Let me give you some perspective: my entire phd was made obsolete by CRISPR. It was a wonderful thing.

Use whatever is published as the new base for your research. Use AI tools to help you going forward.

This happens all the time, even without AI. Other researchers or PhD students can publish the same results before you. I say that based on my experience during my PhD.

Perhaps consider switching to a more applied field. Experiments in the physical realm hold value, especially if you document the process.

This has always been a challenge for PhD students and researchers, it's just far more likely to occur now it seems. Getting scooped doesn't feel good, but it's a signal you've been thinking about things other people care about.

Don't worry, if you use openAI and get lucky they might offer to share credit with you for your work.

I think eventually companies won't get as much stuff that's usable for marketing, so they'll stop investing so much into ai for math, so eventually cheap and poor graduate students will be able to do relevant work again without worrying about getting scooped by a company with a million GPUs :-/

It could still be interesting if your approach to the problem was different to theirs.

That would be unfortunate but the world does not owe you anything and is not going to stop for you. Which is also a valuable thing to learn in your 20s (ideally earlier).

Don’t paste your research into these AI because they will train on it and then scoop you.

Look forward to being obsolete I guess

Yes, and?

> what do I do?

Precisely what all NLP researchers and the ML community at large did in the last few years: embrace the frontier and realize that attention is all you need.