alt Hacker NewsI were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
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17 is such a fantastic age to be free and experience the world, you won't get that much of an advantage as these FOMO groomers are selling you into if you start now versus later.
If you are 17, go be yourself, whatever that is, in whatever way you want that to be, but do it so authentically and fully. Be unapologetic about what you love and what motivates you, and pursue that with passion and commitment.
I've come to accept that some people, when faced with impressive technology, simply want to use it. They genuinely have no interest in understanding how it works. Lately, its even become fashionable to shame people for trying to understand ("you still read code? gross, you know AI can do that for you"..)
I will never understand this mentality, to let yourself be so dependent on something you don't understand at all is to live like a child. But it is very common. I doubt too many 17 year olds will bother even trying to understand what an LLM is, let alone build one from scratch.
When I was 17 I was building Windows Phone apps, bad decision on my part.
Paul has the same problem just about every tech obsessed engineer has (including myself), he thinks everyone else loves computers too. They don't. At all. I''m a self-taught ex-bartender and I can't tell you how many grown adults in the service industry I've tried to get into computer stuff and they had 0 interest.
And younger people I meet don't even own laptops. I had a genz/millennial cusp friend who wrote all her college papers on her iphone.
I think this is weird advice.
Learn how to make language models from scratch, yes. But learn how to use them, in the context of other machine learning tools, on very small hardware.
When the bubble bursts (and I still tend towards thinking it could burst rather than be deflated in a manageable way), the focus will be on uses of AI that are not like the hyperscalars' products.
People will still be interested in useful AI being added to small things — assistive technologies, home security, garden monitoring, their phones and smartwatches, robotics.
Instead of reductive, reactive make-an-anthropic-competitor advice like this, what about advising 17 year olds to focus on broad, integrated, helpful AI — or on going back through eighty years of history to look at AI projects that failed and reassess them?
Curious, what would you do if you are a 40 year old?
yeah i loved tech so started learning circuity and soldering. but it was a waste of time i made my living learning how to program web applications.
This is about as intelligent as say "If I were 17, I'd learn digital electroinics". You would waste your time. Sure, in theory it's useful, in reality it's not that useful.
All the negative comments here are really missing the point. At 17, you should be building your foundation. Kids that can make a custom CPU, or retrofit an old car with an electric motor, or screw around with nuclear energy... these are kids that are doing it just to see if they can. It's not about jobs, it's about curiosity and stretching limits and seeing what you can do, who you can be.
I remember when I caught PG on reddit arguing with some guy who'd said something mean about him. He didn't reveal who he was. But you could tell from his history - his first post was from before reddit opened to the public.
Good times.
I wonder if you can dig that out of the historical reddit database. I'd like to see that again. I love how everything is recorded now.
It seems this is poor advice in that it’s suggesting young people should focus on the current problem as opposed to future problems. Focus on the current problem can result in making some money but it will result in making the incumbents more money, which is not disruptive. Isn’t the goal of radical software startups to maximize disruption?
If the two current bottlenecks, for this LLM madness that could very well be a bubble, are processing capacity and accuracy (a second processing problem) then what comes next? Isn’t that where young people should be looking or are we just giving up on innovation?
Really? because I feel like LLMs are already pretty much a commodity, not to say their won't be advances in LLMs but I don't see the models themselves being all that ripe for disruption the way that the web was and such. I'm guessing chip design and manufacturing processes will be more important than models in the future.
When you see anthropic job postings that say the job may not be available in a year... it really doesn't inspire much confidence. I say if you're 17, learn to weld, solder, and fit pipe...
That's applicable only if you live in the US.
if i were 17, i'd do these things:
1) LC until mediums
2) Calculus & linear algebra even if i understood nothing i'd just stare at vectors and derivatives.
It’s crazy how much survivorship bias gets repackaged as generic advice.
Wait no it’s not, that was always happening.
What’s crazy is that people still believe in it.
I get the sense things have changed a bit since I graduated and there are lot more jobs in AI outside of academia these days, but it's still a very different field from other SWE pursuits, and it's not really accessible to hacker-minded people.
Learning AI isn't like learning HTML in the 90s then expecting to get a job at a tech company building websites. You can't just "learn how to build LLMs" and expect a frontier lab to hire you so I'd argue this is rather bad advise.
Additionally, unlike web development in the 90s you cant really do anything interesting yourself... All of the interesting/useful stuff will require huge amounts of compute and data so there isn't even much point in learning to start your own thing either.
As someone whose built many of NNs from scratch (hand written code, long before the days of LLMs), it's more or less useless knowledge if I wanted to work in a frontier lab or do anything interesting in the field.
I also think anyone thinking about going into a field which is basically a crossover of CompSci and Maths is absolutely insane right now. Even if you think there is a place for CompSci and Maths post LLMs, there's almost no chance anything you learn today will be relevant to the skills required in say 5-10 years.
YC Combinator guy says that with a time machine he would learn to build the currently trillions-valued or whatever technology. Okay.
Paul Graham wants you to work for him, not be him.
I don't think individuals have the resources to build an interesting llm. The l stands for large. You need a dataset too. Llms are only interesting because theyre large
And it's basically a weekend project to put transformers together in a ML library and train it.
