i will leave here a talk i had with melonade from awhile ago, and say again, you should all check out the youtube channel "sentdex" if you're interested in the technology
he covers basic neural networks, RNNs, computer vision, and all the underlying stuff required to understand modern LLMs
but the good part is his tutorials were made during like 2021 and earlier, before any of the consumer LLM companies took off
his videos are almost like cooking videos, and it gives you a completely new perspective once you understand these things & the magic is gone
they're really not that complicated
there is some math voodoo involved in backpropagation (which is vital), but the rest can be understood easily with highschool level math
his book "neural networks from scratch" is good, as well
https://archived.moe/bant/thread/23119271/#23119484i'll also leave here a US government report on the russian intelligence software "meliorator", which ran on twitter and other platforms around 2022
https://www.ic3.gov/CSA/2024/240709.pdfi think LLMs are mostly a parlor trick, and a way to make lots of money, and a way to drive GPU prices
but neural networks themselves are useful in their place, and anything interesting is going to come from chaining these simple technologies together in ingenious ways
that meliorator software is a good example of what i'm talking about, whether or not it's "le scary russia" or whatever
goodnight
