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Comment by hypfer | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit confused as to who this is for - apart from learning how the tech works that is.

If you're truly going to build your own model (and commit to the cost of that), then video tutorials will not cut it.

And if you don't really, then I wonder if this is really the best style of conveying the information you'd be interested in?

I mean I might be wrong and maybe this helps emerging players or something like that, but to me it is more likely that this is more of a monetisation strategy of a personal brand. Living off selling to people that think they _should_ but then in the end don't.

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If you're truly going to build your own model (and commit to the cost of that), then video tutorials will not cut it.

That makes no sense. It's like saying if you want an engineering degree, going to lectures will not cut it. Of course not, you have to do the homework and projects too.

Yeah but if it is not all that useful, why is it saying that it is "from scratch" and what is it doing on #1 of the front page?

Something is off here. It indeed makes no sense

Then you're not the target audience. This is intended for people who like learning things.

You're right about me not being the target audience, but you're wrong about the second sentence I think.

The target audience of this is for people that like to _think_ they're doing stuff by paying for it, to then not do anything.

It's a purchase of an identity, basically.

Which.. I guess is fine as something to cover Sebastian's expenses to enable him to keep delivering this free stuff. If you want to take money from someone, taking from this group is likely the most ethical thing to do.

It seems that the videos are free to access so I don't understand this comment. You think he's getting rich off selling the accompanying book?

No definitely not. You don't get rich with substance in this economy.

He is covering expenses. Probably barely.

You can't even stick by the same opinion from one comment to the next.

It seems that you want to oppose something really badly today, but you're struggling to find something that makes sense for more than 5 minutes.

Is that so?

You sound like you are projecting a bunch of motivations and assumptions about character onto other people. But you projecting such things onto another person is a terrible way to begin to understand something.

There are genuinely people who enjoy learning how something works by doing smaller scale versions of it themselves. This site happens to have a much higher average percentage of them than most other places.

"I know I'm not the target audience and I don't have any interest in how things work, but let me tell you how you're wrong by telling you who the actual target audience is"

What's next? Are you going to give us your opinion of music genres you don't ever listen to? And tell us who should listen to them too, I suppose.

You are completely off base. His initial book was released almost two years ago. I post train models, for work, and I learned more from his book on LLMs than any other source on LLMs. There is a lot more to it than that book, but you have to start somewhere, even if you have a decent theoretical foundation. There are a bunch of people who learned how to build them from his book.

How do you think people learn to build/train models? It comes down from the sky?

That is a good counter (and the only interesting one in this subthread for that matter).

My core point I think is "first principles or nothing", but, thinking about what you said, I could potentially be off there.

I might be lacking the connection to and understanding of academia and how research and work gets done there. Maybe it actually isn't possible to do this work that way.

I doubt it. Strongly. But this is a valid counterpoint. (Which I had to kinda come up with myself, but anyway)

You can follow his book and learn how to build an LLM from scratch. What is the issue?

It's also not a bad foundation for people who want to understand how these things are trained and work.

>apart from learning how the tech works that is.

some people enjoy learning how the tech works

Like me!

"apart from learning how to make cookies at home, I really don't see the point of this cookie recipe"

"Why make things by my own hand when I can buy them cheap?!".

Why teach people to play guitar once a week if they won't be a new Jimi Hendrix? Why teach people to run if they won't be a new Usain Bolt?

Maybe because they don't want to be an "emerging player" or something, they only want to understand how a new technology that is changing the world works and prefer to learn by doing.

If Sebastian is doing it by its personal brand, he really deserves it. I would trust him because I know he is a reference on his area of knowledge and I know he is because he shares his knowledge instead of only making fancy talks.

Let’s not be this negative, we might be going towards a new direction with technology that could allow small teams to build their own models. Maybe not frontier models. Maybe not close to the others in generalized benchmarks. But perhaps they could be really specialized into solving one particular problem better than the others.

You wrote so many words to say .. nothing of substance .. i still have no clue what you are criticizing.

I think you actually do and that is exactly what resulted in this style of reply.

It's a critique of the people and the lack of substance. But not of the author. The author is highly capable.

People are going to be upset about this, but any learning material in this day and age is solely made for your own understanding when writing it. The LLMs can be better teachers and understand your level of need and engagement better than anyone else.

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