8 ms·

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.

• bmacho 24d ago
  It's like looking at the early internet and then suggesting teenagers should write browsers as their projects instead of webpages.
  • amelius 24d ago
    Well, there's a lot more to learn from the former than the latter ...
    • mike_hearn 24d ago
      Really? The latter was immediately useful to lots of people which is motivating, and it had a nice smooth learning curve (html -> js -> php -> databases -> apps -> backend). Learning HTML is the first step to learning how to make full blown apps. Making a browser at 17 is like trying to climb Everest as your first hike. The expected outcome is burnout and demotivating failure. At best you'll learn some C++ or Rust. 17 is an interesting age. There are way too many comments here saying things like, 17 year olds should just do whatever seems interesting or bum around the world or focus on getting into university. But historically most kids were expected to be productive adults at 16 or 18. 17 is about the right time to be thinking seriously about what kind of work you'll do, how you'll make a living. University won't help and will just delay this decision.
      • hnlmorg 24d ago
        Early web didn’t have JS. Nor PHP. In fact a lot of early web pages were written using static HTML with C++ invoked via CGI/bin for processing form data. So writing a browser would teach you the HTML plus C++ too. The early Internet (which the GP mentioned) didn’t even have the web. But that’s nitpicking.
      • graemep 24d ago
        Historically people lived very different lives, required different skills, were poorer, had different opportunities etc. A lot of people will make better decisions with a few yeas more maturity, and spending a few years developing themselves. University will help a lot of people, and for some it will help. There is a lot more to life than making a living.
      • sho_hn 24d ago
        Anecdotally, I think it's great advice. I contributed to a browser engine around that age (KHTML, which later became WebKit and Blink), and while I don't work in browsers right now, much of that knowledge, mindset and of course the professional network have done much to shape my life. And a fairly successful career, for that matter.
        • mike_hearn 24d ago
          Contributing to an open source project is fine, but the original analogy was "it's like telling teenagers to build browsers". If teenagers could make small contributions to LLMs via open source then sure, go for it. Optimizing llama.cpp or similar would be a good learning project that might later get you good work via social networks. Contributing to open source is how I got started too. Unfortunately, training LLMs isn't something that fits well to open source open collaboration. Inferencing codebases are better.
          • sho_hn 24d ago
            Excellent point, and I agree. Much of the benefit I saw was from working within a like-minded, smart team, not going it alone. And also specifically working on software with a real user audience to learn what providing value to them actually constitutes. In that sense it's more a "seek out the open source community and real projects when young" rather than "do web browsers", with a bit of "look for ambitious types of projects few get to work on".
      • yoz-y 24d ago
        17 is a weird age but ymmv. I left home at 16 alone to study abroad. I had tons of free time due to dorm curfews and such. Unfortunately, I was too poor to have a computer and the computers we had access to were completely locked up. (Naturally we waltzed past the locks to play some games but it was also under surveillance) Paradoxically I coded way more between ages 12-14, I regret my wasted late teens.
        • fcatalan 24d ago
          Me too: ages 8-15: lots of great 8-bit computer fun. ages 15-20: girls, booze, motorcycles. 20 onwards: get a PC, back to computers, realize how much I've been missing. To be honest, judging by my own kids and their friends, late teens seem to generally be an era of hard to avoid stupidity.
          • tejohnso 24d ago
            If your focus on girls, booze, and motorcycles ends at 20 years old that's a pretty good sign.
  • serbuvlad 24d ago
    If you learnt to build a browser in 2000 you're probably doing well for yourself lol. Not a lot of demand, but also probably not a lot of supply.
    • zorked 24d ago
      There is an entire graveyward of browsers, almost all that didn't die are now forgotten.
      • paulcole 24d ago
        If any were built by teenagers, I’d imagine those teenagers ended up with pretty good careers in technology?
        • paulryanrogers 24d ago
          For every wunderkind that has a long career there's also plenty who are overlooked or peak early.
          • spolitry 24d ago
            Citation desperately needed.
            • paulcole 24d ago
              Source: Sour Grapes
            • paulryanrogers 24d ago
              Ken Silverman
              • paulcole 24d ago
                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman Is this the guy you’re talking about?
