The NeurIPS high school track has made its way to Chinese social media. The collaborator who sent me this said there is at least one example of a professor asking their PhD student to help write a paper for one of their kids so that it can help their college admissions abroad.
@avt_im Wonder how many of them will be written by LLM.
@avt_im Btw I was approached by a high school kid back in 2015 at a conference who had a paper there. He was evidently smart and ambitious So this thing is not new. Hard to tell how much of it is parental push and how much of it is the kid themselves.
@avt_im This will definitely lead to a industry and exacerbate the so-called "内卷"(rat competition) among chinese students. Money can buy almost any academic products in China.
@avt_im Terrible decision for NeurIPS to allow high-school students to submit papers imo. It might make more students who do well in their grades not able to go to top unis just because their family does not have the resources to find/buy them collaborators to write this kind of papers.
@avt_im Wow, this is happening faster than I thought!
@avt_im A new business model just dropped 🤪 I'm very sure there are people willing to pay at least $5k-$10k for a paper
@avt_im It is predictable in east asia including South Korea. I am sure there will be a ghostwriter for this track.