The follow up comment,train it to play a game also doesn't make sense? Llms Sony really play games and there are better ml approaches to do that?
Terrible advice. If I were 17, genetics and bio tech at the next frontier, with opportunities to be more than another corporate drone. AI is a lot of bureaucracy and nepotistic who ya know already.
Let’s make the xcancel link the actual link, please!
On first glance, this is good advice and in general I'd give the same for this age group. With age, you'll see more of these scenarios come up and if you have experience and foresight, you can provide direction that may prove fruitful to young people. My son and his friend asked "what should we look into and learn?", about 15 years ago, I told them Python and Java; Python because of versatility and cryptocoins; Java for the long term stability in the job market. I despise Python personally, but I could see its potential and still do; especially for AI. At the end of the day, kids have more time than money and its great experience for them to get their hands dirty and find out what they might be interested in; its a long life.
Neural net maths are hardly above scientific high-school level.
Somewhere in rural America is a 17 year old that doesn't even have working plumbing in their house still.
I'm sure they'll get right on powering up their computer from the hamster wheel, Paul.
My heart goes to all the kids out there that didn't get the fair shake let alone fair access to tech that gets these condescending "learn to code/learn to LLM" bootstrappy talks from rich pricks that don't know what life really can be like for a lot of American kids out there.
If I were a billionaire, I'd learn how to give away a lot more of my wealth.
If I were 61 and wealthy, I wouldn’t write a stupid shit like this.
I’m no paulg, but if you’re reading this - and you’re 17 - just focus on getting into a university and having a good time that you won’t regret later. Play games/sports, make relationships, fall in love, explore.
This is always such a nonsense question-answer thing, asking a person who already succeeded what they would do if they were young.
Even worse when they ask themselves.
Can't this guy enjoy being rich in silence? His takes get worse with every passing year.
Venture capitalist suggests everyone to become his future employee, just as he has been (successfully) doing for his whole life.
I genuinely don't think telling young people to do anything tech-related is good career advice. We don't even know if entry level roles will ever come back. The situation couldn't be worse for these roles. PG thinks that some random teenager will build a startup and get rich from it, or some shit. Like get real, man. Completely out of touch, tech bro who hasn't worked a real tech job for the last like 20 years... Remind me how many startups succeed again, Paul? What about the market dynamics for LLMs and how one might "secure compute"?
What the fuck does this guy know about? I'm sure if we went back through similar statements he's said over the years he's said the same thing about various technologies that are no longer relevant. The guy is a talentless hack who larps as a blogger and his only "redeeming" quality is having lots of money.
Owner of Golf Club Company says I should dedicate my life to golf lmfao.
The amount of people who missed the point here is absurd. He's advocating for learning about how LLMs work. For the sake of learning. Because no one's going to invent the next thing without at least some understanding of the current thing.
I think collectively we should all stop listening to Mr Graham..
He capitalizes on greed and hype but with a soft, sober and thoughtful voice so as to lull you with rationalism and now 20 years of his “disruption” has mostly ruined modern society and a whole generation of techies have been led astray into trying to “change the world” is the world of today (minus the magic technology really any better than 20 years ago?)
- Good for him and his Tech Bros, bad for the rest of society
Twitter mirror: https://nitter.net/paulg/status/2091544343589060625
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So I am 15. Is it worth trying to build my own archive (s-1.site) of strategy ideas? Do I have any real differentiation? Or am I just wasting time? I figure that I can use it as proof that I have some know-how?
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hackers and painters and kids and ROI and startups and capitalism and the destruction of nature and old guys with money talking like they know better in fascist social networks
I do not think it is a proper thing to do for 17 y.o., unless they are exceptionally mathematically gifted, as proper understanding of how LLMs are trained requires a good grasp of calculus, understanding modern OS and SDE tools for proper implementation of pipeline etc.
I'd rather simply write another mnist implementation and check if I really like all that AI stuff at first place. Even then, before going into mature-on-the-way-to-dying tech (LLMs) I'd rather focus on fundamentals - good ols linear models, regressions, stat etc.
Another great quote by PG. I've been really enjoying his essays recently - truly a great and curious mind.
If I were 17, I wouldn't be using a social media plattform run by racist neo-fascists...
If I were 17, I'd be going to parties, music festivals, chasing girls, and enjoying my youth.
But sure, make the kids even more depressed by telling them they need to learn how to build an LLM so they can get a job working themselves to death to make Paul and friends rich.
He bases this decision on all of the experience he has amassed, as a 61 year old man in the tech industry. An actual 17 year old, with 17 years of experience, would not think like this, nor should they.
This is the ultimate builder’s mindset. Tinkering with the hardest technical problems—even for frivolous things like games—always yields the highest return on curiosity. Time to go back to the fundamentals.
Paul Graham:
>"Someone asked what I'd do if I were 17. I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch..."
That's funny, Paul Graham, because if I were 17 again,
I'd learn how to program in LISP.
https://www.paulgraham.com/rootsoflisp.html
https://www.paulgraham.com/iflisp.html
https://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
(And/or other LISP derived languages... Clojure, Scheme, Racket, TinyScheme, etc.)
I guess "the grass is always greener..." as that old expression, that old "chestnut", goes... :-)