Arvind Narayanan

I’ve pointed out that AI is killing cold outreach. Let’s check in on how that’s going. We’re months away from the Fall *2027* PhD admissions cycle and I’ve gotten about 75 inquiries. I expect this to increase exponentially until December. And this is just one of 10-15 categories of unsolicited email I get. Sadly I’m long past the point of being able to open all mail. On top of that, there is a new wave of spam / attempted extortion from a company called iLands that lets people run unmonitored agents. https://tedium.co/2026/09/11/ilands-agents-email-spam-kaixin-tang/ One response to my previous post — what’s wrong with needing introductions for outreach? Why am I sad about the death of cold emails? It doesn’t affect me much, because I’m well established in my career. But once upon a time I was the one writing cold emails. Growing up in India, I didn’t have many connections to rely on for reaching out to prominent researchers. Without cold emails, I wouldn’t have ended up where I am today. Of course this is far from a catastrophe, but there was something magical about the egalitarian potential of the internet, and we lose something when we go back to clubby hierarchies.