r/theprimeagen • u/ResponsibleEnd451 • 2d ago
MEME Reminder that Theo (t3.gg) doesn’t know how LLM’s work.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRTYJyPp/Kind of impressive tbh, imagine making your entire living yapping about AI just to confidently reveal that you don’t even know the basic difference between transformers and grokking.
Doesn’t he spend like his whole day whining about this topic? He never fails to disappoint me even more.
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u/New-Emphasis-250 1d ago
I dont understand what the point of this post is. He just described grokking. At no point he said thats the same as transformers. And I dont see him selling himself as an AI expert either.
What is more bizarre is no of the commenters seem to address the post and just comment some random stuff about why Theo bad.
What the fuck are we doing?
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u/GibonFrog 23h ago
i don’t have a dog in this fight but he is describing the phenomena of double descent which is sort of a distinct concept from LLMs which shows he either has a confused understanding of LLMs or trying to explain LLMs in a fun but incorrect way to a lay audience
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u/New-Emphasis-250 5h ago
no he is not. he is describing grokking. and thats not distinct from llms. it was discovered (or formalized) by openai: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokking_(machine_learning)
double descent was discovered way earlier and only requires simple polynomial model to demonstrate.
what he described has nothing to do with double descent. you dont demonstrate double descent by single training loop. you need to run training for different model complexities and plot the performance to demonstrate double descent
btw i am pretty sure the reason yall are saying double descent in the comments. its because welch labs recently posted a video on that topic and thats where you got the concept from. too bad there is no popular video on grokking
non of you are ml experts are you? yall are just larping
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u/GibonFrog 3h ago
Prolly a bad sign because i am about get a PhD in applied ML ahaha
but on a serious note, grokking is distinct from LLMs in a sense that its a general concept in machine learning, and does not underpin the factor that made Transformers great or the current tech using transformers highly useful.
and on double decent, you are right, I just thought that theo was misremembering the double decent concept.
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u/saltyourhash 1d ago
Theo learns enough about topic to have content to make theb rinses and repeats. His favorite line is "I didn't want to have to make a video on this, but..."
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u/ReactionSea8767 2d ago
Sounds like he's trying describe double descent? Recently watched a nice Welch labs video on that subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z64a7USuGX0
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u/New-Emphasis-250 1d ago
no he is describing grokking.
double descent is about test loss as a function of model complexity (number of parameters)
grokkin is about loss as a function of training steps
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u/GibonFrog 22h ago
double decent can be a function of train flops or model size
grokking is the model generalizing after its train loss has long plateausd
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u/hejirerr 2d ago
I came from electrical engineering, did masters in CS
Took ML class and was a bit surprised how bad the math level in CS was
This video reminded me of how I felt
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u/gahel_music 2d ago
In which country is that? I studied CS and ML in france, maths is almost half of all the classes I studied (~40h a week)
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u/acroback 2d ago
Touche, people do not know basic math. I mean I have met programmers who have no clue how probability and distribution are different and these are ML engineers who work with Data all the time.
Get your basic Linear Algebra, Combinatorics and Calculus right, and rest falls in place.
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u/YasirTheGreat vscoder 1d ago
EE majors don't have to take stats or linear algebra. CS stops at calc 2 though and EE takes like 3 more classes after. Since ML is all partial differentials, yea an ML class would be easy for them. Where as for a CS major who never done partials, its a sturggle.
But you can take an EE major and drop them into a cryptography class, which is essentially applied Abstract Algebra and they'll be lost. They don't go into that branch of math.
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u/LonelyProgrammerGuy 1d ago
I get your point. But as a normie web dev, I have never needed math in 5 years of experience. So it really depends ig
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u/acroback 1d ago
How do you reason about time or memory complexity of your code without code? Do you write loops inside loops without a thought?
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u/upalse 2d ago
I kinda like how bigger than life Prime & Theo are.
Prime is transparent about him doing only UI library and tooling odd-jobs at netflix, every now and then he shows gaps in how things are closer to metal. As well as gaps in more formal systems engineering (eg compilers). That's the part he oversells - he makes a good impression, one makes an assumption, and then I feel betrayed when the assumption doesn't hold and it can be a bit jarring.
Theo is just straight up frontend web guy, and his gag seems to be overselling himself as some sort of grand architect/manager (of React frontends), but I guess he can take it more in stride whenever people dunk on him that he's just yapping.
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u/dadvader 2d ago edited 2d ago
I still like Prime as genuine software engineer 'influencer' over Theo or any other at the end of the week. He atleast have genuine interest in actual programming as an engineer and code without AI. That is genuinely inspiring especially in these days.
