Intuitively, I’m having trouble believing that. Starring takes considerably less effort than cloning or copying code. The “time to star” is a literal second, maybe two if you have to scroll up.
From anecdotal observation, repos with more forks and/or external contributors than stars are far from the norm. I’ve seen many mentioning they star repos as a way of bookmarking they seldom go back to, or as an easy way to send kudos to the developer even when they don’t use the project.
In no way is this a comment on the value of Andrej’s work (I’m not familiar with it). I am only interested in the source of your “orders of magnitude” claim, which if proven will update my mental model of the coding community.
Of course not everyone is the same, but I'd be surprised if overall clones were less than an order of magnitude more than forks or stars, and find two or even three orders of magnitude believable depending on the target group of the repo.
My estimate of "one to two orders of magnitude" is based on anecdotal evidence. I edited my comment to reflect as much.
I think the biggest difference with a clone and a star is that a star requires an account and some vested interest in the social network of Github. Anyone who is not interested in the social aspect can just bookmark it.
I guess this differs quite a lot by target demographic. A tool for GPT will probably get a lot more stars than a plugin for some consumer software simply because it is more targeted for the audience of people who have Github accounts.
(This is a tool that most people install and run without any interaction with GitHub, since it is in package managers)
Agreed, but that also means you may be getting multiple clones from the same person/organisation, which artificially inflates the number.
Whilst starring is simpler, the incentive is much lower than that of cloning. Especially for projects you just want to use and not contribute to or follow.
In my many years of work, i have only starred less than 50 repos. I am sure i have cloned more than a thousand.
I seldom star, but neither you nor I can be extrapolated to the general community. I have thousands of stars in some repos, and I know a significant number of those users don’t even code, let alone clone repos or copy code, they’re interested in the final product. They have GitHub accounts because it’s the way to report bugs or make feature requests.
The OP made a claim. All I’m looking to understand is if it has data backing it up or it’s just a gut feeling, because if it’s the former I’ll have learned something and made a correction of my mental model of the world. Sharing more anecdotes will leave us stuck in the same situation.
By checking the usage statistics on that server, you can get an idea how many users there are, and typically it's far higher than the number of stars.
Starring is just not that useful to me so I can see why users or contributors would be much higher. I typically star repos if it's an unpopular or old repository that doesn't have NPM or Nuget packages.
He appears to be building a business and maintaining his profile. And there is nothing wrong with that - I admire him for for pursuing his career in this positive and helpful way.
But random folks do this sort of thing everyday with no such career goals and little recognition, so I'm not sure it is this specific contribution that needs to be called out.
I go the other way. I would like to thank anyone who releases open source code, whether they cause big ripples or not.
A million people building GPT models means that one in 8000 humans on earth has built one. That seems wildly off.
Linkedin has about 100.000 profiles of data scientists. Assume generously that the actual number is 10x higher. Not correcting for the fact that a data scientist isn't always a machine learning expert, etc etc, there's just no way every single one of them even KNOWS what a GPT-like model is.
BTW, I appreciate that you preceded your comment with "Pedantry time!" -- nice gesture :-)
He's done it because he evidently loves it, and wants to share his hard-earned knowledge with the rest of the world.
He may be a product of the ivory tower, but he's been in the trenches. He knows firsthand how f-ing hard it is to ship a product.
And here he is, sharing useful personal code with everyone.
This github repo has ~4K stars and its antecessor (minGPT) has ~11K stars. Normally, the number of people who clone or copy code from a repo is one to two orders of magnitude larger than the number of people who take the time to star it, so we can safely say that Andrej has helped at least a few hundred thousand -- but likely more than a million -- individuals around the world learn how to build and tinker with GPT models.
Remarkably, as I write this, no one else here has said thank you yet, so let me say it on everyone's behalf:
THANK YOU ANDREJ.