Why do intelligent people still use X? Thanks for the xcancel.com link!
I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
241–250 of 725 posts
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#242There'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…
lol unnecessary and inefficient… I just finished fine tuning Gemma e2b for local code completion on my local machine. This comment just reinforces what the post actually means. We need people that are LLM natives, computing solves itself with time and with scale adjustments
Can you tell me what specs your machine has? There is a difference between a few hours and a few days
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#243I'll use this post as a shameless opportunity to tell more people about a little side project, I made: http://languagemodelbuilder.com teaches you (in a few hours to days) how to build an LLM from scratch. It's entirely free, without accounts, and without data collection.
This is great, thank you!
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#244[flagged]
So get into debt and spend money is the advice? Then vote for someone who will make the debts go away?
yes?
I mean, have you seen the options for people graduating right now? How people are behaving?
Or forget the data, look at how the story of the new future technology is being told. The people making it recognize that it has the potential to put swathes of white collar workers out of jobs, and they are openly talking/warning/PR-ing about it.
People in tech and SV, the places which have a underlying culture of near delusional optimism, are talking about trying to avoid being part of "the permanent underclass".
Gambling is up, and prediction markets are being treated as financial investments. Wall street bets is a thing, and outright speculative investments are the hope people have to get ahead.
This is happening in the USA, forget the weaker or smaller economies.
When people see the future as one massive zero sum game, with no way to win by building, then they are going to change how they plan their future.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#245... and it would be totally pointless. I mean first that is already what plenty of 17yo are actually doing, because that is what they do at school or in parascholar activities. There are already countless of such tutorials where you can do that in an afternoon. The pointless part though is precisely why Amazon and others are hunting for rare books, all the low hanging fruits have been picked already so just training…
It seems obvious to me that no matter what your age right now, you should want to be as broadly educated and intellectually curious as possible.
You should want to train a LLM from scratch as an intellectual curiosity itch that needs to be scratched.
The idea of learning one hot skill that has a pot of gold waiting at the end of it was a brief moment in time that came and went.
When I was 17, we would have said obviously support vector machines are the future. Neural networks overfit and don't work.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#246There'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…
AI is the subtrate the future runs on.
And so I think the idea is more to understand tomorrow ... from first principles.
In the late 80's, as a teenager, I learned x86 assembly and C because that was the only way to squeeze out enough juice from my shitty CGA (and later VGA) card to programm the games/graphics that interested me.
I haven't written assembly in years.
But whatever I did in my career: it helped me and gave me an edge over my peers to have a foundation that is very close to the metal.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#247There'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…
I agree with mostly all of this, but personally I wrote a toy LLM almost 5 years ago and while it never saw much use outside of boring my wife with a shitty command line demo with glee it did help me understand how they worked and how to apply them, played a lot with JAX and pytorch, ended up building a ghetto version of MCP and an LLM-Pool to proxy requests to my baby local models and so I didn't struggle to see the…
Game cheating and reverse engineering MMO backends taught me a lot: databases, networking, securing a backend (and frontend), limitations of simpler languages when comparing them to more native options for building backends.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#248As an aside, for someone interested and who's an absolute beginner, can someone please recommend good resources on how to build LLMs from scratch? Thank you in advance.
Stanford CS336 is up on youtube from Spring 2026.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#249I get this is basically advice for young founders and entrepreneurs, but i would ignore that request and encourage 17 year olds to spend time trying to find a happy medium between work and life.
Being a super rich and an unhappy workaholic, or a super-impressive engineer who wakes up one day at 45 and realizes they regret wasting half their life (I ran into way too many of these) is a much worse fate than "not being rich from your startup" and working a relatively regular job while feeling fulfilled and happy by more than just work.
Especially in the US, which is uniquely bad at this and encourages people to work themselves to death, mental health and work life balance are much more valuable things for 17 year olds to focus on than finding good startup ideas.
In case you think i'm being a bit dramatic, let's look at the state of 17 year old mental health in the heart of Silicon Valley:
"The City of Palo Alto and the Palo Alto Unified School District approved a funded contract to place 24/7 human security guards and monitors at all four local Caltrain grade crossings, including the Churchill Avenue crossing directly adjacent to Palo Alto High School."
(in case it's not obvious, it's because of suicides by high school students)
The 17 year olds do not need advice on better startups, and this situation will never get better if we focus our advice on how to be better at work instead of how to be better at life. This will require redirecting the conversations.
Re: I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
lol unnecessary and inefficient… I just finished fine tuning Gemma e2b for local code completion on my local machine. This comment just reinforces what the post actually means. We need people that are LLM natives, computing solves itself with time and with scale adjustments
Can you tell me what specs your machine has? There is a difference between a few hours and a few days
A MBP m5 in this case, but the fine tune would have cost me like 10 bucks on RunPod, that's what I did with my previous setup.