High School Dropout to OpenAI Researcher - Gabriel Petersson Interview (Extraordinary)

I can barely take universities seriously that don't teach ChatGPT as a part of their curriculum.

Gabriel Peterson, a high school dropout from Sweden who now works as an AI research scientist at OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.

I always thought I was too dumb. I met a programmer once. I was so starstruck. I was sleeping on couch pillows that I found in like the common room. Companies just want to make money. You show them how to make money, that you can code, and they'll hire you.

I currently work at Sora where we're building What advice would you give to someone who doesn't know what they want to do?

The way I think people learn the fastest is—

Welcome to Extraordinary, the origin stories behind extraordinary people. I'm CJOL Wen, the founder of Extraordinary.com, and I'm here with Gabriel Peterson, a high school dropout from Sweden who works as an AI research scientist at OpenAI, the creators behind ChatGPT. To be a research scientist, Typically, you need a PhD, but Gabriel has been able to teach himself mathematics and machine learning using ChatGPT, and now works at the world's top AI company. Gabriel was born in the middle of nowhere in Sweden, and now is in San Francisco, California, after getting his O-1 Extraordinary Ability Visa. Gabriel, welcome to Extraordinary.

Thank you so much. Very happy to be here.

So Gabriel, your story is super fascinating to me. I have a tweet over here. It says, 5 years ago, I dropped out of high school in Sweden to join a startup with close to zero experience as an engineer. Today, I'm joining OpenAI as a research scientist to build AGI with Sora. How did you get here from that?

Yeah, it's a long story. I've always been thinking about AI ever since I started reading books like Superintelligence and Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark. Yeah, Max Tegmark.

Dude, I love that.

And both of them happen to be Swedish people as well. Okay, there's, there's something here. But I always thought I was too dumb. I think I was looking into AI, like I didn't really know programming. And I was like, probably there is like a bunch of really smart people out there that I can never compete with. And yeah, I just ended up working as an engineer for a couple of years.

So you dropped out of high school. How did that happen? How did you have the conviction to leave high school when everyone around you from your home country, your hometown was there?

I didn't really make the decision. It just more like happened. I think, yeah, my cousin called me one day and said, hello, I just talked to this person. He's really, really smart. He has this product idea to make like product recommendation system with AI and we should start selling this today. He's currently in Singapore like doing research and yeah, we're gonna start selling. Like we're starting like, yeah, come to Stockholm as fast as possible. And I was like, dude, I have this big party tonight. I'll come tomorrow. He's like, no. So I just went Like, I took the next bus to Stockholm and I just never returned.

So you dropped out of high school, you went to this startup, what happened?

We had this idea, which was building a product recommendation system for e-commerce stores. And at first, like, none of us knew anything about startups at all. We were completely like, okay, what do we do? How do we sell? So the first way I started selling was like calling people up. Like, I started with sending cold emails, didn't work very well. I started calling people up, kind of, you know, people were, sometimes interested, but, you know, I was this random 18-year-old. I had no idea what I was doing. I was non-technical. The way we used to do selling, I used to knock on company doors and I'd bring this like A— is it A3? Like the big papers.

Yeah.

And I'd have already since before like scraped their entire website, trained new product recommendation systems, which is like you have a product and then you have the recommendations under, like what products do you show to increase sales. So I print their old product recommendations to the left and our new product recommendations to the right. And I made like 100 of these.

Wow.

And I have them in like a big folder. And then I went looking at the doors. Hey, can I talk to the e-commerce manager or CEO? And then just show them like, hey, this is your old product recommendations, this is your new product recommendations. And then they were always like impressed. They were like, oh shit, did you do all of this? How did you do this? This is very cool. But then, you know, immediately they're like, okay, but how do I go from here? Like there's so many unknowns. Do not worry. I always brought a script I could paste into their console on their website. which flipped their product recommendations with our product recommendations. And I was like, yeah, we are ready today. We can just go live now. Right, that's crazy. And then they're always like, okay, but how do we know that we'll make money? And I'm like, do not worry, I have an A/B test set up already in this script. It will track like the revenue from people using your product recommendations and our product recommendations. So I could just like first meeting, just close them, everything ready. From the start, we did all the implementations to it, which, you know, would backfire hugely later because we didn't, you know, we're just thinking, let's just scale or let's not think about like being easy to scale up. Let's just like, just make sure we get customers, right?

With like a bunch of other 17, 18-year-olds who dropped outta high school.

Yeah. Yeah. So it was Oliver, he was a researcher, he was 16 or 17 at that point. And then my cousin was like—

And you guys were all in person in like Stockholm, Sweden?

Yeah, so I was living in my cousin's dorm room, but we were—

In college?

Yes, so we were— no, we don't have dorm rooms. It's more like, it's kind of dorm rooms, but in like normal apartments in Sweden.

Okay, I got it.

And they're super tiny.

Yeah.

And you know, you can only live there if you go to the university, but you know, we had to submit things like, oh yeah, we, we, he's still doing university, right? And I was sleeping on Couch pillows that I found in like the common room for one year.

Nice.

It was a disgusting room, but it worked well. And we're sitting in this like coworking space.

What made you keep going? Like most people kind of quit, but you— and they would probably go back to school, but you just, you never went back. Like, why did you keep going? Why did you keep like living in a shared dorm room on these like community couches?

I think I've always had a very distorted view of reality. Like, I was 100% sure that this would make me a billionaire. 100%. It was like no doubt in the world. And I was like super serious and like acting just like I believed, like, okay, this is going to be the next big thing. Like nothing else mattered. I was like, I'm just gonna, you know, I was working like all night, all-nighter after all-nighter. You know, I was traveling around Stockholm trying to do sales.

Yeah.

We're doing like all these like crazy-ass things to try to get customers.

So you originally dropped out without Knowing how to code. How did you go about learning that?

Mostly because I was forced to when we had to do the integrations with—

Yeah, like how did you, how did you learn? I guess you had some friends around you who knew how to code.

Yeah, back then. So the first way I learned how to code was my cousin when I was very young, like at this point I was like 13 or something, but he showed me Java and I made this super simple like Pokémon clone, like turn-based. You could like take damage. Such a bad application. And then it's— some time went by and then I made like a Udemy Python course. I learned super simple Python. I made this like really ass game where like you had lily pods coming and you were like a duck trying to avoid them. It's really dumb. And I also did, like, I tried to get into machine learning. I did all these like, you know, the classic like machine learning course by Andrew Ng. Yeah. I just thought like, yeah, I'm probably too dumb for this. I just can't do this stuff. But yeah, when I really started getting into coding was at Deepict when we, you know, We had to build things. I mean, we had to make product recommendation systems, scraping, integrations, set up A/B testing and all these things.

Yeah, but how do you learn that if you don't go to school?

