Emil's Story as a Self-Taught AI Researcher (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Emil's Story as a Self-Taught AI Researcher (2020)

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101 pointseamag24 comments

Hey, Emil from the article here.

I end-up doing part-time work for Google at the interaction of Art/Culture and ML doing project like this (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-klimt-color-enig...), I saved up enough to build an ML rig (https://www.emilwallner.com/p/ml-rig), since I worked 2-3 days a week, I could spend the rest of my time doing research. I spent 1-2 years working on reasoning, trying different adaptive compute mechanisms and RL on code and mathematics (similar to R1/o1), however, I realised it was hard to compete with the established labs, and if I published my work it was hard to monetize it to have enough time to stop doing consulting work and fund my compute needs.

Instead, I started researching AI colorization, and launched it as a side-project (https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/xe6avh...), I ended up having a few hundred thousand users in a few weeks and realized it had enough legs to bootstrap into a company. So I left my consulting gig at Google to go full-time on the colorization project (Palette: https://palette.fm/).

Fast forward to today, Palette is still running with a healthy margin, I’ve outsourced most of the things and I can spend most of my time doing AI research. I’d love to publish and open-source more, but since it becomes too easy to copy, it makes it hard to fund myself and my compute needs.

Happy to answer any questions.

I got stuck at ”after invoking the spirit of their dead chief, they later annotated me the king of their village”. What kind of interviewer doesn’t ask a follow-up question on that anecdote?

tldr, most of technology in rural Ghana was considered magic, like phones and tvs, and the only explanation was that it came from "the white man". The chief had recently died and for most of the time I was the only caucasian person in the region, and i met many that had never seen a caucasian person before. The locals started joking by greeting my as the king, the joke picked up and soon most were greeting me as the king. I always though it was a joke, and went a long with it. However, one day I was summed by the neighbouring regional kings and the elders of the village I lived in. After chatting for 30 minutes in the local language, they were convinced that the dead chief's spirit had entered me and they asked in english, "So, do you want to be our king?", I asked what it meant, one person said, I would be given 4 wives and they would slaughter a goat and pour the blood over me, another said I should ask the king of Sweden what it meant, every person said a different thing. I sat there utterly confused, but thought to myself, yolo. So I agreed. I still feel like it was a dream, a surreal experience. The anointing ceremony was a lot of fun, since many of the people in the village were christians, the dropped many of the accent rituals since they were considered unethical under Christianity. There were a hundred or so people, many of the regional kings attended, they offered me a new outfit, a tunic, carved a chair out of wood that only chiefs can sit on, lots of music, dancing, and regional ceremonial aspects. Here's a pic from the ceremony: https://imgur.com/fNd55hB

Wow, as a Ghanaian still living in Ghana, I find this to be interesting. Which part of Ghana? preferably the village name. And How long were you considered a chief?

> Most of technology in rural Ghana was considered magic, like phones and TVs I guess that's no longer the case. :)

Close to Nsawam, in the village Darmang, I was the chief for 2-3 months, and when I left they wrote on my door, "Never forget your king Nana Darmang", I don't know if I'm still considered the chief, although last time I spoke to them it seem that way. Yeah, during my time electricity was on and off, and there was no internet or cell connection. These days, many of them have facebook, which was a pleasant surprise.

Someone familiar with small African villages. For "king" read boss, mayor, civic comptroller, or foreign moneybag. It's more like getting a Key to the City[0] that comes with an expectation of resources.

> after invoking the spirit of their dead chief

"Hey, Frank used to say stuff like that! Boy do I miss Frank."

OP isn't exaggerating his experience, and the interviewer doesn't find this unusual enough to unpack.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_City

It's funny that I read to the end of the article and thought "But the logical next step for this type of person isn't to have shown all this agency, and then use it to work for someone else.* It's to start your own profitable side project and then your own company, a natural extension of everything else you've done until that point." So it was funny to read this and realize that actually is what ended up happening. Congratulations!

*the exception here would be if someone throws so much money at you it would be unwise to say no; however, this is rare enough that I think most people of the self-taught audodidact variety can assume it won't happen.

Hi Emil, your story is inspiring for someone who wants to become a self-taught software engineer with particular interests in AI/ML (see my previous HN submission).

This article was posted in 2020, would you change anything regarding the ideal curriculum in becoming a self-taught software engineer now? Assume zero prior programming experience (can see my previous HN submission question).

The AI autodidact guideline you gave in 2019, would you change anything now?

Would appreciate any advice or roadmap to follow, your story is inspiring.

Thanks! I saw your earlier question related to working with AI at FAANG, from the context of being 30ish, and self-taught. I was around 27 when I started learning software engineering and AI.

I made a free e-book here (https://emilwallner.gumroad.com/l/no-ml-degree), and I believe most of the key points are still valid, however, when I learned software engineering and ML, ML was a rather small field and tools like chatGPT and claude didn’t exist.

