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

(magazine.sebastianraschka.com)

251 points | by sgiannopoulos 2 hours ago

10 comments

  • dan-g 3 minutes ago
    I’ve read, worked through, and watched his LLM book as well as this one! Things finally clicked, can’t recommend both books enough—his pedagogy is great (at least for me).
  • darrelld 1 hour ago
    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!
    • lucasoshiro 10 minutes ago
      I don't like working with neural networks and I always found everything overcomplicated or oversimplified, sometimes both at the same time.

      But this book almost perfect. Every mew concept is well described and every is well founded. And every step moves you forward (if you know, you know)

    • globular-toast 22 minutes ago
      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.
  • an0malous 6 minutes ago
    Do you not just say “do reasoning” and leave it an open “<reasoning>” tag?
  • kavalg 2 hours ago
    Highly recommended! Sebastian does a great job explaining complex AI topics in a very intuitive way.
    • artninja1988 1 hour ago
      Karpathy 2.0!
      • krosaen 34 minutes ago
        They are contemporaries - cs231n and Sebastian's first ML book came out in 2015 - both excellent!
      • tomrod 1 hour ago
        Other way around. Raschka's been doing this over a decade.
        • nxtfari 0 minutes ago
          Karpathy also. CS213n first came out in 2015.
      • recroad 44 minutes ago
        Karpathy might be Raschka 2.0
  • abdiadem954 12 minutes ago
    I just started reading his book, and he makes it easy to grasp difficult concepts. As a matter of fact, I have been working on platform where you can learn how AI models work in an interactive manner.
  • misiti3780 25 minutes ago
    I have read both and the are excellent
  • brcmthrowaway 22 minutes ago
    saved
  • kettlecrisp99 53 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • GL26 1 hour ago
    someone's getting auction-poached at openai and anthropic
    • _1 1 hour ago
      he's a well known author on LLMs already.
  • hypfer 50 minutes ago
    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.

    • TheCowboy 24 minutes ago
      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.

    • john_strinlai 39 minutes ago
      >apart from learning how the tech works that is.

      some people enjoy learning how the tech works

      • hypfer 37 minutes ago
        Like me!
    • Lucasoato 44 minutes ago
      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.
    • siva7 33 minutes ago
      You wrote so many words to say .. nothing of substance .. i still have no clue what you are criticizing.
      • hypfer 32 minutes ago
        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.

    • CamperBob2 46 minutes ago
      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 43 minutes ago
        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 41 minutes ago
          Then you're not the target audience. This is intended for people who like learning things.
          • hypfer 36 minutes ago
            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 27 minutes ago
              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 26 minutes ago
                No definitely not. You don't get rich with substance in this economy.

                He is covering expenses. Probably barely.