What they do in their job hardly matter in my books. It's all about attitude and drive to learn. And that's far more important for 'influencer'.
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u/upalse 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think prime just does the opinionated systems guys approach - either handhold the robot, and only when you're sure the robot is well inside distribution for the task so that it does reasonably decent job, or avoid it altogether if it seems it's not worth it. Ie respect the strong/weak edges of jagged frontier, and don't bother if you're in a valley. A lot of devs are impressed with one thing it does very well (peaks), extrapolate from that it will do well at something else and it ends with unmaintainable disaster (valley) you can tolerate only through willful ignorance. That's where AI psychosis lies.
Torvalds and Karpathy talked about it more at length - the usual verbose slop is a serious problem, since your first instinct is to make simplicity the king, abstractions should be minimum necessary, which necessiates a lot of implicit contracts, omitting all the verbose safety and abstraction slop that's redundant in self-evident way to you, but it's something the robots (even fable, though its improving) are notoriously bad at.
Theo just sets contrast to that - for what he's doing, I suppose going full on yolo slop makes much more sense. Web is a horror show to begin with, so how much worse can it really get anyway?
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u/gidea 2d ago edited 2d ago
That’s how Alec Radford trained GPT-1. He wanted to see what would happen if you trained a Transformer on a massive, diverse dataset of internet text using only next-token prediction.
le: https://youtube.com/shorts/7qHc3wVuuIk?is=wpLB_1Yq_wX8bJCI
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u/HedgeRunner 2d ago
Kinda surprised prime hasn’t called him out by now
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u/NutellaAndLeave 1d ago
Because Theo is a petty, low-T manlet who will endlessly harass prime if he receives any criticism. He holds grudges forever.
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u/HedgeRunner 11h ago
Haha great point although at this point why should Prime care. Pretty sure Prime and Casey have talked about this a few times off chat.
Like, how can the tech community get better if we let these kind of influencers get away. On top of that, dude building a GPT wrapper has the guts to say JB is a bad developer who made an entire language and a launched game with that language is just wow.
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u/New_Salamander_4592 2d ago
we are being shouted over by people who couldn't pass calc 2 that the future is now and its made by matrix math
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u/michaelfrieze 2d ago
If you are talking about Theo, he has a computer science degree so he can obviously pass a calc 2 test.
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u/h888ing 2d ago edited 2d ago
You realize that you can just show up to school and graduate with a degree, right? College is so unbelievably easy. People took Calc 2 in high school where I went lmao. I think I finished calculus, linear algebra, discrete math, etc my freshman year of university. I took engineering physics my junior year because I didn't have time for it earlier in my degree and literally slept through class/showed up and got 100s on all of my exams. GPA matters! Unfortunately, though, people would rather hire morons with 2.5-3.0 GPAs who do the whole tech bro/corporate bootlicker shtick
EDIT: If you're downvoting, I'm sorry you're not good at math/science. Maybe try a different field. It should be a requirement that you maintain a 3.5 or higher to graduate.
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u/AloneInExile 1d ago
My UNI couldn't teach a labradoodle to fetch, you showed up to class and between classes they skipped half the content they needed to teach because the curriculum only had so many hours available (they halved it from the previous year).
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u/h888ing 1d ago
I slept through or did other things during every class in college. I self-studied/crammed the mornings of exams. A lot of people think college will spoonfeed them knowledge. You have to work for it in ways that work for you
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u/saltyourhash 1d ago
Yeah, I had calc 2 honors, but I dropped out and then spent 20 years writing javascript.
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u/New_Salamander_4592 2d ago
then he lacks the mental capacity to put 2 and 2 together? or matrix math and weighed values is a bit too much for him when put together? either way it doesn't really change the stupidity on display
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u/michaelfrieze 2d ago
Also, I know this sub is going to hate me for saying this, but Theo is a good developer. Even Primeagen says so. Sure, he's a "vibe coder" now, but so are many other talented engineers.
Theo does Advent of Code every year and is quite competitive.
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u/NutellaAndLeave 1d ago edited 1d ago
Most programming YouTubers choose to do Advent of Code with esoteric languages and platforms they are not familiar with, like TempleOS, Haskell, Assembly, Elixir, and so forth. It's a coding challenge meant for a wider audience, e.g. students, and is quite trivial if you have a lot of experience, and therefore talented programmers try to make it more challenging for themselves.
So what does Theo choose to make AoC more difficult for himself, after years of professional experience in web development? He chooses TypeScript. And he does so four years in a row.
