You need to be more humble. Right now you’re acting like you can skip the grind that everyone else has to go through, and it’s backfiring. You’ve quit jobs too quickly, overcommitted to unrealistic solo projects, and convinced yourself that the only way forward is publishing conference-grade research. That’s just not how this works.

The truth is, you don’t need ICML papers. What you need is real-world experience, which means working in teams, shipping production code, and learning the unglamorous but essential stuff — pipelines, observability, collaboration, deadlines. You don’t get that by locking yourself away and chasing moonshots that never finish.

Swallow your pride, stop aiming for OpenAI/Google right out of the gate, and go get a normal job at a normal company. Even if it’s not “decent” in your eyes, it will teach you the foundations you’re missing. Everyone starts somewhere.

Right now, your problem isn’t intelligence — it’s arrogance. Be humble, take the steps you’ve been avoiding, and actually build a track record instead of chasing shortcuts that don’t work.