Comment by currymj
1 day ago
Especially for your first NeurIPS paper as a PhD student, getting one published is extremely lucrative.
Most big tech PhD intern job postings have NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR/etc. first author paper as a de facto requirement to be considered. It's like getting your SAG card.
If you get one of these internships, it effectively doubles or triples your salary that year right away. You will make more in that summer than your PhD stipend. Plus you can now apply in future summers and the jobs will be easier to get. And it sets your career on a good path.
A conservative estimate of the discounted cash value of a student's first NeurIPS paper would certainly be five figures. It's potentially much higher depending on how you think about it, considering potential path dependent impacts on future career opportunities.
We should not be surprised to see cheating. Nonetheless, it's really bad for science that these attempts get through. I also expect some people did make legitimate mistakes letting AI touch their .bib.
This is 100% true, if anything you’re massively undercounting the value of publications.
Most industry AI jobs that aren’t research based know that NeurIPS publications are a huge deal. Many of the managers don’t even know what a workshop is (so you can pass off NeurIPS workshop work as just “NeurIPS”)
A single first author main conference work effectively allows a non Ph.D holder to be treated like they have a Ph.d (be qualified for professional researcher jobs). This means that a decent engineer with 1 NeurIPS publication is easily worth 300K+ YOY assuming US citizen. Even if all they have is a BS ;)
And if you are lucky to get a spotlight or an oral, that’s probably worth closer to 7 figures…