The good thing with just working is that you always have a real problem, which makes everything so simple. Like everyone always says like, if you don't go to school, how can you learn? I'm like, well, it's so much more easy. Like then you have a real problem and you know, you can map out, okay, I wanna integrate my product recommendation system to this e-commerce store. To do that, I need to figure out how to select the elements on the webpage. I need to insert them correctly. I need to learn how to do all these things. And then you can take it step by step. You go to Stack Overflow and, you know, you can ask your friends if you're stuck. And yeah, I think that's like a simpler way to learning. And especially when you have all this pressure on you, right?

Yeah.

If you have a real job, you have pressure and that's everything. Like I could never learn anything without pressure. There's just no way. Like if someone were like, oh yeah, learn this thing. But you have infinite time and you'll also not make money from it.

If you were to give advice to another high school dropout, what would it be so that they would learn more?

I think I was extremely lucky. I mean, I was living in this town called Vaggeryd in the middle of nowhere in Sweden. I knew no engineers. I met a programmer once in early high school. I was so starstruck. I was like, do you code? Do you like make web pages? That's awesome. And when you don't have this like culture, like why is SF such a capital of startups? Well, because everyone's only talking about startups. It's like so clear how to do one, but if you're like in the middle of nowhere and you don't, you're not like surrounded by people, this is like all they talk about. You'll think all these things are impossible. Like doing all these things for me, I was like, damn, this seems so far away. And I was very lucky to have The Peak. The Peak was the first thing where I was like, oh, this is a real thing. I mean, I had no options and I probably, it would be very hard to have options because I didn't know what I was looking for. It just came up and it happened to be an extremely good, For me, for other people who want to do the same thing, like getting into the market as fast as possible, solving real problems, having accountability. I mean, now with the help of ChatGPT, you don't even need to know. You don't even need to have much knowledge about the thing you're doing. If you can just prove to the person that yeah, I'm good at asking ChatGPT what I need to know. Like I'm super creative. I'm super high agency. You know, you you show all these things to the person hiring, and then the last thing is oh, but you don't know the actual thing. And you'd be like, yeah, yeah, I talk to ChatGPT all the time. Like I'm really good at like extracting information. Like you have all knowledge in the world there. Knowledge is not a problem anymore.

Yeah.

In the same way that it used to be.

You don't have to like go to an institution and then read up on something as like a prerequisite course for some potential solution or some potential application. You can now just go into real world, find problems like, oh, how do I like optimize this? Or how do I teach people faster? Or whatever problem you wanna solve. And then you can query AI like ChatGPT to figure out how you can solve it and how you can learn the different pieces of knowledge to solve it.

The way I think people learn the fastest is by what you would call like a top-down approach, right? You'll probably learn faster if you start with a problem and then you can read about everything required to start solving the problem. And then you find more problems and you read about those. And then you go down to like the core of the problem, right? So you start with actual task and you go down. But that's extremely rare way to learn. Like in school, everyone has this mindset, right? Of like, okay, we need to start with the foundations. We need to start like, if you want to work with machine learning, like you can forget about doing any machine learning for the first like 4 years, right? It's like math. And then you have like matrix multiplications, you have linear algebra, and you have all these things that build up. And then you have the simpler ML that's like, super outdated. You have linear regression, all these things that are still used partly, but it's like, it'll take you a very long time until you get to production-grade ML.

Why is this?

Well, it's extremely hard to scale the top-down approach because that requires a teacher always being there for you. It requires you being able to know exactly what piece of thing you need to learn at any point of time. Well, if you do bottom-up, you know, okay, first you always learn this, then you always learn this. And it's much easier to scale, but it's extremely inefficient. And now with ChatGPT, all of this changes. Like this will change. People say education will change all the time, but I can barely take universities seriously that don't teach ChatGPT as a part of their curriculum. It's like actually insane that this is not like a course that's taught from like 2 years old. Like suddenly foundational knowledge, universities don't have like a monopoly on foundational knowledge anymore. You can just get any foundational knowledge from ChatGPT. And people haven't really internalized how top-down problem solving works. They will always tell you things, you know, like, oh, but you'll never actually understand the problem. You'll never actually blah, blah, blah. And this is not true. You start with a problem, you recursively go down. Like if I want to learn machine learning, I ask ChatGPT, okay, what project should I do? Write a project for me. I have bugs. I start fixing the bugs and then things work. And from there, I start with a specific part of the machine learning problem. Like, okay, what happens here? Can you explain to me with intuition why this module here makes the model learn? And it'll explain it to you. And then you say, oh, it uses matrix multiplication and linear algebra. You know, okay, how do they work? What's the math intuition behind this? Like, show me, like, make up a couple graphs to really make me get an intuition for this part of ML. And then suddenly you have all the foundational knowledge. Like, it doesn't need to go— bottom up anymore.

Yeah.

And this shift will, yeah, I think this shift will like fundamentally change how education is done.

What are schools not teaching you about AI?

First of all, the perception of AI is completely wrong in schools. ChatGPT came, naturally students were like, oh nice, something can do all the work for me. And that's all they thought about, which makes sense. That's the first thing I would apply it to as well. And the first thing the teachers think about is, oh no, everyone will just use AI to do work. We need to ban AI. AI is bad. And that becomes like a reinforcing circle of like, Students' perception of AI is like, okay, I can use this to cheat. And teachers' perception is like, okay, teachers just use this to cheat. Like, it's really hard to build up an intuition of how to learn from AI. It doesn't come very naturally. Now it's like, I'm extremely happy when I talk to like my friends back in Sweden, they go to university and they're like, oh, I realized I can use ChatGPT to like give me quizzes. Like I give it all the previous questions and I ask it like, okay, Tell me some fundamental things that all of these different questions share so I can really learn what they try to teach me. Or like generate 10 new questions, right? And people are starting to learn how to use AI. The teachers are still very, very anti-AI, which makes no sense. Like if the teachers just switch the narrative to, okay, here's how you learn efficiently. Like if a student wanna cheat at tests, I mean, they'll find ways to do that either way. And if you're never taught that, you know, you can actually use this to learn things, I mean, adults use it to cheat.

Like, yeah. Yeah. There's just no concept of that. Yeah. So how do you use AI to learn? How did you use AI to self-teach yourself math and machine learning to now work at OpenAI?

I did a very similar thing to what I was describing before. So I currently work at Sora where we're building these video models at OpenAI. And I wanted to learn things like, you know, the basics of image models. So I asked GPT, hey, what are the most fundamental concepts of like video and image models in AI? And it started talking about, okay, we had these things called autoencoders, we have these things called diffusion models. And I was like, yeah, that sounds interesting. I've heard about this everywhere. That's very cool. Now, you know, write all the code for diffusion model. And it writes all the code and I have no idea what's going on, right?

Right.

I'm like, okay, here's a bunch of code.

Holy shit.

