Can you do cool research at Google Brain? Honest answer: no. You will be on the cutting edge of machine learning, yes—an engineering discipline whose basic goals are set by large corporations. But you will not be a scientist.

I get that you may need to make money. You can make a lot there, and all the jobs at Renaissance Technology are taken. Go for it—you have all my respect. Academia sucks.

But if you want, at some point in your flourishing career, with your mind and your soul, to join the two-thousand year old parade of intellectual progress, you are not going to do it at Google. Certainly not at Facebook.

If you want to do that, I have a suggestion. It's not the only path, by any means, and I've had amazing fellow-travellers who haven't. But here it is.

Go to graduate school. Do a PhD. With us, here at CMU/SDS, if you like—but we're not the only place that does computational social or cognitive science. You won't get paid much, but you will mentors who legitimately care about the development of your mind.

It's difficult to overestimate the difference between a good PhD program and industry. It is literally shameful, if you're a good PhD advisor, to interfere with the intellectual development of a student. At Google, it's a business plan.

None of this is a joke. This is ten years of experience. Graduate school applications are coming up in the Fall. Think about it. Make sure you're getting a good deal (you shouldn't go into debt for a PhD, and you should get healthcare).

In short: corporate "research" is a business proposition. Whatever true intellectual progress comes out of there happens in spite of management. Given how good these companies are at monitoring their employees, that gap is now miniscule.

Last anecdote, then I'm done. We visited Google Research, arranged by a contact. The people were unbelievably smart. We brainstormed all sorts of wonderful things to work on. The last day of the meeting, the academics were like, OK! Let's go to the pub! Let's hash this out!

Their response: this was vacation for us. We're behind on our real work. We have to work this weekend. (Not "we feel guilty", but "we have to".) For the academics in the room, this *was* work. Suddenly, I realized that this was vacation for them.