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 is viable as a toy project, but there are vanishingly few career opportunities.
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.
[Blake Ross] worked as an intern at Netscape at the age of 16 ... Ross became disenchanted with the browser he was working on and the direction given to it by America Online, which had recently purchased Netscape. Ross and Hyatt envisioned a smaller, easy-to-use browser that could have mass appeal, and Firefox was born from that idea ... in 2003 all of Mozilla's resources were devoted to the Firefox and Thunderbird projects. Released in November 2004, when Ross was 19, Firefox quickly grabbed market share ... with 100 million downloads in less than a year
Browsers from scratch are multi-year projects for multiple people. Even just skinning and minor tweaks to modern browsers is a deep well for one person.
Building a browser in the early web was actually a very achievable goal for exactly the reasons it isn’t now. There was not JS. No CSS. No SVG. In fact very few widely supported image formats (and graphical browsers weren’t around in the earliest days of the web anyway). TLS didn’t exist. HTML only had a subset of methods. And even POST was usually just managed by CGI/BIN calling an external process, often written in C++ or Perl.
It was a simpler time.
That’s like saying someone who fabricates cars doesn’t have the skills to drive them. Perhaps not, but they’re very well placed to pick it up quickly. They’ve also shown they can do something far more challenging, which is actually better than hiring for narrow immediate skills.
In other words: I’d hire that candidate in a heartbeat.
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.
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.