And then you try to get it working, you debug it together, you tell it what's wrong. And then you start to build up an intuition of like, okay, this happens here, this happens here, this happens here. And then you continue to just understand in detail what every single line of code does, right? So you're like, okay, what does this part do? What does this part do? So for example, for a diffusion model, for example, you can take apart like parts, for example, called a ResNet, for example. And it has ResNet blocks and they do a bunch of transformation and then they also have a residual. Which is basically like you let data pass through in a certain way, which makes the model learn more easy, right? And at the start, I have no idea how this is done, right? And you start asking ChatGPT follow-ups, follow-ups, and it'll tell you something like what I just told you, but you still have a huge question mark.

Like, what is this? Like, why?

What does this mean? Like, what do you mean it learns more efficiently? And what do you do then? Well, you follow up and you'll be like, well, how does it learn more efficiently because it's doing this? You'll be like, oh yeah, the gradients can flow in these X, Y, Z different ways. And in the scenario that you wouldn't do this thing, they would be stopped at X, Y, Z things. And you just continue to ask the model constantly until you really understand. And when you understand, you can just tell the model, okay, this is my understanding of this. Is this completely correct? And then you'll also start learning about all these small tricks you can do, right? Like explain this concept like I'm 12 years old. That one is really good. It'll start like super easily. Like imagine you are in a bookstore and you can imagine the embeddings being the different books in the store. And then you can imagine all this and it'll connect everything that has to do with AI to like real world concepts, which makes it really easy to reason about for someone like me.

So it sounds like any sort of topic you can learn now and all you need is ChatGPT. And you start with just asking like, hey, what are like the preliminary things I need to, you know, understand about this? And then you might pull on one of those threads, right? First, like when you were investigating video models, you're like, okay, image generation models are like diffusion models, like Stable Diffusion. And you're like, okay, how the frick does a diffusion model work? And then you would have it explain it to you, maybe generate code samples. But every aspect of that you would then inquire further. Like, I don't understand this part. What is this? Why is this adopted to this model architecture? Oh, why is this done this way? Okay, how does that math work? And I mean, I read like your posts on x.com, which are very popular. And it looks like you're just able to use AI in a way where you continuously query until you have full understanding. And then when you do have full understanding, you almost like re-explain similar to how Feynman, the best way to learn is to explain things, but now you can do it with AI, right?

Yeah.

And so when you're learning about diffusion models, after going through a deep dive on some like very technical topic where you might not even know what gradients are, right? And then you'll, it'll explain to you calculus or some linear algebra and you pick that up. But then you would explain it back to the model and then it will then clarify or like see different aspects that you don't understand. And you keep repeating that until you have a very strong grasp.

I see it a bit as recursive gap filling, if I would summarize it in one word. It's like you need— the skill that's required here is knowing what gaps you have in your knowledge. Say you have an AI model or whatever else you want to learn and understanding when you don't really understand a part. It's actually pretty hard to do. It's something you need to train up and practice on yourself. Wait a second, do I really understand this part? And then, so that's one signal you need. The second signal is when you start asking questions, you need to have a real strong signal for when it clicks, when you're like, ah, there it clicked.

Yeah.

I can just understand like fundamentally why this thing is as it is.

How would someone else learn how to learn with AI?

This is a very good question. I mean, first of all, just change like the misconception of AI being used to do the work for you to instead, you know, use the AI to explicitly help you learn. Like, you don't just use it to get work done, you actually learn from it. I mean, the moment you just switch that mindset, which seems still fairly uncommon, but it's becoming more and more common all the time, you have most of the things to get there, right? And then to become really good, first of all, like I said, like, know when you have gaps in your knowledge, understand what it feels like when you fundamentally grasp something. And, you know, you constantly come up with all these hacks, like, You'll notice ChatGPT will respond in a fairly standard way. And your way of learning is probably not exactly what it responds like, because it wants to, you know, make sure everyone has a good experience.

Yep.

But you probably would want it to respond in another way. I very often tell it, for example, be extremely direct and concrete. Always show me all the intermediate states and the shapes of the code you produce. Make sure to make sure I have like a really intuitive understanding of why it happens. And if you're unsure, make sure you show me options and like what others have tried and why this works and why something else didn't work. And you start becoming good at like asking these questions that give you the aha moment. Like as fast as possible, you want to get to the aha moment.

Yeah.

Like the first time you understood linear algebra or the first time you understood why backpropagation works, you probably had a very clear like, oh wow, it finally clicked. And to chase these clicks, And to make them appear like as frequent as possible, right? That's like kind of your utility function.

That's crazy. It's like in modern day, in order to stay competitive and to be like top performing, when you look at someone like honestly, they can, they'll be at the top of the field pretty quickly, like how you've done it just by the rate of being able to query for information. And that's probably like the most important skill now. What do you say?

Yeah. And, and, and, you know, building up this, like, this is another very important, like, build up the moment you have a question in your head, make sure to get it into ChatGPT. This one is very hard. This took me, I remember my, my cousin, the same cousin I started a company with, he was like, um, dude, ChatGPT is out. This was like pre, pre, like the ChatGPT, what's it called? I think of this back in the day when it was just like a playground. It was like super early GPT-3. Like before ChatGPT days. And he was like, why are you not using this yet? Like you're writing code all the time. Like, yeah, I'm gonna try it out. And you know, he kept on pushing me every month and it took me like a year until I really started connecting like, oh, I have this problem and I need to ask ChatGPT. And it's so common. Like you meet people all the time, you're in a discussion and people have all these questions or you sit coworking with someone, they have all these questions, you know? And you're like, you should ask ChatGPT. It's like every time you have any kind of question, anytime, you need to guess about something, just constantly ask ChatGPT. Like, it's always there. It's very low effort. Like, make sure you have a very simple way to just ask ChatGPT about anything you ever wonder, and you'll just, you know, have all knowledge in the world.

Yeah. But the important part is like almost getting hooked on like how fast you can get to that aha moment of realizing or internalizing something and the skill of being able to prompt ChatGPT, not in a generic way, but in a way where it'll give you very concrete or, you know, different analogies or whatever form factor that works best with your learning style for you to then understand and internalize that.

Which is really hard. Or I mean, I think I'm pretty dumb. So it's like, sometimes when I ask ChatGPT stuff and it explains it and I'm like—

I don't understand.

