I started grad school in 2012 and technically defended in 2020, but I actually left the PhD in 2018 and finished up my dissertation while working over the next two years. My grad school research was unusually focused for a PhD student. All my research, starting with my first paper, was focused on answering the question of how to develop an AI that could beat top humans in no-limit poker. After we succeeded in that in 2017, my research shifted more toward generality and scalability.

My original plan was to defend in summer 2019, do an industry research stint for a year, and then start a faculty position in 2020. (1-year deferrals are common in academia these days.) So I applied to universities and industry labs in fall 2018. FAIR gave me an offer and also said that I could start working immediately, even though I told them that I'd be doing faculty interviews for most of spring 2019. That seemed like a strictly better option than staying in grad school and making near-minimum wage, so after considering a few other options I chose to join FAIR immediately.

I ended up liking it so much that I turned down my faculty offers and stayed at FAIR. Once I knew I wasn't going to faculty, there wasn't as much urgency to finishing my PhD. I wanted to include one more major project in my thesis, ReBeL, so I held off on defending until that was done. -NB