alt Hacker News> I know how to build an LLM, I know plenty of fellow young engineers that do too. It's really not that complex.
I’m 40, and I don’t.I took that abstraction for granted and “left it to the big labs”. However I want to build my own LLM for learning purposes.
On needing big expensive hardware.. necessity is the mother of great innovation. Perhaps 18year olds trying to build their own LLMs in constrained resources environments will result in ground breaking ideas of achieving better intelligence than the one we currently have….
The world needs pragmatic folks who work at a higher abstraction and make LLMs useful, AND also folks who think why not “this other way”? And build newer ways to do fundamental things.
Given the usefulness of current LLMs, I would certainly encourage anybody to try and build their own LLMs, and see what they come up with…
Heck if they build a rack full of old laptops and run something with it that could be done “better” with modern servers, I’d still appreciate the learning running things on those little machines bring.
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To me the bottleneck is not even the compute, which is an issue for sure, but the data. All these large companies got their hands into petabytes of data, a lot of which of illegally acquired, but now they are large enough to pay the fines.
> On needing big expensive hardware.. necessity is the mother of great innovation. Perhaps 18year olds trying to build their own LLMs in constrained resources environments will result in ground breaking ideas of achieving better intelligence than the one we currently have….
10000%.
Well, that's not how it works. You don't just put some old laptops into a rack.
Maybe with a decent consumer GPU like a 4090, you could do experiments like distilling and fine tuning a small image model for edge deployment for specific tasks.
Even there, many use cases might require renting compute for $10/hour and investing a few hundred.
A LLM from scratch? Forget it. You can do theoretical experiments, but not build anything remotely useful with that kind of budget.
If you're talented enough to come up with revolutionary methods, maybe an university or AI lab would be the place to be.