I don't understand. It is just too hard. And you try again and try again and you're like, okay. And then you really grab, you're like, ah, you're like, okay, prompting skills time, right? And you're like, okay, what if these features in the world didn't exist? And what if that never existed? Would they still have invented this thing? And explain it to me like I'm 12. And you have, you know, generate graphs showing the distributions that I need to know to really understand this. Like, you know, there's so many creative ways you can use to really extract the information you need from ChatGPT. And I think a lot of the things I've learned, especially like with previous models, like ChatGPT is becoming so much better all the time. But like a year ago when the models weren't as strong, some of the things I've learned is like, I probably couldn't learn them if I didn't like really know how to extract the information. Like I could ask the question 1,000 times and make it rephrase it 1,000 times. I just wouldn't understand. This is why they should teach ChatGPT in like from elementary school. This is like, you know, in a new language. This is like, you know, You know, you still need all the other things in life, like creativity, you know, agency and like all these other things. But like knowledge is like a completely new era. Like you can't compare this with anything else. Very concrete example of this, 'cause people that doesn't— don't seem to realize how like AI, like how abruptly this will change the world. Like currently I'm doing a job which traditionally everyone would agree you need like a PhD for, right? There's a bunch of people who have done it without a PhD, but like if you told someone like 5 years ago, like, oh yeah, at one of the top AI labs, someone will be hired who hasn't, you know, really done the thing for a while. Not a colleague. And the only thing he had was that he had done like all these very cool things in other areas, but didn't know anything about this thing. People are like, no, that's not possible, right? But we are now in a scenario where I can do the job traditionally only, you know, done by people who have done it for like multiple years just by using ChatGPT. That's insane. Like the amount how fast the world will develop with ChatGPT. Like you can just do research in anything you want. If you want to start doing bio research, you want to start doing like hardware, you can just go and do things. It's just incredible.

Yeah.

This will be like a double-digit increase in world GDP, like just coming from large language models.

And anyone can do it as long as they know how to use ChatGPT.

Yeah, it's $20 per month. And you know, the thinking models are like really, really good when it comes to like coding and like understanding things.

How do you use ChatGPT to learn as you build out? Like one of the world's best video models?

It's fairly simple. Like a lot of people ask me this and they're always confused, like, okay, what do you actually do? Right? Like, what do you do? And, you know, they imagine, I don't know what they imagine, but, you know, something very, very special. Right? And it's fairly simple. You know, you look at the video and you're like, oh, this part of the video doesn't look very good. So you go and you change the architecture in the model a bit. Or you change the data or something. And, you know, you train the model, you look at the results, you stare at videos for a while and you're like, oh, these videos were better. That's great. This goes into master. And then you just do that on a loop, right? You're like, okay, what's the next thing that I want to fix or the next thing I want to try? And that's where like AI is really good, right? Because it's like, oh, I have this specific problem. Hello, AI. You know, here's my entire codebase. Tell me 10 ideas of what I can do to improve this. It'll tell you a bunch of ideas. It'll refer to papers you can read. It'll do all these really great things and it'll give you a bunch of ideas. It's really good to brainstorm with. And you can bring all these ideas to your colleagues and talk to them who are just extremely good. And yeah, it's fairly straightforward.

Wow. How does it find other research papers to suggest you to explore?

It just knows about them.

It just knows?

Yeah. It's cute. 4.0 just print— I think even earlier models, you just print out the links and you press the link.

And it would just work? Yeah. Yeah. Because the model just memorized the links.

Yeah, it knows the links to the big papers, like, probably not to smaller papers, but you can also use the search function. You can just turn on the search while you're speaking to it and be like, yeah, find some papers talking about this. And then obviously I don't read the papers word for word.

You use ChatGPT?

I have my instructions like, okay, I want to, give me a list of things this paper did differently. Because oftentimes a paper, they take some technique that I already know about and they introduce some new things to it. And I just ask it, okay, compared to the other thing, tell me a list and be extremely concrete of exactly what they did that compares to the previous thing. And that's a really good summarization. And oftentimes, you know, you're like, ah, this paper probably wouldn't make it. It's not worth trying out. And you can just go to the next one. Or you're like, ah, this paper is really good. Like, I only read the paper in depth if I actually decide to implement it. And then I probably will read it when I'm— if I have bugs, like I'll probably just like throw in all my code and be like, hey, implement this into my code. I'll just copy paste it in.

Oh, wow.

And, you know, I obviously make sure to like really read through the code. I think it's extremely important. You can't just throw in code.

You can't just vibe code?

No, I'm not a vibe coder. I'm very opinionated when it comes to code.

No, it sounds like you have a very different approach where if you actually want to build really concrete things, you need to understand everything, right? Because especially if you're pushing the forefront of any field.

Yeah. I mean, I want to understand all the foundations. I think the first reaction people have is like, oh, you just want to take shortcuts. You don't really want to understand things. You just think you can slop out a bunch of AI slop, right? And I think this is not correct at all. I want to take shortcuts, that's for sure, but I want to take shortcuts to understand all the foundations. And that's very important. It seems like either you're on the camp like, okay, AI slop, do all the work for me, I never wanna work. Or you're in the camp, you need to go to college, they have a monopoly on all the foundational knowledge, you need to have this taught by a professor. And I'm probably somewhere in between, right? I mean, you need all these things and AI is great. Like you should use it for everything.

You should use it to understand everything and train its like human-AI symbiosis in terms of like just Enhancing your brain and enhancing your ability. So you were in Stockholm, you left your first startup, and how did you find your way to San Francisco? What did you do?

Yeah, I always knew I wanted to continue to work in startups, and I always had my sights on San Francisco because, you know, all the best people I knew had moved here. All the, you know, all the best companies people were talking about were here. And I noticed that like Probably I should just like super optimize for learning as fast as possible. This was sadly pre-ChatGPT. Like, just imagine where I would've been now if I had ChatGPT when starting to learn things.

A billionaire.

Yeah. And like back then, the best thing you could do was to work with the very best people. So that's what I tried to do. And so how do you work with the best people? Well, you talk to as many companies as possible. You make sure, you know, you interview the person interviewing you, right? Like, what have you done? Like, do you guys do pull requests? Do you make sure to really review my PRs so I actually know what mistakes I do? And I managed to join a couple of companies with like really, really talented engineers. I also made sure to be like, I generally worked as a contractor. Like the biggest mistakes people do is that they stay with the same company for way too long early in their careers. That's like by far the biggest mistake I see in people's careers.

So it sounds like a year after dropping out of high school, you know, after your first company, you just kept finding the best teams or the best engineers or the best people that you thought, you know, you could work with and you work with them for a bit, you learn what it could, and then you kept finding new opportunities or like better teams and you—

Yeah, I used to only take contractor roles to make sure that like that I could be very mobile in the places I work with. You try to find the best places to work with, with the best people. Yeah, you try to work as closely with them as possible, make sure you're opinionated about what you're working with so you don't only get to do like the tasks no one else wants to do because then you're not learning. Make sure you really show appreciation for the people reviewing your code because that's the best source of—

Or getting feedback.

Getting feedback in general. And, you know, hunt feedback. I mean, tell people, hey, I really liked your review. Can you just review every single feedback of mine? And people will be like shocked, like, oh wow, I'd never heard someone liking feedback before. This is— yeah, of course.

Yeah, it's rare because people usually shy away because they already did their schooling and now they're working, but But yeah, as a young person with like no really accolades, you're like a middle— you're nobody with no degree. Yeah. Right. The way for you to learn is like join the best teams and then be very nimble, but also just relentlessly seek feedback, it seems.