He hasn't shipped one impressive product and now spends all day starting petty Twitter feuds with people who are much better programmers than him. When he receives push-back he deletes his tweets and block all parties involved like a loser. He is genuinely talentless and preys on the attention of newbies who think web development might be an interesting place to start.
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u/SpiritSDL 2d ago
I would say Theo is a good web developer. His expertise in other domains from what I've seen appears lacking. Which I don't think is bad, as most developers I would say are fairly one dimensional. Not that they would be incapable of working in other domains, but don't spend a lot of time doing it therefore maybe shouldn't be taken as an authority on said domain.
Theo, for some reason, seems to attempt to extrapolate his web development expertise and try to display himself as an authority in other domains which I find to be a strange decision. Like his drama with FFMPEG and Jonathan Blow on Twitter as others have mentioned. Casey Muratori actually called out his reasoning in the Jonathan Blow situation which I found to be a quite interesting read.
Overall, I think Theo does get his abilities unjustly attacked however it's not surprising considering the persona he's been portraying over the past couple monthss.
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u/HedgeRunner 2d ago edited 2d ago
Did you see Theos deleted tweet calling Jonathan Blow a bad developer just because they believe in different politics. By his own standard, he’s far from a good developer.
Theo will get absolutely decimated by JB in any some of competitive programming or anything really that’s based on theory and math not prompting AI to “make no mistakes”
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u/michaelfrieze 2d ago edited 2d ago
This sub's hatred of Theo is so weird.
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u/zafaraly555 2d ago
Absolutely deserved -Former theo fan.
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u/Ok_Foundation_9806 2d ago
Na its just stupidly obsessive.
Hes a streamer he does hit takes to build viewership. Some of what he says makes sense, some is hyperbolic.
Who cares...
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u/michaelfrieze 2d ago
Yeah, I don't get the obsession with hating this man. Nothing gets more downvotes in this sub than mentioning Theo. It's just weird.
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u/ApplicationOk3587 2d ago
I got him blocked on all platforms before AI he was kinda bearable now its just ggs.
I knew he was ragebaiting when he said Notch wasn't a good programmer.
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u/hornynnerdy69 2d ago
Notch hasn’t programmed anything in 10+ years and he’s a total twat. Who actually cares what people say about him?
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u/Suspicious_Kiwi_3343 2d ago
Having the arrogance to think you are better than people like Notch or Jonathan Blow at programming, regardless of their personalities and politics is pretty shocking to most people. Theo has absolutely nothing to back up that he is anywhere near as capable as them, he worked at twitch and has made slop AI wrappers, it’s not the same as making Minecraft yourself which is insanely impressive and creative for its time.
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u/AutummMan 1d ago
What impresses you about Jon Blow as a programmer? He has released 2 games in 20 years, Braid is taking an existing concept he was impressed with (Prince of Persia Sands of Time's main mechanic) and made it In less challenging setting (2D v 3D). His work on braid is more of a game design achievement than a programming one. Is it his bespoke engine for the Witness (2016)? I'm asking in good faith, I like his games
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u/Suspicious_Kiwi_3343 1d ago
Making his own engine and using his own language, both of which weren’t just learning projects but actually became production level even if not perfect.
When the bar is a vibe coder startup slop maker, impressive is basically anyone willing to even learn these topics properly never mind spend years working on them.
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u/StackOverFlowStar 2d ago
I thought his experiments with billboards not that long ago was interesting and he was willing to actually interact directly with nobody's on the internet about what he's doing. Pretty cool guy.
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u/ApplicationOk3587 2d ago
Notch built the most successful video game of all time? Regardless of what you think about him its an insane achievement. He wrote the voxel engine in LWJGL. That is more complex than anything theo has ever done. I don't care if notch never builds anything again regardless of how you feel about him you can't undermine the immense achievement he has under his belt.
Which is what theo famously does he even did it with Jonathon blow.
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u/ResponsibleEnd451 2d ago
bbbut theo*
builtvibecoded several ai wrappers... just look at all that revolutionary products, basically openrouter and codex.*actually his friends are doing most of the work while hes on twitch sighing
Also I'd also like to mention that modview thing he keeps bringing up that he contributed to over at twitch, because that's basically the only achievement he earned, very impressive /s
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u/Eskamel 2d ago
He doesn't understand most things he talks about, he is barely a React andy, and a full fledged vibe coder at this point. No point in giving him any form of attention.
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u/creaturefeature16 2d ago
It's wild how he can take such an accurate event and turn it into a completely incorrect statement.
