How've you gone about getting into this btw? I have extensive experience in infra and pipeline rollout but have struggled to find freelance clients for this kind of thing. Would be great to tie it into ML as a learning opportunity there

Spent a year of freetime catching up on everything and learning as much as possible, started sharing what I've found works or not, write a bunch of comments on HN and elsewhere, and have a email in your profile, eventually people will find you if you put out good stuff :)

Also bunch of past workplaces who've adopted AI in various ways who reach out once they find out what my current focus lies, but that's harder for others to replicate unless you've already had a career as a developer.

whats ur contact, would love to chat

This only proves the original point which is that there is not much demand for actual machine learning expertise because that is only carried out in a small number of places and what demands there is is for the more basic software carpentry like infrastructure and operations rather than the actual technology and Engineering side of things

What parent says about "there are very few available positions" for "engineers that can do real LLM machine-learning" is fair, yeah, I'd agree with this.

I don't think the "incredibly small minority of companies in the world do any real training or optimisation" part is necessarily as true, as some parts of the work I do get is about helping them optimize training and infrastructure around training. Mind you, none of this is for building LLMs from scratch, it's 99% fine-tuning existing checkpoints.

I'd also agree with "paulg is in somewhat of a bubble" regardless of this, which is worth remembering whenever you read his content. Same goes for any person living in SF, and dare I say the US. But also, YMMV, I live and work in Europe, probably why I have this perspective.

I think Paul lives in Britain these days.

I think he does, but it seems he still considers himself a remote SV native rather than someone working in the UK's economy.

Worst of both worlds - no casual gossip feed in the Bay Area, no big dog meetings in the UK. (Which mostly has no idea he exists.)

As for the question - what are the odds LLMs will be anywhere near the top of the tech tree five years from now?

The trend seems pretty clear to me - local/offshore models are snapping at the heels of the big names in the US, and the current investment arc is insane.

I wouldn't bet on Anthropic or OpenAI being leaders five years from now. Longer term, I especially wouldn't bet on the US build-yourself-a-monopoly corporate model surviving AI at all.

Congrats!

Is it possible to see some of your old works? Personal research?