what's a good metric for PhD Students?

So, I started my PhD in CS at Georgia Tech in Fall 2023. It’s only been around 16 months, but it feels more like several years in deep learning research trends. During this time, SAM toppled the classical segmentation task research, and the GPT-4 series of models appeared; model alignment (to human expectations) research has taken off, and the Qwen series has (sort of?) taken over the Llama series as the best performing and fast-growing open-source LLMs, LLM based agent frameworks are growing and growing, and numerous (maybe too many) fancy AI startups have popped up.

That’s about research in major (industry) leagues. What about academia?

My observations are based on research in the multimodal learning domain; these might not hold for fields like theoretical ML.

From what I’ve seen, the number of papers from solely academic labs has dropped significantly (based on the 900-odd papers I’ve looked at since June 2023, so please take this statement with a grain of salt). Many papers come from PhD students interning at the industry research labs, so a collaboration b/w industry and academia. An interesting observation here, though, is the disparity between pure industry papers and academic papers. It seems as if academia depends on these industry labs for publishing now, and for a fair reason, because the industry usually has more GPUs.

All this is to say that the industry is dramatically affecting the PhD (research in deep learning) experience nowadays. So, as an international PhD student who spends most of his time at a US academic lab with no long-term collaboration with any industry lab in sight, what should I do to make the most out of a PhD? There are various aspects to this question, to list a few:

How can I focus on producing work I am satisfied with rather than succumbing to the modern publishing frenzy?
Is publishing papers good enough?
How do I not feel too anxious about being unlucky regarding the time of my PhD?
How do I optimize my social network?

In this piece, I’ll try to share my opinions and perspective as a 2nd year PhD student about enduring overthinking and anxiety on an almost daily basis.