Yeah. And, you know, call them up, call them up and be like, hey, that was a great review. Now let's go through all the comments together on a call, right? You learn so much and you just like ask follow-up questions like, What's the intuition? Like, there's like, becoming a really good engineer is extremely hard. It's like such a wide area. There's like so many like first principles things and intuitions you need to understand. And they're pretty easy while you know them, but they can be very hard to learn. And to have someone just straight up tell them to you and you being good at like picking them up, it's like such a—

In the same way that, whereas long before, you know, you only can do that from maybe like an existing engineer or maybe a teacher, but now you also have AI who can do that.

Now you can do this on demand at any company.

You can just stop your own company. It could be like 4 AM and you've been up coding or making something or like writing a paper or researching something and you can still ask AI for feedback and explain to you why was this, why is this a better decision?

I do this all the time. I think like when you've found something in life that works really well, you should exploit it like to the maximum. Like, Ask ChatGPT 100 questions per day, right? Yeah. Like I always have tabs open with ChatGPT. I write code, throw it in there and I'm like, is this good? Is this good? This is good. Are there any bugs? What can I do better? You know, why not? I mean, it'll probably tell you, oh yeah, it looks fine right now. But sometimes it's like, oh yeah, there is a bug. Or, oh yeah, you can do it in this way instead. That's simpler, right? You just constantly learn.

Yeah. And if you're doing it like literally 100 times a day, That's like 100 well-thought-out questions or follow-up questions. And you're just able to outpace 99.9% of people in the world as a high school dropout.

Yeah. And it should be added, like, I think there is still so much valuable advice to be had from humans. There's like still, you know, when it comes to like opinions and things, like if you imagine about how models are trained, they train on all data on the internet and there's a bunch of different opinions. I know sometimes you might have weird opinions, right? I mean, there's still a lot of value in working with like the really best people.

Yep.

But you can get like 95% of that now, which is the AI.

So work with the best people, get feedback from them, but also constantly query AI wherever you go to build very deep understandings of any problem you want to solve and any concept you want to learn. Yeah. You were learning from these senior engineers. You're contracting at different companies, like different YC companies or like different All these different opportunities. How did you end up coming to America if you didn't go to school, if you didn't have a high school diploma?

Yeah, it started out with joining a company called Dataland. We're doing kind of like an Airtable, but way more performant and like developer first. And yeah, a scalable Airtable, you could say. And that was a very important decision. I was working there with with an engineer who's extremely talented and he just loved teach people.

Ooh.

And he'd love having perfect code, which is perfect for me because, you know, I write code and he'd just do like 100 comments per PR.

Wow.

And you had to call him anytime and be like, hey, what do you think like this? And he would be really good at like explaining the first principles reasons for why some code was written in a certain way. And at some point, you know, I was working remotely from Sweden and they were in New York and I was like, yeah, I really wanna go to the US. And I think this is where, I first wanted to go to the US. This ended up not happening because the company pivoted and, uh, to something like, to something else. So I decided to leave. That was like my first, like I started a process there, something called a J-1 visa, which is more like a, you could say like an internship visa.

Yep.

'Cause we were all pretty sure like, yeah, I can't get an O-1 visa. There's like no way. And it's, you know, you either need to win the Nobel Prize or you need like all these random things. I was like, yeah, there's no way. Like, how, how could I do this? And then I ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. And this is when I went to San Francisco and I was here on an ESTA visa for a couple of months just talking to people, trying to figure out like, okay, what would people do here? Like what's coolest companies? And there I ended up joining Midjourney. After joining Midjourney, I was like, yeah, okay, now maybe we can do O-1. And turns out the O-1 visa, there's like so many creative ways you can get an O-1 visa, very many creative ways. For example, one thing we used for my O-1 visa was my Stack Overflow posts. I remember my cousin telling me, oh, you're wasting your time answering a bunch of Stack Overflow questions. And I was like, you don't know, maybe it's helpful at some point. And turns out Stack Overflow posts can be counted as, yeah, here we have it even. Here's my post about it on—

So you can use Stack Overflow posts to get the academic publishing criteria for your O-1.

Which is legitimate. Like I have like millions and millions of views. A lot of like peers will review your posts. They're very strict. They will downvote and remove anything that's not true. And if you get upvotes, you're helping a bunch of people, which was the criteria. Like, have you helped people?

I think like with GitHub or like Stack Overflow, it's definitely a very creative way to argue for your L1. And so how did you— Midjourney is one of the biggest and best, it's the best AI image generation company. How did you end up working there?

Yeah, it was kind of interesting. I mean, it's extremely hard to deterministically go somewhere in your career. And kind of what you want to do, it's very cliché what everyone's saying, right? But it's like you want to have a bunch of small chances everywhere, right? You just want to go wide. You want to post things that you've done. You want to make sure you have really good demos. You want to reach out to as many people as possible. Go to events and ask people for intros and make sure they do the intro at the event. Really force them to, okay, oh, you want to intro me? Well, yeah, let's do it right now.

Yeah, bias towards action so that it actually happens. You make sure the results It is a very high agency move. Yeah.

And also be very clear with how you can give them value and make sure they understand that you're not a nobody, right? I was a nobody, but the moment you show anything at all, like, oh, I made this, like something I made, for example, is this thing called FastGrid. It's like a really performant web table. And you just show, you know, anytime you talk to someone that you think is relevant that can help you, you know, make sure you show them that you're relevant, right? Oh, I built this really cool thing. You should see it. And they're always like, oh wow, this is really cool. And now suddenly, you know, they have a bunch of friends who start startups, for example. And now they want to introduce you to them because they have seen that you know things. Like everyone wants to help you if you first can make sure, you know, that you can show them because they can gain a bunch of like, you know, social value from, you know—

Doing an intro. Yeah, for doing an intro. Oh, you hired someone I introduced to you. Right, and they're a good hire. If you are a nobody, if you are from the middle of nowhere, like how, you know, you're from the middle of nowhere in Sweden, if you're a nobody, how would you go about showing your value to someone important?

The number one thing I recommend to people is making a demo that is super, super simple. It's actually really hard to make a good demo for a lot of reasons. Everyone thinks it's hard because they need to make a demo That is hard and they don't have the skills. This is very not true. You can make very simple— like, you don't need that much code knowledge to make a really cool demo. The hard part of making a demo is making sure that people understand why you can code within 3 seconds. You know, you have like 100 applicants for something. If you apply with one link and they press the link and, you know, you have one shot, right? Like, making sure you build a really cool demo where people understand what they're looking at, which is really hard. And where people understand that you're a really good engineer, which is really hard, but then you're there. I mean, that's all they want to see. I mean, companies just want to make money. You show them how to make money, that you can code, and they'll hire you. And then you might say, oh, but they only hire people with degrees. Well, yeah, because literally no one has ever showed them that they can do their work. They're like, oh, I had these internships. And the interviewer would be like, okay, what did you do there? Oh, I streamlined pipelines and made things 30% more efficient. And then you're like, okay, well, that tells me literally nothing. Okay, what else? What have you done? Oh, I went to Harvard. I have the best grades. Well, I still don't know if you can do the job, right? Oh, but I have all this extracurricular. I was a debate champion. You know, they start going on with all these things that their parents will tell you, people around you will tell you. Nothing matters. The only reason it matters is because no one can show that they can do anything. So then they start listening to this like, proxy things. No one generally, you know, cares. Now, there are people who actually care, right? Who are these people? The CEO will never care. They will never care. They just want to make money, right? Which is great. You just, hey, I can make money.

