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How long does it take to learn the prerequisites to learn these if you don't already have a CS background? Reading through the list, I can barely parse half the titles due to acronyms and terms I've never seen before. Would I be able to figure them out along the way? Or is there a body of knowledge this is assuming I should already have? (This isn't a criticism of the list, or even the idea of presenting such a list…
The papers have bibliographies with citations in text. The knowledge you need to read a given paper usually lies within 3 degrees of bibliographical separation.
You can also use reverse citation search on Google scholar to find newer works that cite a given work. This can uncover a review or textbook, which often makes the concept much simpler to digest. And it can be a more advanced approach which gives you an alternative view or lets you abandon the original paper altogether.
2. Back to tha basics
For math, it would help if you have college level calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, and statistics. If you don't have that, be ready to assign yourself math readings and homework. It would also really help if you had analysis, topology, abstract algebra, and category theory under the belt, just so you can see the mathematical forest for the trees... But that's not really so necessary
You can often find the author's preferred reference for a given work in the bibliography, and use that.
For computer science, it helps to be able to read algorithm pseudocodes, follow complexity and correctness proofs, and understand performance experiments and charts. Skimming Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" should be very helpful.
You'll need some algorithmic/statistical learning theory as well, since authors often use these concepts to prove that a system can learn. Though TBH, I usually skip these proofs and focus on the performance details. I usually find a higher performance paper before I need to care about the learning proofs. Still it helps to expect them and have an idea of how they work, if only to know when you can safely ignore them.
3. Narrative Arcs
Many AI results build on keystone papers that define eras. We can build on these papers by understanding their philosophy and deeper implications, even if we don't really understand their math. There's a story that you will tell yourself, and it may lead to interesting research or business results.
For example, if you read "Attention is all you need", you set the stage for LLMs. then "LLMs are in context learners", followed by the "chain of thought", "reflexion", and "toolformer" paper will give you a great sense of how LLMs are emerging as more than just stochastic parrots, ready to be developed and deployed in a lot of ways that overcome their issues. But looking at how bad the numbers can be even with our best efforts, you also get the sense of how much work these systems will need to actually be good, and the sense that corner cutting will lead to a lot of pretty awful systems.
It's a fun time to be a computer scientist or software engineer! Lots of cool papers to read!
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Reportedly, Carmack did it an a week by locking himself in an hotel room
If he really did it in a week, why hasn't anything come out of his AGI startup yet, two years later? Maybe it wasn't as easy as he seemed to imply, despite his towering intellect. Anyone can read an absurd amount of text in a week. To absorb and understand it all is a different matter entirely. Seems more likely to me that Carmack simply convinced himself he'd understood it all. He does seem to think very highly of h…
I would not bet against his understanding on technical topics where he's done a serious deep dive. Also it was more than a year, not just a week.
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Ah, the freedoms of not having any other responsibilities.
If you can't take a single week off of work during an entire year in order to advance your career, then you're satisfied with your current one. There is no need to direct negativity toward others for making time to learn. Carmack is in this position today because of such work ethic, not in spite of it.
I'm going to guess you don't have kids.
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What a strangely narrow way of looking at this. Work isn’t the only responsibility. What is the correlation between taking a week away from responsibilities - work, family, etc. - and job satisfaction?
I assumed someone would retort with this angle, but I hoped people would interpret my comment charitably without me littering it with a dozen caveats. Of course work isn't the only responsibility. Of course some people have kids, pets, parents, medical conditions, etc. It's one week away from work. It can still be done. You weren't going to be taking care of any other responsibilities during your normal 9-5 hours, so…
I think you didn't read the parents carefully. The comment being replied to is not about 9-5 hours, it's about "locking yourself into a hotel for week", and if you have kids, this is not exactly a healthy thing to do in the face of other responsibilities. That's the point being made here, and you are changing the goal posts.
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I assumed someone would retort with this angle, but I hoped people would interpret my comment charitably without me littering it with a dozen caveats. Of course work isn't the only responsibility. Of course some people have kids, pets, parents, medical conditions, etc. It's one week away from work. It can still be done. You weren't going to be taking care of any other responsibilities during your normal 9-5 hours, so…
> It's one week away from work. It can still be done. You weren't going to be taking care of any other responsibilities during your normal 9-5 hours I think you didn't read the parents carefully. The comment being replied to is not about 9-5 hours, it's about "locking yourself into a hotel for week", and if you have kids, this is not exactly a healthy thing to do in the face of other responsibilities. That's the poin…
The negative sentiment itself is what I addressed. Everyone fortunate enough to have internet access, a computer and a functional brain/body can make time, if they really want to, to learn new things that benefit their long term goals.
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> It's one week away from work. It can still be done. You weren't going to be taking care of any other responsibilities during your normal 9-5 hours I think you didn't read the parents carefully. The comment being replied to is not about 9-5 hours, it's about "locking yourself into a hotel for week", and if you have kids, this is not exactly a healthy thing to do in the face of other responsibilities. That's the poin…
I'm not moving goalposts. The commenter tried to assert that only someone without "any other responsibilities" gets to spend a week learning something. It doesn't have to be in a hotel room. It doesn't have to be a week. It can be two, three, four weeks. Those are all implementation details. The negative sentiment itself is what I addressed. Everyone fortunate enough to have internet access, a computer and a function…
That's what I mean -- you didn't read the parents carefully. The commenter (me) made that reply to this:
> Carmack did it an a week by locking himself in an hotel room
Everyone can and should spend time learning, but the little point being made was that locking yourself in a hotel room is not something most people can do due to responsibilities. Somehow you changed this into your more general statement "spending a week learning something."
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If one cannot disappear for a week to think or study he is putting himself at some serious life disadvantage. My 2c. I do not mean telling family that I am disappearing for a week starting tomorrow, but that I want to disappear for a week in a couple of months and the family would cover responsibilities for me (I should be willing to reciprocate).
Realistically most people just don't have the resources for this sort of thing. It's not necessarily a matter of want but a limitation of needs. Assuming one has a family that could cover, they would still have a job with responsibilities. Not everyone can afford to risk termination or go without a paycheck for a week even if it's the most intelligent option.
Many people have a lot more flexibility than they let on. They just make excuses instead of acknowledging their own priorities and commitments or lack of actual interest in change and work.
Looks fake
The headline belies the scope of this task. If you click in to see what these are: - one is a full course in convolutional neural networks https://cs231n.github.io/ - one is a 500 page text book https://www.lirmm.fr/~ashen/kolmbook-eng-scan.pdf - another one is an 80 page text book (?) https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0406077 and so on. I would guess it is possible to go through this list if you make it your full time job…