Comment by danielmarkbruce
19 hours ago
You are completely off base. His initial book was released almost two years ago. I post train models, for work, and I learned more from his book on LLMs than any other source on LLMs. There is a lot more to it than that book, but you have to start somewhere, even if you have a decent theoretical foundation. There are a bunch of people who learned how to build them from his book.
How do you think people learn to build/train models? It comes down from the sky?
That is a good counter (and the only interesting one in this subthread for that matter).
My core point I think is "first principles or nothing", but, thinking about what you said, I could potentially be off there.
I might be lacking the connection to and understanding of academia and how research and work gets done there. Maybe it actually isn't possible to do this work that way.
I doubt it. Strongly. But this is a valid counterpoint. (Which I had to kinda come up with myself, but anyway)