531–540 of 725 posts
There's this dilemma where in theory there's a ton of demand for engineers that can do real LLM machine-learning, but in practice there are very few available positions and entrepreneurship opportunities. The reality is that an incredibly small minority of companies in the world do any real training or optimisation. It's unnecessary and inefficient for most purposes unless you are fully dedicated to being an LLM comp…
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I disagree. It's absolutely possible to develop an intuition about extremely complex mathematical ideas, including llms or high dimensional systems. Learning to build an llm is a great way to start building that intuition.
What provable conclusions have you intuited around how LLMs work? Give me some examples to prove your point? I'm absolutely happy to change my view with enough data.
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It's like looking at the early internet and then suggesting teenagers should write browsers as their projects instead of webpages.
That may have worked at the time, but no companies are interested in learning projects today. If you didn’t do the reqs list for the last 5-10 years with the same title, forget about it. Because there are dozens of folks who have, lined up. No one is indulging career changers (and most fresh grads) for the time being.
Oh hey thank you for that. It really helps. Hope you have your rug pulled from under you today too.
— signed, a career changer trying his best.
Whether that makes a good long-term investment is quite debatable. IMO, LeCun’s take (at the end) is far more forward-looking since it aims to gain more insight into what could come next based on what we know about the current state of the art.
All that being said, the extent to which these people capitalize on our tendency to be blinded by the halo effect is incredible. A constant stream of bite-sized aphorisms…
This is especially at a different level for early startup figures who happened to be in the right place at the right time and usually did little more than digitizing mundane, traditional day-to-day processes. Yet they’re treated as geniuses and prophets, with people hanging on their every word as though everything they say contains some deeper wisdom. PG and the like often strike me as broken clocks and they’re still profiting from having been very early players in the game, who had good instincts for commercialization and capitalism.
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LeCun’s reply:
> I would try to figure out why LLMs can write my essays but not clean my bedroom. Then I would study topics in college and grad school that could help solve that problem. I'll figure out a set of methods and architectures beyond LLMs that can quickly learn to perform physical tasks as efficiently as humans and animals. That last item is also what I would if I were 30, 40, 50, or 66 years old
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Telling them not to get into tech is also terribly reactionary advice. The truth of the matter is that we don’t yet know whether tech roles will be eliminated or if they’re just going to follow previous innovation breakthroughs where “one person producing way more work” makes software even more of a desirable industry to be involved in. There really isn’t a very strong correlation between tech industry hiring strengt…
“only make $115k” This right here is why nobody is shedding tears for the massive employment crisis in tech. You make double that shilling ai slopware while they work nights saving lives. I would tell a 17 year old that the world will always need nurses, same can’t be said for guys sitting in their pajamas burning tokens. What is happening now in tech has been a long time coming, and it can’t happen fast enough.
I don’t make the rules for how much each profession is able to make in compensation.
The world will always need nurses, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a fantastic career to get into if you have a neutral career preference and your primary consideration is university tuition ROI, expected compensation, work schedule, and day-to-day physical exertion.
My point isn’t to debate the virtues of each career, I am intending to stick to objective aspects of them.
In that sense, telling today’s kids that there’s no future in tech careers just because there’s a short term hiring slump is extremely premature. I certainly wouldn’t tell a kid who is passionate about tech to avoid the field just because the unemployment rate is currently 7%.
https://www.investopedia.com/bachelor-s-degrees-with-the-bes...
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I disagree with the premise. Learning should not be done only as a direct path to getting paid. Learn to create pattern matching and intuition to solve future problems. When you are 17 it is a good time to understand how the world works so you can build on top of it in the future. If we assume most tech is going to have an LLM as part the stack, a solid basis in how LLMs work is likely to help you in future endeavors…
You haven't actually refuted their premise.
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I think he's doing fine? Sure, he got out of the video game industry, but that's for young people to burn themselves out.
I don't mean he's destitute. Just that he's no longer exceptional, which is fine.
> I’d imagine those teenagers ended up with pretty good careers in technology?
The guy you mentioned doesn't seem to have ended up with a bad career in technology?