The localllama subreddit, although focused mostly on open source locally run models, still has ample discussion of SOTA models too.
Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#22The poster's looking for articles, so this recommendation's a bit off the mark. I learned more from participating in a few Kaggle competitions ( https://www.kaggle.com/competitions ) than I did from reading about AI. Many folks in the community shared their homework, and by learning how to follow their explanations I developed a much more intuitive understanding of the technology. The first competition had a steep le…
Out of sheer curiosity, how much time did you spend on it on average? How much of this knowledge are you using now?
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#23Unpopular opinion: if you can't use Google nor ChatGPT to get an answer to this question, I have bad news for you.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#24My blog is very high volume so yeah, it can be difficult to know where to look on it.
I use tags a lot - these ones might be more useful for you:
https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-engineering/ - collects notes on prompting techniques
https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms/ - everything relating to LLMs
https://simonwillison.net/tags/openai/ and https://simonwillison.net/tags/anthropic/ and https://simonwillison.net/tags/gemini/ and https://simonwillison.net/tags/llama/ and https://simonwillison.net/tags/mistral/ - I have tags for each of the major model families and vendors
Every six months or so I write something (often derived from a conference talk) that's more of a "catch up with the latest developments" post - a few of those:
- Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 - https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/31/ai-in-2023/ - I will probably do one of those for 2024 next month
- Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024 - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/ from July this year
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#25The poster's looking for articles, so this recommendation's a bit off the mark. I learned more from participating in a few Kaggle competitions ( https://www.kaggle.com/competitions ) than I did from reading about AI. Many folks in the community shared their homework, and by learning how to follow their explanations I developed a much more intuitive understanding of the technology. The first competition had a steep le…
Out of sheer curiosity, how much time did you spend on it on average? How much of this knowledge are you using now?
Not the poster you responded to but I learned quite a bit from kaggle too.
I started from scratch, spent 2-4 hrs per day for 6 months & won a silver in a kaggle NLP competition. Now I use some of it now but not all of it. More than that, I'm quite comfortable with models, understand the costs/benefits/implications etc. I started with Andrew Ng's intro courses, did a bit of fastai, did Karpathy's Zero to Hero fully, all of Kaggle's courses & a few other such things. Kagglers share excellent notebooks and I found them v helpful. Overall I highly recommend this route of learning.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#26Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#27Build a tool on top of the LLM layer for a specific use case. That'll get you up to speed. You haven't missed much.
Exactly. Avoid intentionally throw-away effort and instead attempt to build something specific and practical. Learn by doing.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#28Unwind AI would be helpful. They publish daily newsletters on AI as well as tutorials on building apps with step-by-step walkthrough. Super focused on developers. https://www.theunwindai.com/
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of sheer curiosity, how much time did you spend on it on average? How much of this knowledge are you using now?
Not the poster you responded to but I learned quite a bit from kaggle too. I started from scratch, spent 2-4 hrs per day for 6 months & won a silver in a kaggle NLP competition. Now I use some of it now but not all of it. More than that, I'm quite comfortable with models, understand the costs/benefits/implications etc. I started with Andrew Ng's intro courses, did a bit of fastai, did Karpathy's Zero to Hero fully, a…
Thanks for the detailed reply!
Re: Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI
#30Machine Learning Mastery (https://machinelearningmastery.com) provides code examples for many of the popular models. For me, seeing and writing code has been helpful in understanding how things work and makes it easier to put new developments in context.