Personally I don't see the problem, as long as you're aware there is survivorship bias involved here.
What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :)
Personally I do both, read about what worked for people, also read about what didn't work for people, then ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want.
What bucket should I put this advice in?
But some advice is less specific than other advice though. Some things are always stupid, and some things are always smart, if you look at the context of our world and society. I find myself pursuing these "fundamental truths" with great interest lately, especially now that the world is changing so quickly.
Agreed, my previous stated "ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want" approach has worked out very well for me in life, people should probably focus on identifying better what their gut tells them, rather than what randoms on the internet thinks and writes.
Seek advice from the averagely successful people, since that is statistically what you're most likely to be.
Intuitively, I would guess that they have a better grasp of what made them fail than successful people have of what made them succeed.
For me, I know that one major reason for putting an upper limit on my success is my inability to form effective professional relationships. I know I should go to events and talk to people and use these relationships to my advantage, but that's just not something I've ever been good at, and I find it so incredibly unpleasant that I also just don't want to do it.
Do you think the most successful people got that way by attending events? I thought they were hacking in their garages, building great products.
I know there were opportunities I could have benefited from if I'd had better relationships with specific people.
> Do you think the most successful people got that way by attending events?
That's not what I said.
Nonetheless, there are many successful people I would gladly listen to for advice, though they are often successful in a different meaning than what venture capitalists would use (e.g. parents with great kids, managing to keep a healthy work-life balance, happiness, and maybe even having time to spend on some cool hobby project -- you are heros!)
Of course, there are degrees and exceptions on every side, but the coping mechanism is very strong among people.
Do both. Get advice from successful and unsuccessful people and take the diff
Learning from their mistakes (where it did go wrong) can be as valuable as.
I know who the 17 years old is closest to.
That’s what you get from listening to “successful people”. You get to learn about all the things they tried that failed, then the things that did work on that 24th try, which was successful.
The “survivorship bias” people always seem to assume that the “survivor” lucked into his fortune on his first try ever, so he can’t have learned anything, so we don’t have to listen to him. But that’s seldom the case.
I’ve written about this before:
There are successful people that failed many times before being successful. Somehow these days, previous failures and persistence seems to be ignored and they focus just on the luck you got on the 20th try.
Not sure why would you think so.
Inverse reasoning is very powerful, and unsuccessful people can give you plenty of "don't do this mistake", which the survivors would not even think about.
But how can I know for sure that that particular mistake is actually why they were unsuccessful? Has exactly the same issue as listening only to successful people as they hardly know what actually made them successful most of the time, but they still compose large blog posts with their reasoning for why.
Again, I still think my approach of reading both but then regardless go my own way is the preferable approach, at least for me, ymmv.
Pretty tall ask, especially if this is targeted at 17 year olds...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I
An advantage that is not "advisable", like being born in january, in a rich country, in an above average family, or just having luck, might have more influence on the outcome than any conscious action. It is almost sure that one-in-a-million level people only edge over the other 999,999 they competed with is just "have more luck".
Of the 10 most talented and hardworking people above, I bet they have wildy different advise other than "do hardwork": use more LLM, use less LLM, keep away from computers, etc. And we are talking 1 in 100, not 1 in 1,000,000!
It comes to mind someone like Kary Mullis. He was no dumb, but I wont put him either at the peak of talented or even hard working people in the field. Yet, he was "lucky" enough to invent the PCR, which earned him deservedly the Nobel Price. Now that he was made to believe that he is some kind of illuminated and well above the top human, he started giving (at the bare minimum wrong, probably even dangerous) "advise" left, right and center: take LSD, astrology works, extraterrestial glowing racoons exist, etc. Downtune the guy a notch or two, and you can find thousands of Kary Mullis around giving useless advise as they were messiahs.
You're right that it's probably a little too in the weeds, but it's also a nice clear and fun objective that teaches you the basics. Like building a TODO list in JavaScript to learn webdev or a Gameboy emulator in C++ to learn how a CPU works.
I think it is. He isn't saying to learn how to train a LLM so that you can go on to train LLMs. He's saying to learn it so that you gain a deep understanding of how LLMs work. Ordinary startups can still benefit from things like training or fine tuning highly specialised smaller models, knowing how to select and configure an appropriate model for the task at hand, knowing what software to use and why, understanding what's going on behind the scenes instead of treating everything like a black box, having a higher level of intuition about LLMs generally, etc.
Most computer science courses do in fact teach things which are lower level than coding, such as how transistors work.
how many of us out here are doing work directly in what we got a degree in? I majored in economics and now I'm a CTO.
I would absolutely advise a 17 yo to learn how to code, understand how transitors work and how to code an llm. even if he never works on llms, you basically end up with a kid with applied knowlege of statistics, math, physics hardware, logic and a whole lot of practice in critical thinking.
Since he has not given any reference point it is equally as good advice as „just learn everything slightly valuable“.
So the real question is: „What should I not learn in favor of learning this.“
Or in other words: His comment is not usable because it can mean anything or nothing.
Now, for most software careers (including my own), that knowledge isn't directly practical. BUT, the most important things for a successful, fulfilling career are curiosity and a willingness to dive into subjects _without_ necessarily knowing how (or even if) that knowledge will yield practical applications. That drive is what's going to lead to insights and breakthroughs over your career that wouldn't happen if you just let abstractions be abstractions.
In 2000 (his era), it would have been really smart to study the source of Linux or Apache. Would have paid dividends over decades. Cuz that knowledge was so rare. The number of people hacking on LLMs now dwarfs the number of people hacking on web servers 30 years ago, by several orders of magnitude.
And if you turn back the clock even more, I mean just even having access to a computer, let alone owning one, would have put you at a massive advantage.
I don't know what to call it. The pioneers should be respected obviously, but at the same time you need to understand that for them, the game wasn't nearly as played out as it is now.
I just don't think you can afford to be dicking around with LLMs like you could afford to dick around with random Linux distros 20 years ago. Too many people willing to do it for free these days.
You don't wanna end up being the 2030 equivalent of a certain SNES emulator developer, or maintainer of a package manager for jailbroken iPhones, I mean the list goes on and on. Being a hacker doesn't automatically give you a path to being rich, or even making a decent living. It hasn't been that way for a while.
Hell yeah. Transistors are pretty awesome.