  • afro88 24d ago
    I mean... that's actually amazing advice. Not because they would grow up to create browser startups. But because they would grow up to create web startups that succeed because of very fundamental of how the web is rendered. Which is paulg's point really
    • spolitry 24d ago
      This site exists because paulg created a webshop in a niche language (Lisp) and got a prototype bought out (and discarded) in the gold rush. No browser internals needed to make a fortune on the platform. Just rapid development of an application with natural monetization, and being in a place to do so way at the beginning. Jeff Bezos did similar, but he did his own fulfillment and hired out the coding.
  • sam_lowry_ 24d ago
    Are you fingerpointing Marc Andreessen?
  • mrits 24d ago
    Early internet let me create the best personal web page in my city that I knew of with 2 weeks experience as a 12 year old. I imagine that same 12 year old could be more knowledgeable about LLMs than 99% of people in the same period.
    • master-lincoln 24d ago
      I doubt it. Creating a website can be done by copy pasting a few snippets together and checking if it visually looks like expected. 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.
    • BigTTYGothGF 24d ago
      You're vastly over-estimating the difficulty of making a web page and even more vastly under-estimating the difficulty of LLMs.
  • nextaccountic 24d ago
    If someone writes a browser in their teens, they will probably learn more about the web than if they were just writing web pages
    • ignoramous 24d ago
      A few did. [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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross
      • topham 24d ago
        Sure, you had to pick the browser I despise worse than Netscape 4.
      • nwatson 24d ago
        In the meantime Mozilla was mocked on slashdot.org and elsewhere relentlessly after the first two years of the project when nobody believed there would be any value in the effort. Hats off to the team that took around five years to get to Firefox 1.0 (and released Mozilla browser in the interim). It took a lot of conviction to see it through.
    • paulryanrogers 24d ago
      They'll learn so much more that won't transfer to as many job opportunities. For ex, say more about C++ and less about cutting edge CSS (because modern browser tech is an ocean). I suppose they might luck into other adjacent or unrelated roles with the same skills.
      • bigfishrunning 24d ago
  • mixmastamyk 23d ago
    That may have worked at the time, but no companies are interested in learning projects today. If you didn’t do the reqs list for the last 5-10 years with the same title, forget about it. Because there are dozens of folks who have, lined up. No one is indulging career changers (and most fresh grads) for the time being.
    • kdkdifnejd 23d ago
      > No one is indulging career changers (and most fresh grads) for the time being. 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.
      • islandfox100 23d ago
        it's just a fact of the market, it's not an attack on you.
        • mixmastamyk 23d ago
          Indeed, I speak from experience. Generalists like myself are unfavored as well, it seems.
• giancarlostoro 24d ago
  Building an LLM covers a lot of CS fundamentals and forces you to do lots of research in order to implement one, especially on more modest hardware.
  • Avicebron 24d ago
    So do a lot of things, that isn't what Paul is implying when he says "I would build a LLM if I was 17".
• paulcole 24d ago
  But he’s not saying that it’s a career opportunity. It seems to me like he’s saying that doing this thing would be 1) fun and 2) a great way to become employable in the future. I don’t believe he’s saying that this project would be some kind of job training exercise.
  • smcg 24d ago
    sounds like a great way to not establish social skills
    • paulcole 24d ago
      It’s not either/or. You can do 2 things.
      • fuzzfactor 23d ago
        I never thought of that :) I "guess" you could put all your effort into moving up to the next level in computer science, or you could put the same progressive effort into reaching new levels in video games on the same hardware. Alternatively you could even put all your effort into social activities and leave the technology to other people entirely. It might even be possible to find a balance between things that are widely "understood" "socially", and those that are not ;)
• mr_toad 24d ago
  There are more career opportunities building rockets than designing rockets. Lots of welders, machinists, electrical engineers etc build rockets, and those skills transfer. The same is not so different for AI. A few people design novel AI, but there are a lot of people training AI (especially if you include fine tuning) and implementing AI, even as a hobby.
• hardwaregeek 24d ago
  That seems like a perfectly good use of time for a kid in the 70’s! You’d learn a lot of engineering skills and demonstrate a tenaciousness that most people don’t have. I don’t think the goal is to predict what will be the important technology in 10 years. The goal is to challenge oneself with hard tasks and learn interesting stuff. A lot of the “AI” people today were compilers people yesterday
• fuzzfactor 23d ago
  When I was 17 and still witnessing Apollo Moon launches, I wanted to build an AI that would handily outperform LLMs as we know them today. 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.
• sejje 23d ago
  How far into the future can you see?