Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 140 posts

Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?

#21

Post by antirez »

My 2 centes:

1. Learn basic NNs at a simple level, build from scratch (no frameworks) a feed forward neural network with back propagation to train against MNIST or something as simple. Understand every part of it. Just use your favorite programming language.

2. Learn (without having to implement with the code, or to understand the finer parts of the implementations) how the NN architectures work and why they work. What is an encoder-decoder? Why the first part produces an embedding? How a transformer works? What are the logits in the output of an LLM, and how sampling works? Why is attention of quadratic? What is Reinforcement Learning, Resnets, how do they work? Basically: you need a solid qualitative understanding of all that.

3. Learn the higher level layer, both from the POV of the open source models, so how to interface to llama.cpp / ollama / ..., how to set the context window, what is quantization and how it will affect performances/quality of output, and also, how to use popular provider APIs like DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, ... and what model is good for what.

4. Learn prompt engineering techniques that influence the qualtily of the output when using LLMs programmatically (as a bag of algorithms). This takes patience and practice.

5. Learn how to use AI effectively for coding. This is absolutely non-trivial, and a lot of good programmers are terrible LLMs users (and end believing LLMs are not useful for coding).

6. Don't get trapped into the idea that the news of the day (RAG, MCP, ...) is what you should spend all your energy. This is just some useful technology surrounded by a lot of hype of all the people that want to get rich with AI and understand they can't compete with the LLMs themselves. So they pump the part that can be kinda "productized". Never forget that the product is the neural network itself, for the most part.

Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?

#24

Post by Joeri »

WA wrote: post #14

To piggyback on this discussion, what do you all think about option 3: Work for companies (as a consultant?) to help them implement LLMs/AI into their traditional processes?

I don’t think we should ever put “implement LLMs/AI” as the goal. Process transformation should be defined in terms of user or business goals (reduce turnaround time, reduce costs, improve customer experience, …). In the course of doing that the places where LLMs have a use will be apparent, but more often something a lot less clever will be the better solution.

Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?

#25

Post by carbocation »

When I was in my postdoc (applied human genetics), my advisor's rule was that you needed to understand the tools you were using at a layer of abstraction below your interface with them.

For example, if we wanted to conduct an analysis with a new piece of software, it wasn't enough to run the software: we needed to be able to explain the theory behind it (basically, to be able to rewrite the tool).

From that standpoint, I think that even if you keep with #2, you might benefit from taking steps to gain the understanding from #1. It will help you understand the models' real advantages and disadvantages to help you decide how to incorporate them in #2.

Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?

#26

Post by prohobo »

antirez wrote: post #21

My 2 centes: 1. Learn basic NNs at a simple level, build from scratch (no frameworks) a feed forward neural network with back propagation to train against MNIST or something as simple. Understand every part of it. Just use your favorite programming language. 2. Learn (without having to implement with the code, or to understand the finer parts of the implementations) how the NN architectures work and why they work. Wh…

Agreed with most of this except the last point. You are never going to make a foundational model, although you may contribute to one. Those foundational models are the product, yes, but if I could use an analogy: foundational models are like the state of the art 3D renderers in games. You still need to build the game. Some 3D renderers are used/licensed for many games.

Even the basic chat UI is a structure built around a foundational model; the model itself has no capability to maintain a chat thread. The model takes context and outputs a response, every time.

For more complex processes, you need to carefully curate what context to give the model and when. There are many applications where you can say "oh, chatgpt can analyze your business data and tell you how to optimize different processes", but good luck actually doing that. That requires complex prompts and sequences of LLM calls (or other ML models), mixed with well-defined tools that enable the AI to return a useful result.

This forms the basis of AI engineering - which is different from developing AI models - and this is what most software engineers will be doing in the next 5-10 years. This isn't some kind of hype that will die down as soon as the money gets spent, a la crypto. People will create agents that automate many processes, even within software development itself. This kind of utility is a no-brainer for anyone running a business, and hits deeply in consumer markets as well. Much of what OpenAI is currently working on is building agents around their own models to break into consumer markets.

I recommend anyone interested in this to read this book: https://www.amazon.com/AI-Engineering-Building-Applications-...

Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?

#27

Post by silisili »

IMO, you're a woodworker, a craftsman that builds solid products. You've been using a hacksaw and hammer all these years, now someone invented a circular saw and drill and people can move a lot faster. And now even relatively previously inept people are able to do woodwork.

Do you need to understand how the circular saw and drill are made?

Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?

#28

Post by joshdavham »

I’d recommend you simply follow your curiosity and not take this choice too seriously. If you’re simply doing this for career purposes, then the honest answer is that absolutely no one knows where these fields will go in the next couple years so I wouldn’t take anyone’s advice too seriously.

But as for my 2 cents, knowing machine learning has been valuable to me, but not anywhere near as valuable as knowing software dev. Machine learning problems are much more rare and often don’t have a high return on investment.

Re: Ask HN: Go deep into AI/LLMs or just use them as tools?

#30

Post by JackDanMeier »

From my prespective it's a bubble, very similar to the dot com bubble. All businesses are integrating it into everything, often where it's unnecessary or just confusing.

But I believe that the value will come after the bubble is burst, and the companies which truly create value will survive, same as with webpages after the dot com bubble.

Post reply on HN