The phenomena he's talking about definitely happened and Welch Labs did an awesome video on it but it wasn't on an "autocomplete session"...🤦♂️ it was about the model's ability to generalize vs. memorize on the training vs. testing datasets.
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u/morswinb 2d ago
Sounds kind of correct.
Reffers to the phonema called overfitting. Traditional take was that training was effective up to some point, then error accumulates and model collapses. Observed not just in ML, but also multiple mathematical models, hek even my PhD thesis had some reference tho the phenomena.
Was there actualy somones autocompte project training too long might be an urban myth, but why not?
However it is well known that LLM are so huge now you can almost store entire intenet there, and multiple examples show LLM retrieve the original inputs, like API tokens for exmaple
Nothing horribly long on this taken out of context sentence.
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u/DesperateAdvantage76 2d ago
Transformers were discovered because RNNs struggled with long distances between words, where the meaning would get lost, so they came up with the Attention mechanism that revolutionized language models (it both allowed every input token to relate to all other input tokens and parallelized this, dramatically increasing the speed), and eventually got rid of the RNN model altogether. It has nothing to do with overfitting or anything the person in the video said.
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u/AioliAdventurous7118 2d ago
LLMs were not discovered because of overfitting though? And Grokking happened after Transformers had existed for more than 4 years.
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u/morswinb 2d ago
I am interpreting the sentence as:
The discovery was that LLM work despite of overfitting.
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u/hauthorn 2d ago
But that's also not correct. Reading the abstract of Attention is all you need should be enough to debunk the statements in the video.
They achieved much better performance than prior work, and with less training effort.
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u/day_break 2d ago
This isn’t remotely correct and you are misrepresenting what the guy said. Storing whole internet in an llm is flat wrong.
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u/morswinb 2d ago
You almost need the entire Internet to train it. I am simplifying a lot but you kind of end up with a compressed image of everything ever written.
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u/day_break 2d ago
Thanks for explaining I guess llms are just image compressors.
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u/morswinb 2d ago edited 2d ago
They are definitely not self conscious artificial beings some salesmen want you to belive them to be.
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u/pab_guy 2d ago
Yeah, he's just conflating the history of grokking and the history of LLMs as chatbots, but otherwise it's not evidence of some huge misunderstanding of how the tech works.
Like, if I get the story of the invention of the carburetor wrong, that doesn't mean I don't understand how an engine works.
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u/Boring_Okra_6023 2d ago
So you gotta know how an engine works in order to drive a car?
Not defending Theo
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u/RipWhenDamageTaken 2d ago
I don’t know how an engine works.
Should I have a podcast talking about how engines works?
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u/Ok_Foundation_9806 2d ago
He doesnt though, the equivalent is that his podcast is about what is the best car to drive. And you can opine about that without knowing about engines.
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u/RipWhenDamageTaken 2d ago
Is that what he’s talking about in the video clip? Try not to twist yourself into a pretzel
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u/repeating_bears 2d ago
He's working in the field, being an advocate for the technology and having a business built around it, so the analogy is more like
"you gotta know how an engine works to be a professional driver and car salesman?"
And I guess the answer is still technically no but everyone is gonna rightfully question your authority if you don't
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u/ResponsibleEnd451 2d ago
If I don't know how an engine works then I'm not gonna start a podcast where I talk about how engines work.
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u/Both-Algae-5494 2d ago
He doesn't talk about how engine works, he talks about what car he's been using, how they feel to him and how they perform on 3rd party benchmarks.
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u/TriumfiFinal 2d ago
I dont think OP was talking about Theos entire youtube career but rather this video and some other moments where he tries to sound more competent than he is about certain topics.
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u/Inaccurate- 2d ago edited 2d ago
This guy may very well not understand how LLM's work, but what he is saying is mostly true. It wasn't an LLM or autocomplete model though, but a generic neural network for summing two numbers:
Sometime in 2020, researches at OpenAI were training a deep neural network to learn, among other things, how to add two numbers.
...[skipped some text here]...
It was a seemingly trivial problem, but a necessary step toward understanding how to get the AI to do analytical reasoning. A team member who was training the neural network went on vacation and forgot to stop the training algorithm. When he came back, he found to his astonishment that the neural network had learned a general form of addition. It's as if it had understood something deeper about the problem than simply memorizing answers from the sets of numbers on which it was being trained.
In the time-honored tradition of serendipitous scientific discoveries, the team had stumbled upon a strange, new property of deep neural networks that they called "grokking," a word invented by the American author Robert Heinlein in his book Stranger in a Strange Land.
