[HN Gopher] Emil's Story as a Self-Taught AI Researcher (2020)
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Emil's Story as a Self-Taught AI Researcher (2020)
Author : eamag
Score : 84 points
Date : 2025-02-03 18:56 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (floydhub.ghost.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (floydhub.ghost.io)
| croissants wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101066
|
| IMO the confident Tweets about how to become a good researcher
| and hire good researchers look pretty weird next to the lack of
| any apparent research papers (or even visible research products)
| five years later.
| gwern wrote:
| Isn't he running a company (Palette) which makes heavy use of
| DL?
| emilwallner wrote:
| Indeed, I realized it's hard to compete with PhD students for
| grants, and subsidising my work with content marketing does
| not fit my style, and I prefer owning my work and choosing my
| own research direction. I also want people to use my work,
| and create solutions that are cost-effective.
|
| So the most logical way was to bootstrap an AI start-up in
| the area I'm interested, so that's what I'm doing.
| Unfortunately, it's hard to publish or contribute to open-
| source, since it becomes too easy to copy, which cuts my
| margins and ability to fund my research and compute.
|
| Now I spend most of my days doing AI research, and outsource
| most other parts, really enjoying it :)
| gopher_space wrote:
| I think you'd attract a more sympathetic audience if you
| reframed _Emil 's Story_ as "How to get people to leave you
| alone and let you think." E.g. half of your AI autodidact
| degree boils down to 'make money with what you\'ve
| learned', and it's always interesting to see people unpack
| their approaches to this idea. Your thinking around target
| numbers would be valuable.
| croissants wrote:
| Sure, so it seems fair for him to offer advice on how to
| apply AI or start a company based on it, but doing AI
| research means generating new knowledge about AI itself, and
| I don't see any evidence of that.
| king_magic wrote:
| Guy seems & speaks like a charlatan.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| >I moved from Sweden to Ghana, West Africa. I started working
| as a teacher in the countryside, but after invoking the
| spirit of their dead chief, they later annotated me the king
| of their village.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| For those casually browsing the comments, this is an actual
| quote from the article.
| emilwallner wrote:
| True story, happened when I was around 18:
| https://imgur.com/fNd55hB
| dkarl wrote:
| I knew a guy like this. He was fairly transparent about the
| fact that he talked a lot of bullshit about himself, in the
| sense that he didn't keep it realistic and didn't respond
| to reasonable skepticism the way a normal person would, but
| a lot of people responded positively to it. The people it
| worked on, they recognized that he wasn't speaking literal
| truth and mentally discounted what he said by some large
| percentage, thinking that they were critically adjusting
| for his boastfulness. But he painted such a grandiose
| picture of himself that anyone who subconsciously assumed
| that 10% of it was true would still be impressed.
|
| He was a weird dude. I think he grew up in a household
| where outrageous boasting was common and had been doing it
| so long that it was his authentic self. He desperately
| wanted people to be impressed with him, and he had mastered
| a strategy that had a consistent yield, but the people it
| didn't work on looked down on him pretty severely, and he
| didn't have any way of earning their respect. He had to
| trust in the fact that over time he would tend to find
| himself surrounded by people he could manipulate.
| sepositus wrote:
| I stopped reading at this point. Is there some cultural
| context I'm missing here? What does that even mean?
| emilwallner wrote:
| I wrote a tldr here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=42976187
| emilwallner wrote:
| Hey, Emil from the article here.
|
| I end-up doing part-time work for Google at the interaction of
| Art/Culture and ML doing project like this
| (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-klimt-color-
| enig...), I saved up enough to build an ML rig
| (https://www.emilwallner.com/p/ml-rig), since I worked 2-3 days a
| week, I could spend the rest of my time doing research. I spent
| 1-2 years working on reasoning, trying different adaptive compute
| mechanisms and RL on code and mathematics (similar to R1/o1),
| however, I realised it was hard to compete with the established
| labs, and if I published my work it was hard to monetize it to
| have enough time to stop doing consulting work and fund my
| compute needs.
|
| Instead, I started researching AI colorization, and launched it
| as a side-project (https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/c
| omments/xe6avh...), I ended up having a few hundred thousand
| users in a few weeks and realized it had enough legs to bootstrap
| into a company. So I left my consulting gig at Google to go full-
| time on the colorization project (Palette: https://palette.fm/).
|
| Fast forward to today, Palette is still running with a healthy
| margin, I've outsourced most of the things and I can spend most
| of my time doing AI research. I'd love to publish and open-source
| more, but since it becomes too easy to copy, it makes it hard to
| fund myself and my compute needs.
|
| Happy to answer any questions.
| tobr wrote:
| I got stuck at "after invoking the spirit of their dead chief,
| they later annotated me the king of their village". What kind
| of interviewer doesn't ask a follow-up question on that
| anecdote?
