Skip to content
HHackerTube.videoSurprise me

A Hackers' Guide to Language Models

A Hackers' Guide to Language Models on HackerTube: recommended by 8 Hacker News commenters across 8 separate months, 2023–2024.

Jeremy Howard

tutorial · intermediate · dated

Open on YouTube

Jeremy Howard's 90-minute practical tour of language models. It covers how they work, GPT-4's capabilities and limits, using the OpenAI API, code writing, data analysis and fine-tuning.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Repeatedly named the best practical tutorial for using LLMs, with a well-liked fine-tuning section.

people recommended it
8
separate months
8
strong recommendations
4
discussed on HN
2023–2024
“highly recommend "Hackers Guide to language models" by Jeremy Howard. 1.5h video packed with practical information”
— tarruda, Nov 2023, in “Generative AI for Beginners”

What HN commenters said

13 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

mangomanFeb 2024Strongly recommends

I understand the sadness around not understanding it, it's fucking hard. however, there are more and more resources online getting published for how to get started understanding it that help with understanding the math at an abstraction that helps with learning how to build with it. I would strongly strongly strongly recommend starting with karpathy's from 0 to hero neural networks youtube course - it starts with building a tensor library and back propagation, explaining it in a way that finally clicked for me [link] jeremy howard also has a fantastic video that is more around how to use LLMs and such called a hacker's guide to language models - ▶ this video as i've dove more and more into it, i would strongly recommend trying to run things on your local machine too (llama.cpp, ollama, LM studio). that has helped me fight that feeling of like "are we all just going to be open AI developers in the end" and made me feel like you _can_ integrate these things into stuff you build by your self. I can't imagine how fucked we'd all be if llama was never opensourced. being old does not mean that you can't continue to grow, and remember that it's okay to feel overwhelmed about all this - many people are.

in “I'm an Old Fart and AI Makes Me Sad” · View on HN

dojitza1Nov 2023Strongly recommends

An interesting solution to the blind spot error (taken directly from Jeremy Howard's amazing guide to language models - ▶ this video ) is to erase the chat history and try again. Once GPT has made an error (or as the author of this article says, the early layers have irreversibly pruned some important data), it will very often start to be even more wrong.

in “Effective GPT-4 Programming” · View on HN

tarrudaNov 2023Strongly recommends

If you're looking for a practical guide on how to use LLMs, highly recommend "Hackers Guide to language models" by Jeremy Howard. 1.5h video packed with practical information: ▶ this video

in “Generative AI for Beginners” · View on HN

tarrudaSep 2023Strongly recommends

Thanks a lot for this video, best LLM usage tutorial I've seen so far. At ▶ this video when talking about valid use cases for a local model vs GPT4 is: "You might want to create your own model that's particularly good at solving the kinds of problems that you need to solve using fine tuning, and these are all things that you absolutely can get better than GPT4 performance". In regards to this, there's an idea I've been thinking about for some time: Imagine a chatbot that is backed by multiple "small" models (such as 7B parameters), where each model is fine tuned for a specific task. Could such a system outperform GPT4? Here's a high level overview how I imagine this to work: - Context/prompt is sent to a "router model", which is trained to determine what kind of expert model can best answer/complete the prompt. - The system then passes the context/prompt to the expert model and returns that answer. - If no expert model is found, just use a generic instruct tuned general purpose LLM to answer If you can theoretically get better than GPT4 performance on a small models fine tuned for that task, maybe a cluster of such small models could collectively outperform GPT4. Does that make sense?

in “A Hackers' Guide to Language Models [video]” · View on HN

tikkunNov 2024Recommends

It sounds like you want more broad stuff, not necessarily learning how to train models. More like learning to use them and how they work. [link] and Hacker's Guide to LLMs by Jeremy from Fast.ai - ▶ this video State of GPT by Karpathy - [link] LLMs by 3b1b - [link] Visualizing transformers by 3b1b - [link] How ChatGPT trained - [link] AI in a nutshell - [link] How Carlini uses LLMs - [link] For staying updated: X/Twitter & Bluesky. Go and follow people that work at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Podcasts: No Priors, Generally Intelligent, Dwarkesh Patel, Sequoia's "Training Data"

in “Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI” · View on HN

tikkunApr 2024Recommends

I suspect these videos would be higher quality than most offerings from universities or business schools (given that it's a fast moving field, and most of the true experts are practitioners, and so if they're teaching, they're not teaching actual classes, at most they're doing youtube videos or interviews): - ▶ this video (Jeremy Howard Hacker's Guide to LLMs) - [link] (Karpathy Intro to LLMs)

