The speaker believes PhD students' research is unlikely to be very interesting if they do not use their freedom to pursue work that matters to others or is not seen as trivial.

“none of these papers are it's not like a gpt6 astro release you know it's not like everyone's like oh my gosh like i'm going to use this now this is the best thing in the world like academia just can't afford to do this at least right now i mean there's a whole slew of reasons why i think that should change but i think it's like if you don't have as a phd student i think you're in such a unique position where you can work on literally whatever you want for the most part if you're not taking advantage of that and working on things”

“on things that like nobody cares about or like people see as some trivial thing like oh i thought about this but like i don't use it i just think like in the end the research is just never going to be that interesting because you kind of need to take big bets if you're going to be in academia because otherwise i think like just go to an industry lab like you know they have tons of resources tons of talent why constrain yourself in an area where you don't have a lot of resources and like there's not even that many”