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Comment by bijant | Hacker News Reader

Considering how much of the whole local LLM ecosystem relies on llama.cpp, very much like the Open Source Video Ecosystem and FFmpeg, Computer Scientists and Hackers should look towards Physicists of the past Century who managed to make their Einsteins known to a general public. With Fabrice and Georgi and others we still have a ways to go before the value of their contributions is widely known. Ok for Georgi (and Aaron whose Reddit enabled much of their training datasets)our future AI Overlords might take care of erecting (virtual) monuments to celebrate them ;-)

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Not sure what that had to do with anything but there's nobody alive today in the realm of computer science who is even remotely comparable to Einstein. Einstein deduced extremely unconventional (from a human perspective) physical phenomenon based purely on mathematics and logic and decades later was proven right when the labcoats finally caught up with the chalkboards.

Comparing something like an LLM or a video transcoder or fucking reddit to Einstein is a joke. Turings a better comparison as he was born into a world without computers and was able to describe fundamentally how a computer would think. And turing is also very well known, too.

While I agree that there are a lot of people doing excellent work who ought to be recognized for it, I really wish people stopped looking for individuals to idolize. The physics of today is a heavily collaborative activity, so while you can argue about whether there is an Einstein alive today or not it's unlikely that someone sitting by themselves working alone is likely to revolutionize the field like he did. The same is true for software engineering. And, I would posit, that the field is new enough that the amount of effort required to reach the forefront in any given area is actually less than one might think. We should celebrate the accomplishments of those who are working at that edge but to put them on a pedestal seems inappropriate.

>...it's unlikely that someone sitting by themselves working alone is likely to revolutionize the field like he did.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Interestingly it's really physicists. Met the dean of the faculty where Georgi graduated the other day (according to his linkedin), and tried to make a joke that "faculty of math is all the hype, but math of physics seems where all the range was" and he answered: "it is a very logical consequence", and that was all he said.

IMHO cause only 0.1% of conventional devs can get anywhere near to what llama.cpp is in terms of complexity and this... percieved easy which physicists munch tensor flows.

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