If he has said "to learn the math and programming skills needed to understand how to build LLMs" it'd have been much more positively received.

Completely agreed. The point is the knowledge, the learning and the journey. If a kid has a passion for building or toying with LLMs, then of course, by all means, please start tearing them apart or even build and train your own model. You'll learn a ton, even if you won't necessarily end up using it here and now. The learning experience will compound and of course that will be useful.

The above is, after all, the whole genesis of the word 'hacker'. We should celebrate that.

> I am kind of amazed how negative the comments are here, especially on HN.

I can't recall or point out exactly when, but there is a stark before/after moment where the opinions of anything pg went from "Interesting and maybe true in some ways" to what we see today, lots of knee-jerk reactions and hardly any comments about the actual content.

Hazarding a guess, I think the moment Altman became the CEO and later during COVID, the sentiment seemed to have been shifting towards what we see today. But this is all based on hazy memory, rather than looking at the data. I'm sure there is a blog post waiting to be written about analyzing the sentiment of comments to PGs articles on HN, and you'll see a shift somewhere.

Now I'm curious, do people actually tried to hack vacuum tubes or other big servers that's barely 1MB RAM? It seems like another thing that needs big investment to work properly, unlike those other techs where results can be shown even with little materials.

> Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort?

No. But funnily enough that is a promise by some of the AI cretins and their boosters. Oh yeah best case scenario you learn how to build LLMs for us. We’ll employ you. And then ultimately that just becomes training data for the LLMs to do it themselves.

But why are people cynical? they ask.

> With LLMs and online tutorials, this isn't even a difficult suggestion.

Don't many of the commercial ones prevent you from using them to build LLMs?

I would say the reason for the negativity is not because it's a bad idea for a project, or that doing projects in general is a bad idea (it's not!), it's because it's a very specific thing that is not for everyone. The best thing about computing is the low barriers to entry. You can basically work on anything that takes your fancy. So those who are interested in ML will be drawn to learn about LLMs. They don't need anyone to tell them to do it. Telling everyone to do it reminds me of the "just learn to code" stuff of a decade ago. No, please don't, please find something you enjoy.