Fuzhao Xue

National University of Singapore, Joining Google DeepMind

Email: xuefuzhao at outlook.com

Twitter: @XueFz

Dec 9, 2024

中文版

I’m joining Google DeepMind as a Senior Research Scientist after three incredible years of PhD (aka "Pretrain myself harD" 😄). I’ll be contributing to Gemini pretraining and multi-modality research, areas I’m deeply passionate about.

I feel incredibly fortunate to report to Mostafa Dehghani again, one of my amazing mentors during a previous internship, and to be part of Jack Rae’s exceptional research team. I’ll begin this exciting journey from Singapore and transit to the Bay Area in a few months.

I’m super, super excited for this new chapter!

To mark this milestone, I’m writing down the key lessons I’ve learned during my PhD—not only for self-reflection and memorization but also to share and hopefully inspire others.

Seven Takeaways in My PhD

  1. Engineering is the foundation of research.
  2. Working with talented individuals is incredibly helpful for improving research taste.
  3. Aim for a concise and insightful 45-minute presentation rather than a long publication list throughout the PhD.
  4. Focus on a few key papers and understand them deeply rather than skimming many.
  5. When onboarding to a new topic, reading papers along the timeline to study the evolution of research trends.
  6. Transposition thinking is a highly effective way to improve writing and presentation.
  7. A PhD degree is helpful but not a prerequisite for a career in LLM research.