Comment by yobbo
13 hours ago
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 someone writes a browser in their teens, they will probably learn more about the web than if they were just writing web pages
They'll learn so much more that won't transfer to as many job opportunities. For ex, say more about C++ and less about cutting edge CSS (because modern browser tech is an ocean). I suppose they might luck into other adjacent or unrelated roles with the same skills.
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A few did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross
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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.
> 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.
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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.
For this example, if you built a browser in 2000 it would put you in a great position to launch android in 2008. I think this is pg’s point. You spend all this time learning the interesting bits and when an inflection comes along that makes a new product or service possible you could be the one to likely launch it
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There is an entire graveyward of browsers, almost all that didn't die are now forgotten.
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Are you fingerpointing Marc Andreessen?
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.
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I mean... that's actually amazing advice. Not because they would grow up to create browser startups. But because they would grow up to create web startups that succeed because of very fundamental of how the web is rendered.
Which is paulg's point really
This site exists because paulg created a webshop in a niche language (Lisp) and got a prototype bought out (and discarded) in the gold rush. No browser internals needed to make a fortune on the platform. Just rapid development of an application with natural monetization, and being in a place to do so way at the beginning.
Jeff Bezos did similar, but he did his own fulfillment and hired out the coding.
Early internet let me create the best personal web page in my city that I knew of with 2 weeks experience as a 12 year old. I imagine that same 12 year old could be more knowledgeable about LLMs than 99% of people in the same period.
You're vastly over-estimating the difficulty of making a web page and even more vastly under-estimating the difficulty of LLMs.
I doubt it. Creating a website can be done by copy pasting a few snippets together and checking if it visually looks like expected.
Good luck with that approach when trying to toy around with models and their training/inference.
There is also a lot of math basics missing that a 12 year old may be able to grasp, but I would bet they are at least 13 by the time the knowledge is deep enough to understand what operations are happening.
That seems like a perfectly good use of time for a kid in the 70’s! You’d learn a lot of engineering skills and demonstrate a tenaciousness that most people don’t have. I don’t think the goal is to predict what will be the important technology in 10 years. The goal is to challenge oneself with hard tasks and learn interesting stuff. A lot of the “AI” people today were compilers people yesterday
There are more career opportunities building rockets than designing rockets. Lots of welders, machinists, electrical engineers etc build rockets, and those skills transfer.
The same is not so different for AI. A few people design novel AI, but there are a lot of people training AI (especially if you include fine tuning) and implementing AI, even as a hobby.
Building an LLM covers a lot of CS fundamentals and forces you to do lots of research in order to implement one, especially on more modest hardware.
So do a lot of things, that isn't what Paul is implying when he says "I would build a LLM if I was 17".
How far into the future can you see?
But he’s not saying that it’s a career opportunity.
It seems to me like he’s saying that doing this thing would be 1) fun and 2) a great way to become employable in the future. I don’t believe he’s saying that this project would be some kind of job training exercise.
sounds like a great way to not establish social skills
It’s not either/or. You can do 2 things.
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When I was 17 and still witnessing Apollo Moon launches, I wanted to build an AI that would handily outperform LLMs as we know them today.
But that was way back in the early 1970's and all I had to work with was a mainframe.
Well the mainframe itself wasn't bad, the real show-stopper was that I didn't own the computer outright, no strings attached, no debt, etc.
>I'd probably try to make an LLM that I could use on some specific problem.
I thought so too back then, still do so I guess this is one of those things that could stand the test of time. I always wanted to start with something a lot simpler than a Moon mission myself. At 17 I already had a significant breakthrough in the chem labs and it was from alternatives to a single processing step plus everything that descended from that, rather than trying to tackle a much more complex detailed multi-step synthesis. I was only 17 but I was not trying to be a slouch, I don't think pg was either at that age but his advice is not for just anybody. I couldn't have done it if I hadn't made major progress since being 16, and it really emphasized at the time how much maturity can make a difference. My imagination ran wild as I extrapolated :)
In a reply from LeCun to pg:
>>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
I see no reason to stop at 66 either ;)
But I figured that people owning more computer power than I could ever afford were going to be doing something like this as soon as they could, without having to wait for something like an LLM to arrive before getting peoples' attention.
It did seem like things were going to take longer than you expect, so it's pretty good to have a lifetime of concentrating on the specialized natural science domain expertise, focused now for 50 full years on how it would combine if AI ever got good enough.
Both the natural science and the AI need to be a major cut above, I still see dramatic room for improvement in my own work. If I'm going to have to rely on "other peoples' AI" then that natural science component is going to have to pull a lot of weight to keep up with the kind of computers that only rich-as-hell high-rollers have access to.