Imo, asking about a curriculum is the wrong framing, for me, it was more about how to find resources to focus full-time and being in an environment that increases my motivation.

I started learning software engineering at home taking courses, but I procrastinated too much to be effective, maybe I did around 10 hours of effective learning per week. For me, studying C at 42 (https://www.42network.org/42-schools/), a free peer-to-peer school was crucial, and I recommend something similar. It enabled me to focus 70-90 hours a week, and after 6 months I was good enough to get competitive startup job offers.

During my time, the FastAI course (https://www.fast.ai/) was the best practical AI course. I'd probably spend a week looking for ambitious projects made by recent autodidacts, and ask them which course they think is best now. And spend max 1-2 months taking the course.

As for picking projects and building a portfolio, the advice in my e-book is still valid. An ambitious but realistic timeframe for landing a FAANG job is 3-5 years. Once you have a solid portfolio, I’d recommend joining say a YC-startup or similar with ex-FAANG employees to get up to speed and references. My first gig was at the YC-startup FloydHub with ex-FAANG employees.

If you are self-taught it’s often easier to get on the FAANG radar by making highly domain specific portfolio projects that are core to their business, or making open-source contributions to their projects. The other route is applying for jobs, however, most people without an ivy-level degree don’t pass the screening stage. If you choose this path, plan for at least 6 month to learn the first part of Ian Goodfellow’s book (https://www.deeplearningbook.org/) using say ChatGPT as your tutor, also grasp the key content in Chip Huyen’s books (https://huyenchip.com/), learn cracking the coding interview, and get good at solving leetcode hard problems.

Thanks for the advice and the link to your e-book!

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101066

IMO the confident Tweets about how to become a good researcher and hire good researchers look pretty weird next to the lack of any apparent research papers (or even visible research products) five years later.

Guy seems & speaks like a charlatan.

>I moved from Sweden to Ghana, West Africa. I started working as a teacher in the countryside, but after invoking the spirit of their dead chief, they later annotated me the king of their village.

For those casually browsing the comments, this is an actual quote from the article.

True story, happened when I was around 18: https://imgur.com/fNd55hB

I knew a guy like this. He was fairly transparent about the fact that he talked a lot of bullshit about himself, in the sense that he didn't keep it realistic and didn't respond to reasonable skepticism the way a normal person would, but a lot of people responded positively to it. The people it worked on, they recognized that he wasn't speaking literal truth and mentally discounted what he said by some large percentage, thinking that they were critically adjusting for his boastfulness. But he painted such a grandiose picture of himself that anyone who subconsciously assumed that 10% of it was true would still be impressed.

He was a weird dude. I think he grew up in a household where outrageous boasting was common and had been doing it so long that it was his authentic self. He desperately wanted people to be impressed with him, and he had mastered a strategy that had a consistent yield, but the people it didn't work on looked down on him pretty severely, and he didn't have any way of earning their respect. He had to trust in the fact that over time he would tend to find himself surrounded by people he could manipulate.

I wrote a tldr here: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=42976187

I stopped reading at this point. Is there some cultural context I'm missing here? What does that even mean?

Isn't he running a company (Palette) which makes heavy use of DL?

Indeed, I realized it's hard to compete with PhD students for grants, and subsidising my work with content marketing does not fit my style, and I prefer owning my work and choosing my own research direction. I also want people to use my work, and create solutions that are cost-effective.

So the most logical way was to bootstrap an AI start-up in the area I'm interested, so that's what I'm doing. Unfortunately, it's hard to publish or contribute to open-source, since it becomes too easy to copy, which cuts my margins and ability to fund my research and compute.

Now I spend most of my days doing AI research, and outsource most other parts, really enjoying it :)

I think you'd attract a more sympathetic audience if you reframed Emil's Story as "How to get people to leave you alone and let you think." E.g. half of your AI autodidact degree boils down to 'make money with what you\'ve learned', and it's always interesting to see people unpack their approaches to this idea. Your thinking around target numbers would be valuable.

I agree, it was written some time ago, and the language is hyperbolic, but many of the key points still hold true. Building a skillset to reach $100/hour consulting gigs was key to work 2-3 days per week, have time for research, and saving money for an ML rig, while living in Paris. Around $5K MRR is sufficient to live off, $10K MRR is more comfortable and allows renting a few extra A6000 Ada and start outsourcing, and $20K MRR to afford full outsourcing to focus on research and renting 8xH100s. That's a good goal to balance research freedom with other responsibilities. After that, it's optional to trade research freedom for higher MRR and more responsibilities.

Sure, so it seems fair for him to offer advice on how to apply AI or start a company based on it, but doing AI research means generating new knowledge about AI itself, and I don't see any evidence of that.

> doing AI research means generating new knowledge about AI itself, and I don't see any evidence of that.

Wouldn't colorization count as research? In vision domain there are a lot of papers like this. Just arranging and rearranging known blocks and getting SOTA result on some datasets. ;)

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