Oh, great.

Here's a task. You know, everything's perfect. When the further away from the CEO you come, the harder it becomes because people start losing incentives to do the best thing for the company. And instead, what comes up instead? Well, they don't want to fuck up. They just don't want to lose. So how do they hire someone that if they are a bad hire, they will not get any—

You go through conventional accolades. Like they went to the top school.

Exactly. Oh, they went to top school. How could I know they were bad? Right? So then the recruiter doesn't make a mistake, right? So that's the, you know, the thing to avoid, like avoid people who have no incentives in the company. So generally avoid recruiters at a company.

Yeah.

Like they're not even technical. They can't even know if you're good or bad. They will only go on all these like proxy signals. And that's why people say I need a degree because, you know, that's everything they say. People don't know that you can just talk to people. You just go to an event with tech people and like every single startup I know, wants to hire people who have high agency and can learn things.

Yeah.

Literally, if you're really good at using ChatGPT, you saw one of these people at a random event, you went up and talked to them and you give them some advice and you're like, yeah, I'd like to, can we try working together for a week for free? This will be super fun. Like I have these random ideas I just came up with that I can work with, with you that are, you know, no commitment from your side, no time from your side. You just like get a free data point if I'm good or not.

Yeah.

And 100% of them would say yes. They're like, oh great, I don't need to do anything and I can see if you're good.

Yeah.

Like if you're generally a person who knows things and like not even knows things, if you, if you're just a smart person who can use ChatGPT, you can get a job tomorrow. And here's where people are like, but it's a risk, right? I want to get into college. I want to do all these things. There is no risk. And you can even do it the risk-free way. Just apply to college. You can go to college.

Yeah.

Apply to college. And while you're in college, apply to jobs, right? And there's zero risk. You just put some extra time into applying to other jobs. The moment you have a job, no one will ever see your degree. Like the moment you have one real job, like why would you care about a degree? Like suddenly you have done things, right? Like where does the degree come in? Like things you do weigh much harder than if you did linear algebra in school, right? And this is obviously for like people who really wanna go all in at their career. This is, you know, obviously not the right thing for people who I mean, I also recommend my friends to like, yeah, go to college. It's an awesome time, right? You'll have so much fun, you'll meet a bunch of friends, you'll even like learn things. I mean, it's not useless, the things you learn. They just teach them to you in very inefficient ways. And you will meet very cool people. You can meet way cooler people if you went to San Francisco or just go network with people or work at companies. You'll meet so many more interesting people. But you can still meet interesting people at college. Like, you will get all the things, just less efficiently. So it's all like a question about like, what do you want to do in life? I think it's very easy to convince yourself that college is right if you're like hyper-ambitious. Like, for hyper-ambitious people, I'm always like, yeah, you should drop out as fast as possible. You can still do the safe route by going there and making sure you can continue if you don't get a job. But if you're, you know, really ambitious and you really care about your career, I mean, that's, you know, obviously the best thing to do.

I would've dropped out of high school. if I couldn't get someone to do it for me.

Yeah.

So no, that's really awesome.

University in a lot of ways is, in a super controversial way, but like, I see it a bit like an adult daycare. You have a bunch of people who need to take a decision about what they wanna do further along in life, and you don't wanna make a decision, and then an option comes up, especially in Sweden where you don't even pay for college.

Wow.

They're like, oh yeah, here you can get free money and push making decisions further into the future. And we also have all these courses where you don't even need to decide. Like, if you wanna be a lawyer, you gotta do this niche thing. But if you don't want to be a lawyer, we have this like, you know, civil engineering or industrial economy and all these like courses where you don't even need to decide what you do. You just continue doing random things for 5 more years and you just push your decision. People love pushing decisions, right?

Yeah.

Like, I don't want to choose what I permanently do for life because that's what it feels like you're doing. It's not true, but it will feel like you're choosing what you permanently do for life. If someone does something for 5 years and they earn a certain amount of money, even If they took a job in a completely separate thing, like say they went from being a lawyer to marketing or something, even if they make more money and are more happy and everything, people will be like, did you just do that? Did you just waste 5 years of your life? And you know, it's a really weird question to me. Like they just upgraded their life satisfaction and salary. And I mean, maybe they even downgraded their salary, but they were just much more happy. I mean, it's all about being happy in the end.

What advice would you give to someone who doesn't know what they want to do and they're like 18, maybe they're in college or maybe they're in high school or maybe they just graduated college, what would you tell them?

This is a classic persona, right? I've met so many people in this position. I've been in this position. You know, I think it started for me in like late elementary school where I was like, okay, I really want to make money or I want to do business or, you know, I really want to succeed in life. I'm not really sure what that means because I haven't seen anything at all. And like, I don't even know what a startup is, but I want to succeed in life. And then you start searching online, how do I make money, right?

Yeah.

And you see these like surveys pages and you sit and do surveys and you're like, holy shit, I'm making money online. And you do all these like, you know, you have no idea where to start and no one tells you where to start. Everyone's just like, go to college, you know, wait, wait 8 years and then you can start doing things, or wait 10 years or whatever. And it's really tough to know what you want to do. You know, some people are very lucky. They play Minecraft and they start doing Minecraft servers and they realize, holy shit, I can make money from this. From out of nowhere, you're running a business and you just start thinking, right? And then you're fine for life. Now you know how it's done. You do something, you start making money, and you start really thinking about things from the right perspective. I think my suggestion would be you kind of got to do a leap of faith. And becoming a software engineer, especially now with ChatGPT and doing demos and things, that might be a good leap. Start making games. The good thing about software engineering is that you can show all your work super easily. Just send people links. You make a game, you have a good story about yourself and why you're a high agent and how you can learn fast. And maybe just screenshot an example of how you can learn fast from ChatGPT. I mean, hiring managers will love this. They'll be like, oh, this guy gets it, right? And then you just send that to like 500 people, right? And one of them will be like, yeah, I should give you a shot. You know, you're an undiscovered talent. You'll make like $10 an hour now when you're early, but it's worth You know, it's worth our time to try out and this person will learn a lot. They'll work with real people, like as fast as possible. Get yourself into real context with real problems where you make real money, where people have like real economic incentives. And from there it just continues to roll. Then you're fine. But it's really hard to get there.

That first jump of like—

That first jump.

From like something comfortable, like school or high school to like, okay, I'm like working Somewhere or working on something.

