Everybody is a prof now

Everybody is a prof now

Published: August 20, 2026

We have been looking for those places that are, at least to first order, bottlenecked by intelligence for a while now. Among the most conspicuous such places are maths, coding, and seemingly offensive cybercapabilites. In that same step, much of the academic grunt work required to execute an idea in fields that are predominantly or entirely based on computation has collapsed. The distance between idea and finished model, algorithm, benchmark, etc. has meaningfully contracted to a degree that it is no longer a meme that your 19-year-old Freshman is now just one-shotting his NeurIPS submissions on his $100 Claude Max subscription. This has, one is nearly tempted to say mechanistically, to a devaluation of this type of work in practice. In practice, there is not a whole lot of value in producing much of this work unless it delivers something beyond its value in implementation by contributing directly to the wider body of knowledge, by testing a clearly defined and relevant hypothesis, or by providing genuinely useful infrastructure (such as a well curated dataset or benchmark) that others build on top of.

Your immediate and validated reaction to this may be: wasn't this always the aim of science? And of course in many ways you're right. It was and is. But in the realities semi-professionalized system of modern science, in which every participant is required to meet some quantitative proxy of actual scientific relevance, namely grants, citations, and papers, there had long been a deference in practice to the people executing mildly interesting work well, or at least doing it at all. The pure act of spending many months, and in most cases years, developing code for a certain (more or less made up) problem still involved real effort and, which is mostly the same thing, also did teach the author real things. In that way, the contribution of the paper consisted mostly in the actual doing of this effortful (if not always impactful) thing, meriting them a publication and one more step on the eventual path to graduation, tenure, and academic glory.

Clearly, this line of argumentation can hold no longer in a time where writing up code has become ultimately commoditized. There simply is little in benefit to academia (let alone society as a whole) in just writing up things. In a perfect world, this would be a wildly good thing and certainly the amount of good review that at least a code-based paper can get these days is incredible. In a perfect world, every paper would be internally and externally audited by a large number of very capable, perhaps even specialized, models that sleuth out every mistake and bug (intentional or not), enabling a new gold standard of methodological excellence not even rivalled by the biggest top-tier journals today. In fact, anybody who has tried realizes how much we suffer from the fact that this has not been the reality over the past years (certainly the years since 2018) and how easy it is to find papers which, to put it mildly, would have benefited from such a setup. In a perfect world, we would see many current paradigms being closed as we come to their natural endpoint much faster and many new ones popping up as new capabilites allow for new ways of tackling problems and testing out these new ideas becomes much faster. Of course we do not live in this perfect world.

Rather we get the same sluggish academic process supercharged with an alien intelligence that is all too happy to slave away at building out our half-baked ideas and ill-formed hypotheses. If only more people would look at the hill their climbing! But no. We don't see paradigms being overturned -- as every time this happens it's a potential risk to someone's career. We don't see the standard of publication rising, instead, preprint servers have banned survey and review papers for the pure flood of slop preprints, hallucinating insights and academic thought. (If you ask me this will soon be followed by a paperblank ban on the deluge of biomarker-correlation-to-x papers that have swamped the preprint servers in recent years.) What irony indeed! In a time where we should be making the fastest kind of progress in these areas of science, wouldn't we more than ever need the services of a good review, a guiding text, our spiritus rector, to help keep up with the pace of change. Trying to consolidate our findings into general theories, updating our priors, building better conceptualizations and, most of all, understand what to work on next. The review should be the holy grail of academic reasoning, the consolidation of years of data, experience, and insight distilled through the author's genuine taste and creativity into salient, get-to-the-point insights that help decide the questions to ask, the ideas to let go off, laying the groundwork for a future generation's textbooks.

What we see are the same faultlines of academia simply supercharged. The...