I appreciate the sentiment and I'm pretty curious how I could train an LLM, even are really basic one from 5yrs ago without nuts hardware.

That said, I a good starting point for a 17yo is reading about perceptrons[0], then the basics of neural networks[1] (ex. 3-layer perceptron) then writing a program to train a 3-layer perceptron and classifying the MNIST dataset[2] - a dataset of characters.

This can anywhere between a day and a week and you will demystify the basics of neural networks and work your way forward with more advanced contemporary concepts.

Fun fact: any multi-layer perceptron neural net can be reduced to a 3-layer perceptron network.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron [1] http://geeksforgeeks.org/deep-learning/neural-networks-a-beg... [2] https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hojjatk/mnist-dataset/data