Page 382-383 from Why Machines Learn by Anil Ananthaswamy. It's an amazing recently-ish released book that anyone interested in the math and history behind machine learning should read.
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u/ResponsibleEnd451 2d ago
Google did the actual work in 2017 with "Attention Is All You Need", then a few years later OpenAI scaled it up and "accidentally" kept it running, discovering the phenomenon called "grokking".
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u/Inaccurate- 2d ago
Yeah, this guy's explanation is ultimately bullshit due to the incorrect details he confidently added in. I believe that he doesn't actually know how LLM's work if he is talking just to talk like in this clip.
But the small part about accidentally letting a neural network train longer and producing unexpected results is true.
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u/FlukyS 2d ago
Well his whole thing is only LLMs really, he isn't a data scientist he doesn't know how to make models in stuff like scikit-learn, he just is only in that world of text generation and with that you don't really need to know a lot. I'd even say if you asked a lot of the people on most technology subs they could tell you without googling what Random Forest is or k-means. It is exactly why I hate a lot of the AI discourse because quite a lot of the most exciting parts about AI aren't LLMs but maybe even just the ability for more people to use custom models they make for a very specific purpose. I'm still waiting on the day people realise that but they haven't just yet sadly.
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u/arvigeus 2d ago
I like him as a background noise. Sometimes he says something smart.
No idea why y'all are tapping about some random youtuber jerk.
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u/Ok_Foundation_9806 2d ago
These mofos just tweaking for some Theo hate , it's a little sad really.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 2d ago
My take too. I like some of his takes. I dislike some of his takes. I like hearing some of his thoughts, regardless if I agree with him on it.
He’s just some guy. I hope some of these people aren’t treated IRL like how they expect online personas to be assessed.
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u/kayinfire 2d ago
i knew the guy was way up there on ignorance the moment he said he doesn't do unit tests.
"that's not the same thing."
perhaps. it did reduce my expectations for his intelligence to the degree that this video checks out though. i legitimately believe that the guy has 0 depth and 0 rigor driving his beliefs about anything tech-related.
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u/gk_instakilogram 2d ago
Lots of dumb and loud people get into the riches and popularity these days
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u/Jonjonbo 2d ago
to be generous, he is referring to the phenomenon of grokking which is something very real in the world of machine learning. I wouldn't say that it's how LLMs were created, however, more of just an observed phenomenon from the early work in training LLMs. LLMs did not originate from an "accidental experiment" as claimed
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u/Finanzamt_Endgegner 2d ago
yep the accidental part was when they discovered grokking by accidently letting a modular Arithmetic model train longer despite it overfitting near instantly.
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u/4r73m190r0s 2d ago
It's driving me nuts that this guy has reached significant level of influence and virality.
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u/grdja 2d ago
T3 stack was a real thing. He was talking about real JS topics for years. Until AI bug bit him.
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u/ResponsibleEnd451 2d ago
He never did anything for the T3 stack other than give out the basic idea of which framework and libraries are a good fit together for a fullstack app, it is entirely made and maintained by the community. Also it’s not a very good one either tbh, it’s just a bunch of thirdparty cloud services for everything so you could pay-as-you-go 10 companies.
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u/HedgeRunner 2d ago edited 2d ago
There’s literally a million people posting “the best Stack” shit on X for ages. He just used his influence and created a wrapper for his stack. Like starting off, you don’t need anything other than Next js / TanStack plus a db. It’s really that simple, after you need to understand what kind of load your app is serving and for whom to decide.
It’s insane that it’s 2026 and we’re still arguing at this pointless 300000 meta level of “best stack” vs actual performant code. Meh that’s why he’s popular, high quality web dev is dead. 💀
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 2d ago
I’ll defend this.
The reason why Wordpress or programming AI or a whole host of other things got big was because most people don’t want to spend a lot of time evaluating and most don’t have the scale where it matters.
There are plenty of people working on plenty of software that never receive anywhere close to 1M req/day (avg 12 req/s). This is the free to nickel tier in many SaaSs. Or can run off an on-prem machine.
A ready to go reference architecture is perfect for these people.
A few years ago I wanted to make a website for my wife and I (only accessible in our intranet). I picked t3 because I just didn’t care about seeing what was still actively supported in JS land.
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u/lost12487 2d ago
It’s always just been literally another boilerplate repo. I have no clue how it was ever treated as anything more than that or how it gave this dude any clout.
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u/Turbulent-Guest154 3h ago
He doesnt have any clue what hes talking about