Venture capitalist suggests everyone to become his future employee, just as he has been (successfully) doing for his whole life.
I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
181–190 of 725 posts
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#182As if you couldn't learn what LLMs are at any Age.
The core technoology is pretty basic, developing a rudimentary understanding for why the individual parts work as well as they do is tricky.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
What parent says about "there are very few available positions" for "engineers that can do real LLM machine-learning" is fair, yeah, I'd agree with this. I don't think the "incredibly small minority of companies in the world do any real training or optimisation" part is necessarily as true, as some parts of the work I do get is about helping them optimize training and infrastructure around training. Mind you, none of…
I think Paul lives in Britain these days.
I think he does, but it seems he still considers himself a remote SV native rather than someone working in the UK's economy.
Worst of both worlds - no casual gossip feed in the Bay Area, no big dog meetings in the UK. (Which mostly has no idea he exists.)
As for the question - what are the odds LLMs will be anywhere near the top of the tech tree five years from now?
The trend seems pretty clear to me - local/offshore models are snapping at the heels of the big names in the US, and the current investment arc is insane.
I wouldn't bet on Anthropic or OpenAI being leaders five years from now. Longer term, I especially wouldn't bet on the US build-yourself-a-monopoly corporate model surviving AI at all.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like looking at the early internet and then suggesting teenagers should write browsers as their projects instead of webpages.
Well, there's a lot more to learn from the former than the latter ...
Really? The latter was immediately useful to lots of people which is motivating, and it had a nice smooth learning curve (html -> js -> php -> databases -> apps -> backend). Learning HTML is the first step to learning how to make full blown apps. Making a browser at 17 is like trying to climb Everest as your first hike. The expected outcome is burnout and demotivating failure. At best you'll learn some C++ or Rust.
17 is an interesting age. There are way too many comments here saying things like, 17 year olds should just do whatever seems interesting or bum around the world or focus on getting into university. But historically most kids were expected to be productive adults at 16 or 18. 17 is about the right time to be thinking seriously about what kind of work you'll do, how you'll make a living. University won't help and will just delay this decision.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#185[dead]
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> +1, I have a friend, math PhD that's been working on ML research 5+ years in London yet he has not been able to find any position. Maybe people simply don't want math PhDs but something else? Since 1-2 years ago I started doing consulting/freelancing in the ML space, but more on the infrastructure, deployments and similar stuff, as a general purpose developer, and I have a waiting list of clients interested in more…
How've you gone about getting into this btw? I have extensive experience in infra and pipeline rollout but have struggled to find freelance clients for this kind of thing. Would be great to tie it into ML as a learning opportunity there
whats ur contact, would love to chat
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#187Horrible advice. This may have been good advice 10 years ago, but not today. There are no positions for people who "kind of understand how toy LLMs work" because so many engineers do these days. Most of the real LLM optimization work is at the edge of research and highly proprietary and not something you could ever do without infra that costs millions. But of course, 10 years ago this wasn't obvious.
What would be better advice for a 17 year old?
Learn math
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#188I would (and am) going into MLOps. Not just the general infrastructure/systems administration but how to do inference optimization, caching, quantization, memory pinning, vfio passthrough of gpus etc.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would encourage people not to seek advice from successful people like this (survivorship bias). Personally I don't see the problem, as long as you're aware there is survivorship bias involved here. What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :) Personally I do both, read about what worked for people, also read about what didn't work for people, then ignore both and do wha…
It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field. In mid 2000s in Australia all the "top people" were telling me not to get into a software engineering career because it was dead. It's certainly challenged right now, but it took off during those 15+ years.
“It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field.”
What bucket should I put this advice in?
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It's like looking at the (Apollo) moon rocket launch and then suggesting teenagers should learn to build rockets in their garages for the coming space age. It is viable as a toy project, but there are vanishingly few career opportunities.
It's like looking at the early internet and then suggesting teenagers should write browsers as their projects instead of webpages.
If you learnt to build a browser in 2000 you're probably doing well for yourself lol.
Not a lot of demand, but also probably not a lot of supply.