There are all these like classical paths. Like you have programming, which is one very classic path where you can do this. Marketing is another one because it's very easy as well. If you want to become a marketer, how would you sell yourself? When I was 16, the first thing I would have done is to email a bunch of people, hey, I can do marketing. They'll all ignore me, right? Why would they respond to a random, you know, elementary or high schooler? If you go into their website and you, you know, you crop their stuff and you do like you do free work for them and then you post that to them, And they'll be like, oh wow, this guy just made work. I mean, it's such a low bar for what's considered work. It's a really low bar. Like everyone needs a bunch of problems solved. If you can just solve one of those problems, I mean, you're hired, right?

Yeah. So you already did part of the job. You already proved to them, hey, like you can do it. And it makes the decision so much easier for them to just, all right, here's like, here's like a contracting per hour role. Yeah. Let's just start there. What do you think are the most important things I mean, I'm extremely AGI-appealed, right?

I'm like, okay, the only reason I can do the job that I'm doing right now, which I love, I have so much fun, I'm working with like really talented people, that's because AI. And like way many more people are going to be able to do what I'm doing right now. That means like way faster innovation, all aspects of life. Like when it comes to curing diseases or making, you know, random experiments or like how do we, you know, If someone is really interested in space, they can learn everything and start making small rockets and maybe they can join some cool rocket company. And there's unlimited possibilities the smarter the AI gets. And the double-digit increase to world GDP we'll see from this, I'm extremely excited for that.

I have some Twitter posts here.

Very controversial takes.

Yeah, we'll go through some hot takes of you and you can kind of go more in depth. All right. Learning ML with my professor 01 preview. Bounce what to make, code it, debug it so it works, explain parts, the intuition why it works, the main intuition why, explain to me like I'm 12, go into all details. Learning this the other way around would be so hard.

Right. Yeah. So I think my thinking here was like, 'cause I wanted to become extremely good at ML and yeah, this is kind of the path that I explained before of how you can learn very fast. So you start at a problem, you can ask ChatGPT for which problem you should solve and it'll just give you great problems to start with. And you know, you code it with ChatGPT, you try to understand the code, how it works. When you understand the code, you can go into depth, like for each specific module, how do you learn that? Just recursively go down all the way down. And yeah, I was just having a very strong feeling. I was like, wow, if I had to learn this from like the math up, that'd be so hard and take so much time.

Yeah. Like if you thought that Oh, I needed all these prereqs before like, you know, CS406. I need to take like CS365W or something, right? Like it's much harder to— I feel like that just instills like the wrong type of belief.

Yeah.

Where like, this is unbounded. I should just master this coursework, which is a prereq for that. Whereas I like the way that you call 01 Preview your professor. And I like that you just say, fuck it, I can learn anything and I can just recursively go from top to bottom versus, oh, I can't touch that knowledge because like I'm just an undergrad and I haven't done like the prerequisites for it. Yeah.

And I think this is a huge shift in how we think about knowledge. And I think on X, I'm often like very skeptical to academia, not because academia in itself is something bad or because that's not something you should do. I think a lot of people, you know, they think it's super fun to go to academia. A lot of good things comes out of academia, like all these papers and so on. But there are some very dangerous takes people have in academia. One of those things being you can only learn foundational knowledge from, you know, the classical ways of starting from the bottom up. And people are so ready to defend this that they're, you know, ready to go to war for it, right? They're like, oh, you're wrong. You will never be able to understand these things. And then I'm like, why do people get so upset? I mean, it seems like, you know, when someone spends a lot of time doing something and then being told that, oh, there's more efficient ways to do this, I mean, their ego gets hurt, right?

Yeah, they spent 10 years doing something.

They spent 10 years doing something.

And this high school dropout comes out of nowhere and just learns it, takes their position.

And it's tough. It's really tough. And when I write this kind of things, it will hurt people's feelings. And to be honest, That's kind of the point with it, because these people gatekeep others from getting into whatever they want to do. Yeah. Like if someone is 17 years old, they want to learn ML, and they ask all these other people who have learned this from before, and they'll all be like, yeah, you need to spend a lot of hours. You need to, you know, do all these classes. You need these professors at these universities and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, it's just not true. That's not what you need to do. Or you can do it. It's fine. I mean, think that sounds fun. Go for it. I mean, it's probably fun. fun thing to do. But I mean, there are simpler ways. And if you crush the ego that is behind all these ideas, more people can do what I've done so far.

Universities don't have monopoly on foundational knowledge anymore. Here's how I learned the main intuitions behind diffusion models as a high school dropout with ChatGPT.

I go through some ways that I described earlier of how you can learn. It also describes very well what I think about foundational knowledge.

Yeah, I really like how it's like They don't have the monopoly on foundational knowledge anymore. And pretty much what matters is do you have agency over your own curiosity and learning? And you can pretty much learn anything.

And the university wants to have a monopoly on your learning. If you're a professor that your entire life have been spent, you know, talking to people about, you know, why going to university is so important and suddenly you don't need it anymore, they'll do everything in their power to, you know, keep it be that way. Like what happens if all the smartest people start learning themselves? Well, then the smartest people won't go to university and this lessens, you know, the status that you can have at a university, which is very bad.

Their egos are challenged. Like, I spent 10 years of education. I'm like $400,000 in debt. I have successfully combated my dissertation for my PhD. And you're telling me that Gabriel Peterson over here says, I'm currently doing a job traditionally only done by PhDs with zero ML or math experience with the help of ChatGPT. IDK what other proof that ChatGPT is at PhD level that we need.

Yeah, that's a pretty good post. To be clear, I mean, the people who are professors who have done PhDs, they've done an incredible job, right? I mean, they've done super cool things for the world. They've done research about very important things. And I don't think at all of these people— it might sound like I'm talking down on these people, and that's not true at all. The only thing I'm talking down about is these concepts. that come with the old types of thinking.

It takes 3 days to learn diffusion models top-down, 6 years before you can learn it bottom-up. That's like the perfect analogy there.

Exactly. Like if you want to learn diffusion models after university, it's like at least 6 years of, you know, schooling before you even encounter it.

You're like, okay, I need to do Calc 1, Calc 2, linear algebra. And then you met Introduction to Machine Learning.

And this is the problem. Like, how do you even know that you like doing diffusion models? 6 years ago. I mean, this is the problem with universities. If you can try out different jobs faster and you don't need to commit to something, like I know so many people that are like, oh, AI sounds cool, so I'm gonna take this course. And they have no idea what an AI is until they're like 3 years in, which is insane. Like, should it really take 3 years until you know what you chose to do the rest of your life and spending like millions?

And like, oh shit, maybe I wanted to learn something else. But you could have just learned it Far faster if you yourself had felt more agency. It's like literally just like, can you, do you think you can learn diffusion models in 3 days?

