My personal anecdote as one of the no-undergrad people: I got into ML research on my own and published papers without much research mentorship, and then joined OpenAI. My background is definitely more in engineering than research, but I’ve spent a substantial amount of time exploring my own research directions. I get direct mentorship from my manager, but I also seek out advice from many other researchers in the organization, which I’ve found to be valuable.
My case is quite unusual, so I would caution about drawing generalized conclusions about what to do based on my experience.
OpenAI and Anthropic often hire people without PhDs (often undergraduate degrees, sometimes masters, rarely no undergrad).
Edit: And I think these people in practice get at least some research mentorship.
They typically have some prior work/research/ml experience, but not necessarily any specific one of these.
My personal anecdote as one of the no-undergrad people: I got into ML research on my own and published papers without much research mentorship, and then joined OpenAI. My background is definitely more in engineering than research, but I’ve spent a substantial amount of time exploring my own research directions. I get direct mentorship from my manager, but I also seek out advice from many other researchers in the organization, which I’ve found to be valuable.
My case is quite unusual, so I would caution about drawing generalized conclusions about what to do based on my experience.