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Ask HN: Good Sites for/with AI Enthusiasts?

126 points by wruza ↗ HN
As an enthusiast sometimes I feel that I get stuck in a corner and could use some overview. A newsforum about AI engineering could help. E.g. most articles about practical things (think civitai guides), some articles dive deeper into how this tech works (think 3b1b). Do you know a good one?

I only google things and am not e-social, so may miss something obvious like “civitai’s good though, why” or “there’s tech jesus but for AI on YT”.

Interested: AI tech, SD inference and training, local LLM models and prompting/settings, VLMs, TTSs, other models, scripts, experiments, popsci.

Disinterested: CEO said, politics, winter, alignment, eats us all, not a human, etc.

I can provide my lora training and automation experience, for the most part (around 100 sd 1.5 loras, few versions each).

59 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] thread
ed
It’s a big field!

But if you’re in a few discords and a bunch of subreddits, you’re doing it right.

The most interesting stuff happens in GitHub PR’s, but you have to know where to look. Kohya’s misnamed SD3 branch has a ton of good flux hints, for example. It’s also where furkan gets pretty much all his content, before it gets paywalled.

Unfortunately, unless you participate full-time it’s hard to follow along. But if you really dig in and learn to modify your tooling (Comfy, kohya etc), you’ll start to come across some really impressive people who are all self-taught, and very accessible.

It’s totally possible to work your way up to the frontier with a few months of hacking. (And disposable income for GPU time.)

And the overlap between image AI’s and LLM’s is actually pretty great since they’re all transformers under the hood.

Civit, in my experience, is a good source for weights but most of the guides are written by people without much actual experience.

If you haven’t already, use tensorflow or wandb to get an intuitive understanding of your training parameters. It’s very easy to connect your tools to these services. This is by far the most helpful thing I’ve done, and something I really regret not doing sooner.

antimemetics
Any discords you recommend?
ed
I'm on:

Image

- Terminus Research Group, from bghira of SimpleTuner/diffusers https://discord.gg/cSmvcU9Me9

- AI Toolkit https://github.com/ostris/ai-toolkit https://discord.gg/VXmU2f5WEU

- Stable Diffusion https://discord.gg/stablediffusion

LLM

- LLamaIndex https://www.llamaindex.ai https://discord.com/invite/eN6D2HQ4aX

- Nous research https://discord.gg/nousresearch

- LangChain https://discord.gg/hMrfPpUk

Platforms

- Replicate https://discord.gg/replicate

- Fal https://discord.gg/fal-ai

kouteiheika
> use tensorflow

I think you meant TensorBoard?

ed
yep!
grayxu
r/LocalLLaMA
postalcoder
LocalLlama is the place. Really high quality people and discussion there and surprisingly collaborative. Very different than most subreddits.
TNWin
How is /r/machinelearning
ratedgene
good but not as community-oriented I'd say as locallama

the machinelearning subreddit has a lot of great experts there.

/r/learnmachinelearning isn't moderated well enough

vid
I like LocalLLaMA because it's not just for algorithm/math experts, it's for people who want to use LLMs locally (as the name says), so there is often practical discussion on how to use "off the shelf" models and kits. This also implies a patient crowd who will sometimes go into great detail about specific details, since there are many non-specialists.
Two_hands
Hey I have a blog site where I write about implementing different papers and doing deep dives on the papers!

https://ym2132.github.io

I try to go for those things you're looking for. It's hard to find good resources nowadays with real people behind them.

I hope you enjoy the posts. Feel free to reach out about anything on there

MaxPimento
Neat ! Bookmarked :)
input_sh
You've created an account just for this two word comment?

Totally not suspicious.

Two_hands
Fwiw I didn't create that account, I didnt notice it was so new earlier. It is a bit weird though
chrisweekly
random tangent: I like your input.sh website
freeqaz
Reading through this now. Really appreciate the knowledge sharing!

Your content is amazing and with some more polish I feel like it would really shine! (Some sentences not flowing quite right is a little confusing for me, reading the GAN deep dive)

Two_hands
Hey, thanks for your feedback, I'm glad you're finding it interesting!

Noted I am quite new to writing like this, where exactly was it confusing? I'll definitely take this on board and try to increase the clarity in my writing.

reinaldnaufal
https://gwern.net/#deep-learning

Gwern is the place for me. His deep dive on meta-learning is always interesting.

khafra
Recommending Gwern on any technical topic is practically cheating; he always has in-depth, impeccably referenced overviews, complete with experiments he has done.

For deep learning in particular, I will add Neel Nanda's interpretability work: https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability

joenot443
He's the best writer online. If you're reading this Gwern, know that you're greatly admired.
beeboobaa3
Just simulate your own with some LLMs?
hunterhod
Chipp AI public discord is pretty active and folks tend to talk about the latest stuff there. It’s a mostly non-technical crowd though.
paraschopra
I like Machine Learning Street Talk discord server.
_giorgio_
http://x.com

You can find 99% of companies and reasearchers. Just follow them. If you need some names, just ask!

dweinus
A site run by a fascist transphobe? Hard pass.
dagelf
But you're happy living in a country built on the bones of ??? run by warmongering ???
crimsoneer
I hate that this is true, but it is. If you want ot keep up to date with news, following on X + hanging around on discord is the way.
alfanick
https://www.lesswrong.com/ for HN-style longer AI-related posts, especially around alignment and consciousness
trustno2
I think that's what OP is not interested in
olalonde
Indeed, OP's "disinterested" list matches LessWrong almost perfectly.

> Disinterested: CEO said, politics, winter, alignment, eats us all, not a human, etc.

Vecr
Isn't it pretty niche to not want discussions of winter or alignment? I guess you can go read Nick Land? If there's not at least a mini-winter or alignment some time soon it's going full Nick Land, right?

What I mean is, Nick Land is the only person I know of who can at least sort of credibly claim to have a theory for why alignment isn't just not guaranteed, but is in fact impossible, and there's ~no chance of a lasting winter.

trustno2
what

OP wants technical discussions

Vecr
Even then isn't it irresponsible to avoid talk about progress from other labs vs the probability of winter? Either way you could get wiped out hard, investment wise and product/startup wise.
1oooqooq
ask chatgpt about your favorite research echo chamber
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
gom_jabbar
Here's a primary literature review on Nick Land's thesis that AI and capitalism are teleologically identical and will converge on the event horizon of the techno-economic singularity.

It's AI hype to the max.

https://retrochronic.com/

Vecr
Not really not "eats us all, not a human" though. Do OP's requirements really make sense?