in “Ask HN: AI Training for Executive Level” · View on HN

Show 7 more comments
simonwMar 2024Recommends

For "citation needed", read "please link me to a blog post showing how, don't just tell me to Google for one". The internet is full of blog posts about this. That doesn't mean they're actually good - I'd love to be pointed at one that has proven itself useful for someone (and definitely isn't just LLM blog-spam). I don't care if it's trivial to fine-tune and get crap results - I care about fine-tuning where the result was worth the effort. For the record, my favourite guide to fine-tuning is the section of this Jeremy Howard video that shows how to train a text-to-SQL model: ▶ this video

in “GPT-4, without specialized training, beat a GPT-3.5 class model that cost $10M” · View on HN

ghjDec 2023Recommends

Will you still be working on educational content on the side? (e.g. updating fast.ai and/or making one off lectures like ▶ this video ) Either way thank you for all the amazing free content you've already put out and good luck on the new endeavor!

in “A new old kind of R&D lab” · View on HN

code_biologistOct 2023Recommends

Jeremy Howard talks about it in his recent video "A Hackers' Guide to Language Models": ▶ this video That link goes directly to the timestamp where he discusses fine tuning, but the whole talk is great. Punchline, check out Axolotl: [link]

in “Mistral 7B Paper on ArXiv” · View on HN

lsedgwickOct 2023Recommends

You're right about the basic mistakes they can make - they can also excel at the same tasks if prompted differently. But I was making a slightly different point. The point is they can reason about things in a better-than-chance way (I mean, a much-better-than-chance way) when given problems not in the training set. Have you read the Codex paper? Seriously, go look, an LLM even from years ago (which is like decades ago in ML-time) is often able to write code to solve novel programming problems that were handwritten to not be in the training set! Also, the benchmarks against which GPT3, InstructGPT, and GPT4 were tested are illuminating about its problem solving ability on novel problems, these are described in the three respective papers. Secondly, quality is highly variant and there are traps the context window can fall into which causes especially bad results. Jeremy Howard has a great video ( ▶ this video , starting at 18:05 the 'limitations and capabilities' section is only 13 minutes long) talking about how quality depends on: how you frame your prompts, model power (4 does a lot of stuff that 3.5 can't), and whether you're in a kind of "context trap" of repeated mistakes. Of course, some people like to point out that if it's so "finicky" and variant, it is "dumb." Sure, if you like. I'm not interested in whatever definitions you're using those things, the objective and observable point is that given well-known prompting practices, LLMs can do something functionally equivalent

in “Advent of Code 2023's new AI/LLM Policy” · View on HN

birrielMay 2024Cites it

I believe it was originally written by Jeremy Howard, who has been featured here in HN a number of times. ▶ this video

in “Ask HN: What is your ChatGPT customization prompt?” · View on HN

thomascountzMay 2024Cites it

Here is Jeremy Howard's system prompt [0]. I often have success using a modified version of this. > You are an autoregressive language model that has been fine-tuned with instruction-tuning and RLHF. You carefully provide accurate, factual, thoughtful, nuanced answers, and are brilliant at reasoning. If you think there might not be a correct answer, you say so. > > Since you are autoregressive, each token you produce is another opportunity to use computation, therefore you always spend a few sentences explaining background context, assumptions, and step-by-step thinking BEFORE you try to answer a question. > > Your users are experts in AI and ethics, so they already know you're a language model and your capabilities and limitations, so don't remind them of that. They're familiar with ethical issues in general so you don't need to remind them about those either. > > Don't be verbose in your answers, but do provide details and examples where it might help the explanation. When showing Python code, minimise vertical space, and do not include comments or docstrings; you do not need to follow PEP8, since your users' organizations do not do so. [0] - ▶ this video

in “Ask HN: What ChatGPT prompt do you use to avoid code-writing hallucinations?” · View on HN

lagrange77Nov 2023Cites it

Jeremy Howard put a nice example in his Video 'A Hackers' Guide to Language Models' [0]. He asked a LLM to solve the 'Wolf, goat and cabbage problem' [1], which it could do without a problem. When he modified the problem in a way, that made it trivially solvable by a reasoning human, the LLM failed miserably. It kept parroting the solution to the original problem. [0] ▶ this video [1] [link]

in “LLMs and the End of Programming – CS50 Tech Talk with Dr. Matt Welsh [video]” · View on HN

Topics & tags

LLMs & generative AIMachine learning & deep learninglanguage modelsgpt-4fine-tuningopenai apijeremy howardprompting