High school dropout learned machine learning with ChatGPT. He is currently working on Sora as a researcher at OpenAI.
Gabriel Peterson said on Thursday’s episode of the Extraordinary podcast that he was able to learn machine learning through ChatGPT, which has led him to work in jobs traditionally reserved for people with Ph.D.s.
“Universities no longer have a monopoly on basic knowledge,” he says. “You can get basic knowledge from ChatGPT.”
“When you start with a problem, you recursively go down,” he added.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Peterson joined OpenAI’s Sora team in December. Prior to that, he worked as a software engineer at Midjourney and Dataland. He dropped out of high school in 2019.
Peterson said on the podcast that he dropped out of high school in Sweden to join a small startup and had to learn how to code out of necessity. “We needed to build something, we needed to create a product recommendation system, scraping, integration,” he said.
“The good thing about just working is that you always have real problems,” Peterson said, adding that people learn fastest with a “top-down approach.”
He applied the same top-down approach to understand machine learning from the ground up. He asked ChatGPT which project to build and had it generate the code. If any bugs were encountered, they were fixed with the help of the model. From there, we drilled down into specific components of the system until the underlying idea clicked.
“Suddenly you have all the basic knowledge. You don’t have to do it from the bottom up anymore,” he said.
Peterson also said people should focus on results rather than qualifications to prove their worth. “Companies just want to make money. If you show them how to make money and that you can write code, they’ll hire you.”
School dropouts are the rising stars of the tech industry.
Thanks to AI, a college dropout has become a rising star in the tech industry.
“I envy today’s 20-year-old dropouts,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, himself a Stanford dropout, said last month.
“The opportunities in this space are incredibly wide because of the amount of things you can build,” he said in an interview with Rowan Cheung at the DevDay conference in October.
“The playing field is leveling for young founders,” venture firm Andreessen Horowitz said in a blog post in March, adding, “This is the best time in a decade for dropouts and recent graduates to start a company.”
Some CEOs go further and openly question the value of higher education.
“Everything you learned in school and college about how the world works is intellectually wrong,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC in February. In April, his company launched the Meritocracy Fellowship, a four-month paid internship for high school graduates who are not enrolled in college.
