When I was 17, I wrote poetry and learned how to play guitar. I’m really happy that I did. That’s what I would do now, were I 17. I feel slightly bad for people who didn’t.
As to the substance of your comment, there's nothing stopping a 17-year-old from writing poetry, learning guitar, and also learning about how LLMs work, if they're so inspired. Indeed I'm sure pg would encourage it, and that he did the equivalent of all those things himself when he was young. There's plenty of evidence of that in his essays: he wrote short stories, published a scandalous school newspaper, played soccer, and studied fine art and philosophy. See:
I assume the people at HN are intelligent enough to understand this without me having to explain the most obvious banalities to them. The point is why you would do anything at 17:
> if they're so inspired
You said it yourself. The Twitter post, to me, reads like career advice or something in that vein. One has plenty of time to run the wheel like a lab rat later, but at that very point in life you have possibility to find the thing that truly inspires you, that is its own motivation.
I was incredibly lucky to have had a father who worked that out for himself then impressed it on me. The people I feel sad for are those who don’t have people around to make them feel it’s ok to try things that seem impossibly advanced for your age or social status.