on the technical topics for too long. We chatted about our life, my new job, and how some of our mutual friends had been doing. He has proposed to his girlfriend earlier this year on a trip to Mexico but has not settled on a plan for the wedding, and she was busy participating in a series of architectural competition, doing her best to succeed at her architectural design firm in Los Angeles. A sentimental point came up when we realized it has been almost a decade since we left high school – that was when we took separate journeys and studied at different places in the US, and somehow, we were still in touch through all this.

Getting close to graduation, my friend was actively job hunting, which quickly became a central topic of our conversation. Due to the slow market, he was feeling a lot of pressure and was yet to secure any offers. Among my friends, he has always stood out as one of the most innovative in the tech realm. He was also hardworking and mentally resilient, and I sincerely believed he would be a great engineer to advance the mission of any tech company on Earth (he also has >1,000 citations on Google Scholars to date), so I was quite empathetic with him about his pending offers that seem to be never coming.

He admitted to wanting to work for the cutting-edge LLM companies like Open AI or xAI and pursue a career that is both lucrative and intellectually satisfying. We joked about how terrible a person Sam Altman and Elon Musk has turned out to be, including the board room intrigues Sam might have launched to push Open AI into the for-profit realm and the no-life approach of employee management Elon has turned to for the software company X and his AI venture. But wait a minute, did he not mention that he would like to join them? The image of him working crazy hours to experiment with their proprietary LLM models were as unreal as a full-scale AI-induced nuclear war. He had never struck me as someone who identified with the tech bro culture and his work ethics seemed to be at odds with that of those two companies.

This perceived difference became even more obvious when we were chatting with another friend of his that went to the same conference about the extreme behaviors of people in the academia. I was shocked to hear a certain professor that I have heard of who sent a “?” to his undergraduate intern for not using his computing server during Christmas, and another world-renowned young assistant professor who did not let her top student to graduate in his 5th year, despite of his many achievements already. I could feel him and his friend detesting these behaviors. His friend even gingerly asked for tips for avoiding such professors in spite of their academic brilliance. I wondered, if these incidences sounded crazy enough, then how much of a difference can the companies like Open AI or xAI, both composed of geniuses that took work to an extreme level, make in terms of making their workplace humane. In light of this, my friend’s preferences still baffled me. Maybe my Epicurean believes prohibited me from taking a more reconciliatory look at the situations. Regardless, I could only wish him the best.

On the flip side, a job in tech could easily bring my friend to places like New York City, where his salary and perks could make him live comfortably even in Manhattan. This was comforting news for me – it will be a fortunate way to re-unite with him after so many years and keep up with his ground-breaking works. Before we parted ways, I told him to keep me updated on his job status – despite his crazy dreams to chase the best of tech under strict bosses, it is always nice to have a long-term friend like him nearby.