It's crazy, most Master's students applying for a PhD position already come with multiple top conference papers, which a few years ago would get you like 2/3 of the way to the PhD, and now it just gets you a foot in the door in applying to start a PhD. And then already Bachelor students are expected to publish to get a good spot in a lab to do their Master thesis or internship. And NeurIPS has a track for high school students to write papers, which - I assume - will boost their applications to start university. This type of hustle has been common in many East Asian countries and is getting globalized.
Its a prestige economy. There are other things too like having worked with someone famous or having interned in a top company.
Makes me wonder, have I turned brilliant or is it quite unimpressive out there?
I’m inclined to even suggest to you that the prestige economy started with truly prestigious research work, of which then the institutions “ordered” as many more of those as they could, hence the industrial levels of output. Not unlike VCs funding anything and everything for the possibility of the few being true businesses.
The problem is that of course everyone wants the glory of finding out some new groundbreaking innovative disruptive scientific discovery. And so excellence is equated with such discoveries. So everything has to be marketed as such. Nobody wants to accept that science is mostly boring, it keeps the flame alive and passes on the torch to the next generation, but there's far less new disruption than it is pretended. But again, a funding agency wants sexy new finding that look flashy in the press, and bonus points if it supports their political agendas. The more careful and humble an individual scientist is, the less they will seem successful. Constantly second guessing your own hypotheses, playing devil's advocate strongly and doing double and triple checks, more detailed experiments, etc. take longer time and have better chance at discovering that really the sexy effect doesn't exist.
> Makes me wonder, have I turned brilliant or is it quite unimpressive out there?
Obviously, it's impossible to say without seeing their work and your work. But for context, there are on the order of tens of thousands of top-tier AI-related papers appearing each year. The majority of these are not super impressive.
But I also have to say, what may seem "just common sense" may look like that just in hindsight, or you may overlook something if you don't know the related history of methods, or maybe you're glossing over something that someone more experienced in the field would highlight as the main "selling point" of that paper. Also, if common sense works well, but nobody did it before, it's still obviously important to know how well it works quantitatively, including detailed analysis of the details.