The Research Paper Backlash: 'Ilya Was Right — 90% Is Noise'

A viral thread argues most AI practitioners are consuming surface-level content instead of engaging with the 25 papers that actually matter.

@GenAI_is_real posted a thread invoking Ilya Sutskever's oft-cited belief that most of the AI industry is noise, arguing that practitioners who haven't deep-dived into a curated list of roughly 25 foundational papers are operating on borrowed understanding. The post resonated widely, tapping into a growing frustration among serious researchers and engineers that the discourse-to-depth ratio in AI has become untenable.

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