A high school dropout learned machine learning with ChatGPT. Now he’s a research scientist at OpenAI working on Sora.
Gabriel Petersson said on an episode of the “Extraordinary” podcast published on Thursday that he’s in a job traditionally only done by people with doctorate degrees because he was able to learn machine learning through ChatGPT.
“Universities don’t have, like, a monopoly on foundational knowledge anymore,” he said. “You can just get any foundational knowledge from ChatGPT.”
“You start with a problem, you recursively go down,” he added.
Petersson joined OpenAI’s Sora team in December, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he worked as a software engineer at Midjourney and Dataland. He dropped out of high school in 2019.
Petersson said on the podcast that he left high school in Sweden to join a small startup and had to learn how to code out of necessity. “We had to build things, and we have to make product recommendation systems, scraping, integrations,” he said.
“The good thing with just working is that you always have a real problem,” Petersson said, adding that people learn the fastest with a “top-down approach.”
He applied the same top-down approach to understanding machine learning from scratch. He would ask ChatGPT which project to build, then have it generate the code. When it ran into bugs, he would fix them with the model’s help. From there, he drilled into specific components of the system until the underlying ideas clicked.
“Suddenly, you have all the foundational knowledge, like, it doesn’t need to go bottom up anymore,” he said.
Petersson also said people should focus on results, not credentials, to prove their worth. “Companies just want to make money. You show them how to make money, that you can code, and they’ll hire you.”
Dropouts are the rising stars in tech
College dropouts have become rising stars in the tech industry thanks to AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — a Stanford dropout himself — said last month that he’s “envious of the current generation of 20-year-old dropouts.”
“Because the amount of stuff you can build, the opportunity in this space is so incredibly wide,” he said in an interview with Rowan Cheung at the DevDay conference in October.
Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote in a March blog post that “the playing field has leveled for younger founders,” adding that it is “the best time in a decade for dropouts and recent graduates to start a company.”
Some CEOs have gone even further, openly questioning the value of higher education.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp said on CNBC in February that “everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect.” His company launched a Meritocracy Fellowship in April, a four-month paid internship for high school graduates not enrolled in college.
