The speaker says PhD students have unusual freedom to choose what they work on, for the most part.

“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”