Comment by BoredomIsFun
16 hours ago
I just voiced my opinion. I just think buiding an LLM from the scratch for 17 y.o. is pointless exercise, advising a teenager to do so is borderline irresponsible, and frankly PG is simply virtue signalling here, as LLMs are still trendy, esp. in his circles.
There still will be varyy small number of outliers among youngsters who'd be able to extract tremensous value from such an excercise, but for most that'd be _IMO_ waste of of time, with illusion of understanding w/o actually having any.
> I just voiced my opinion.
Same! I just happened to disagree with your opinion, and frankly, I'd say trying to gatekeep what people learn is closer to "borderline irresponsible" compared to asking people to build/learn/do X.
> youngsters who'd be able to extract tremensous value from such an excercise
But they're youngsters, who are about "extracting value"? Life is about fun, not extraction, not value, not avoiding waste of time but literally enjoy what you do, nothing is more important (IMO).
Then who knows, doing fun stuff sometimes lead to useful stuff, like in my life. But if you only think about "extracting most value for time spent" or similar "optimization strategies", then you'd never discover this part of life.
> Life is about fun, not extraction, not value, not avoiding waste of time but literally enjoy what you do, nothing is more important (IMO).
This is, pardon, demagoguery. There is always "future fun" and "present fun" which a normal person would assign different nonzero weights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_utility). Besides, building a LLM _truly_ from the scratch, just using the famous 2017 paper and numpy manuals is not fun at all, esp. for a high schooler.
> Besides, building a LLM _truly_ from the scratch, just using the famous 2017 paper and numpy manuals is not fun at all, esp. for a high schooler.
To you it isn't, is my entire point here. But why extrapolate what you think is fun, to others? Sure, I don't find that fun either (although useful), but who am I to say it isn't fun for others?
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