| emilwallner wrote:
| tldr, most of technology in rural Ghana was considered magic,
| like phones and tvs, and the only explanation was that it
| came from "the white man". The chief had recently died and
| for most of the time I was the only caucasian person in the
| region, and i met many that had never seen a caucasian person
| before. The locals started joking by greeting my as the king,
| the joke picked up and soon most were greeting me as the
| king. I always though it was a joke, and went a long with it.
| However, one day I was summed by the neighbouring regional
| kings and the elders of the village I lived in. After
| chatting for 30 minutes in the local language, they were
| convinced that the dead chief's spirit had entered me and
| they asked in english, "So, do you want to be our king?", I
| asked what it meant, one person said, I would be given 4
| wives and they would slaughter a goat and pour the blood over
| me, another said I should ask the king of Sweden what it
| meant, every person said a different thing. I sat there
| utterly confused, but thought to myself, yolo. So I agreed. I
| still feel like it was a dream, a surreal experience. The
| anointing ceremony was a lot of fun, since many of the people
| in the village were christians, the dropped many of the
| accent rituals since they were considered unethical under
| Christianity. There were a hundred or so people, many of the
| regional kings attended, they offered me a new outfit, a
| tunic, carved a chair out of wood that only chiefs can sit
| on, lots of music, dancing, and regional ceremonial aspects.
| Here's a pic from the ceremony: https://imgur.com/fNd55hB
| certyfreak wrote:
| Wow, as a Ghanaian still living in Ghana, I find this to be
| interesting. Which part of Ghana? preferably the village
| name. And How long were you considered a chief?
|
| > Most of technology in rural Ghana was considered magic,
| like phones and TVs I guess that's no longer the case. :)
| gopher_space wrote:
| Someone familiar with small African villages. For "king" read
| boss, mayor, civic comptroller, or foreign moneybag. It's
| more like getting a Key to the City[0] that comes with an
| expectation of resources.
|
| > after invoking the spirit of their dead chief
|
| "Hey, Frank used to say stuff like that! Boy do I miss
| Frank."
|
| OP isn't exaggerating his experience, and the interviewer
| doesn't find this unusual enough to unpack.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_City
| roadtoswe wrote:
| Hi Emil, your story is inspiring for someone who wants to
| become a self-taught software engineer with particular
| interests in AI/ML (see my previous HN submission).
|
| This article was posted in 2020, would you change anything
| regarding the ideal curriculum in becoming a self-taught
| software engineer now? Assume zero prior programming experience
| (can see my previous HN submission question).
|
| The AI autodidact guideline you gave in 2019, would you change
| anything now?
|
| Would appreciate any advice or roadmap to follow, your story is
| inspiring.
| emilwallner wrote:
| Thanks! I saw your earlier question related to working with
| AI at FAANG, from the context of being 30ish, and self-
| taught. I was around 27 when I started learning software
| engineering and AI.
|
| I made a free e-book here
| (https://emilwallner.gumroad.com/l/no-ml-degree), and I
| believe most of the key points are still valid, however, when
| I learned software engineering and ML, ML was a rather small
| field and tools like chatGPT and claude didn't exist.
|
| Imo, asking about a curriculum is the wrong framing, for me,
| it was more about how to find resources to focus full-time
| and being in an environment that increases my motivation.
|
| I started learning software engineering at home taking
| courses, but I procrastinated too much to be effective, maybe
| I did around 10 hours of effective learning per week. For me,
| studying C at 42 (https://www.42network.org/42-schools/), a
| free peer-to-peer school was crucial, and I recommend
| something similar. It enabled me to focus 70-90 hours a week,
| and after 6 months I was good enough to get competitive
| startup job offers.
|
| During my time, the FastAI course (https://www.fast.ai/) was
| the best practical AI course. I'd probably spend a week
| looking for ambitious projects made by recent autodidacts,
| and ask them which course they think is best now. And spend
| max 1-2 months taking the course.
|
| As for picking projects and building a portfolio, the advice
| in my e-book is still valid. An ambitious but realistic
| timeframe for landing a FAANG job is 3-5 years. Once you have
| a solid portfolio, I'd recommend joining say a YC-startup or
| similar with ex-FAANG employees to get up to speed and
| references. My first gig was at the YC-startup FloydHub with
| ex-FAANG employees.
|
| If you are self-taught it's often easier to get on the FAANG
| radar by making highly domain specific portfolio projects
| that are core to their business, or making open-source
| contributions to their projects. The other route is applying
| for jobs, however, most people without an ivy-level degree
| don't pass the screening stage. If you choose this path, plan
| for at least 6 month to learn the first part of Ian
| Goodfellow's book (https://www.deeplearningbook.org/) using
| say ChatGPT as your tutor, also grasp the key content in Chip
| Huyen's books (https://huyenchip.com/), learn cracking the
| coding interview, and get good at solving leetcode hard
| problems.
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