YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Sebastian Raschka's from-scratch video course on building reasoning models

229 points sgiannopoulos 2 hours ago 24 comments

kavalg 1 hour ago | parent

Highly recommended! Sebastian does a great job explaining complex AI topics in a very intuitive way.

artninja1988 1 hour ago | parent

Karpathy 2.0!

tomrod 1 hour ago | parent

Other way around. Raschka's been doing this over a decade.

recroad 29 minutes ago | parent

Karpathy might be Raschka 2.0

krosaen 19 minutes ago | parent

They are contemporaries - cs231n and Sebastian's first ML book came out in 2015 - both excellent!

darrelld 1 hour ago | parent

I got his book Build Your Own LLM From Scratch and it's super readable and does a great job at holding your hand through the entire process...need to finish reading it though!

globular-toast 7 minutes ago | parent

I like it too. Haven't got very far through it yet but just learning about how to use PyTorch and finally getting how back propagation works via autograd etc. was really fun and enlightening.

GL26 1 hour ago | parent

someone's getting auction-poached at openai and anthropic

_1 1 hour ago | parent

he's a well known author on LLMs already.

hypfer 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

CamperBob2 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

hypfer 28 minutes ago | parent

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

LoadbearingGun 26 minutes ago | parent

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

hypfer 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

goobatrooba 12 minutes ago | parent

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?

hypfer 11 minutes ago | parent

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

He is covering expenses. Probably barely.

Lucasoato 29 minutes ago | parent

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.

john_strinlai 24 minutes ago | parent

>apart from learning how the tech works that is.

some people enjoy learning how the tech works

hypfer 22 minutes ago | parent

Like me!

siva7 17 minutes ago | parent

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

hypfer 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

TheCowboy 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

misiti3780 9 minutes ago | parent

I have read both and the are excellent

brcmthrowaway 6 minutes ago | parent

saved