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Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

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Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#71

Post by orochimaaru »

ptero wrote: post #46
brayhite wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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).

I agree. We travel for work and disappear for a week. I've disappeared for 4-5 days to party with friends and my wife and kids have been fine with it. Obviously the work travel I don't control much. The party part - I'd be getting some serious conversations if it was happening every month. However, if it was to improve my career prospects I don't think anyone will hit much resistance. I mean provided you use the time well and don't get into a space of watching youtube clips of Dune 2.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#72

Post by lemurien »

sheepdestroyer wrote: post #21
klunger wrote: post #15

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…

Reportedly, Carmack did it an a week by locking himself in an hotel room

Did he say that? It’s not in the original interview: https://dallasinnovates.com/exclusive-qa-john-carmacks-diffe...

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#73

Post by DiggyJohnson »

deprecative wrote: post #68
cwillu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that the many of the relationships I'm most proud to have in my life are with those who had a reputation for being difficult and/or insufferable.

Weird flex but ok. I think though that there is some merit in being able to communicate with a difficult or insufferable person but I find no merit can exist in choosing to take pride in regularly willingly doing so.

Well, presumably there are other aspects of those relationships to take pride in. You’re coming across as needlessly suspicious.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#76

Post by jononor »

smeej wrote: post #58

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…

Depends on what you mean by learn... And what other relevant background one has outside of CS - programming/math/stats/systems/engineering. Assuming one has a few years of that, and one want to get to the level of being able to apply this to a problem that comes up in a realistic setting (making a product etc). Maybe extreme dedication over many months, or a few years at 20 hours a week? This is assuming that one either is very good at studying alone, or have access to people one can ask alone the way.

If one has no relevant background, then I would 5+ years of full time study.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#77

Post by giantg2 »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #70
sheepdestroyer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 generally agree. Another point could be that even if you understand something, executing on something can still be hard, especially when trying to push beyond existing limits or implementing something complex.

Re: Ilya Sutskever: “If you learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters”

#79

Post by pmelendez »

js8 wrote: post #41

The argument that this is 90% of what matters in ML seems a bit bold. AFAICT it is completely missing reinforcement learning, which has been source of some mindblowing results (from Deepmind) in the past decade. It is also missing other stuff that I as a layman found fascinating (graph neural networks, 1.5 bit networks, ..). Also, I am not sure how much the Kolmogorov complexity actually matters, it's more philosophi…

>The argument that this is 90% of what matters in ML seems a bit bold. AFAICT it is completely missing reinforcement learning,

Wouldn't that account for the other 10%? To me it sounds like the quote is not too far off when you consider that he said "of what matters today". There are many other things missing from that list that might become more relevant tomorrow.

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