And even if you want to go to university, because I mean, going to university seems to be a great experience. Like what do I know? But it seems to be super fun. And even if you want to do that, you can still go to ChatGPT, learn all these things before, you know, go straight to the end and see how it is and see what it means. And just know like, oh, this actually sounds interesting. I'm ready to learn this. Right? And that's great. Then you've made a very well-positioned, you know, you've made a very good decision. You know that you'll have a lot of fun in college. You know that you learn something that's fun. I mean, then you've done a great decision.

I love it when people are able to learn something far faster in timeframes that other people just cannot believe. They're so used to like, oh shit, I've like spent so much time trying to pick it up. And like, you know, you're like a living example of Just being able to do this. And you can do this constantly. If you just believe you can learn something really fast and you're willing to just like keep asking questions, like how, you know, you laid it out, like, holy cow, like you can learn anything. And then you can be working at the top AI lab in the world like you are.

It's crazy how simple it is. It's like, in the end, it's just like companies want to have people who can do cool things. Show them that you can do cool things. It's like, like remove all advice you've ever received about finding a job. And just start from that very simple truth because that's all there is to it. And then people will try to add, you know, things on top of this. Yeah, just start from there.

That leads me to one of your tweets. Companies just want to make money. So all you need to do is show them how you can help them make money. Drop everything you ever have been told about getting a job and start from that simple statement.

I think people are severely misaligned sometimes when giving advice. If you've done 5 years of college and you're happy with it and you're like, oh yeah, I I learned good things. And now someone comes in and asks you, hello, I want to have a very good career. What should I do? And this other person that has chosen, you know, the path that basically everyone else chooses who want to do like, for example, software engineering. And they'll also be like, yeah, I genuinely think you should do, you know, spend these 5 years doing this thing in university. And I mean, they share no incentives with you. They are well-intended. They want the best for you, but their take is completely meaningless. It doesn't mean anything. This person has no life experience. This person has done one thing, haven't compared it to anything else. And even if they tried, they probably mentally can't do it because they're locked into, you know, oh, I did this 5-year thing and did I just waste that time? No, that can't be true. This must be the right thing, right? I mean, your opinions nearly always comes after incentives. So I generally recommend people to discard most advice. That's how I dropped out of high school because I discarded advice. I just never trusted people to— I've always been like, yeah, people want the best for me. They really think they want the best for me and they think they're helping, but you know, most people will give you advice that doesn't help. Like, as in my example, like if you ask someone who's done college and has never really thought about their career, and they'll just tell you the same thing and they'll have very good intentions, but you know, it's actually like a reverse data point. Like it doesn't mean anything.

How did you deal with counter-advice? How did you deal with maybe, were your parents supportive when you dropped out?

This is very interesting. This is something I've realized later in life. And I think a lot of people will be like, oh wow, You know, there's 2 types of parents, or it's more like a grayscale. My parents never were never really like, oh, you should get good grades in school. They were just like, oh, as long as you have an okay grade, like from a scale A to F, you get an E, right? If I get E or more, they'll be happy. And that's like all opinions they ever had on my career. They never had another opinion. And I was angry. I was like, why do they not care? Like, why can't they like force me? Like, why can't they push me harder to do things? Like, I have really bad discipline, but I want to do all these cool things. Why can't they push me harder? And turns out there's like this grayscale of parents. And my parents were at the very end of one of the sides. And that end is like how much ego you have attached to your children, right? Like how, you know, parents on the other side, they have really strong egos attached to their children. And these are often parents that like maybe they didn't succeed with the things they wanted to succeed with as children. And now they're trying to live out their dreams like through their children. Like, you're gonna be a doctor, you're gonna be a lawyer. Like, this was my dream, this should be your dream. Like, I love you as long as you do these things because that's what I would've done. And they genuinely mean the best for you. They convince themselves that, yeah, I really want this for you because I really care. But often it's very ego-induced. Like, oh, I want my kid to do this so I can tell all my neighbors or friends about what my kid can do. So you have these 2 very— And everyone is like somewhere in the middle of the scale. It seems like in Sweden, it seems much more common to be very far down on the scale. Very few parents in Sweden will care about your degrees.

Yeah, 'cause it's free. That's one part.

Yeah, 'cause it's free. That's one part. And also I think people don't have their, like parents doesn't have as much ego attached on average. Then there's always people who really have this as well. But yeah, I think it really differs from different cultures and, you know, Now when I know how this works, you know, I'm very happy over like the childhood I had where I could, you know, experiment and do whatever I wanted to. And, you know, I just got support for whatever I did. Obviously they were a bit surprised. What, you're gonna drop out of high school? I mean, my dad was like pretty like, oh no, no, no, this is bad, you know? But they got over it very fast and now, you know, it's nothing weird. I'm glad.

That's pretty good. I think like most people might not have that experience. How do you decide where to take advice from?

There's very few people I take advice from. Very, very few. I mean, I can count them on one hand probably. My cousin and I happen to be very similar people in how we think. And he also happens to be many years older than me. So, you know, he went through college. I mean, he's the bigger reason where he was like, yeah, I went through college. You and me think super similarly. We want the exact same things and you'll just waste your time. Like that was a big part of the trust where I was like, okay, you know, we think super similar about things. And he kind of like shortcutted a lot of things that he had to go through and spend years doing that wasn't worth it for him. And I could kind of just like follow his footsteps immediately. And yeah, he's one of the people I take a lot of advice from and that I based a lot of my opinions on early.

But especially if you aren't established yet, you don't really have a track record. You're young, you're unproven. And like, how do you, how do you go about like finding Advice or mentorship, or where to trust, or where to learn from. And like, what what did you do? Like, how do you go about that? How do you go about figuring yourself out?

I think it's so easy to get stuck as like a very ambitious sixteen-year-old. And like, like first of all, like watching motivational speeches on YouTube, right? You have all these people like, oh, I made millions and I did la la la la la la la. And it's you know just all slop. And you know, you know, you you you get this feeling after you watched it, like oh, I just saw something. I saw Secret, and now I have this like, you know—

I feel good. I feel motivated.

I feel good, right? I feel motivated, right? And you think you're like, yes, now I'm gonna be motivated forever. And then you wake up the next day and it's all gone, right? And yeah, these videos are, you know, they're traps for motivated people to, you know, fall into and feel motivated while you're doing nothing, right? And it's the same with like, you know, people have this mega focus on like good habits, And, you know, reading and, you know, all these things that people say are like extremely good for you. I mean, they are really good for you. I mean, reading is great, working out is great, having good habits is great. None of this matters if you don't do it while you're doing something that matters, right? And what matters? Well, you don't know yet because you're young and you've also, you know, you have no data points on what matters, but you should start trying. And literally the number one way is to do real work. Solve real problems. There is millions of startups out there who would happily have someone work for free for you. You just need to reach out to them. Go to LinkedIn, find stealth founders. I mean, send a message to all of them, be like, hey, I want to try working with you. Let's try working this weekend or something. And I'm ready to do whatever. I know I can do good things. And, you know, I could just start working with really simple things for you. I mean, just get your first real experience as fast as possible. That's all it's about. Like, everything I ever did in my life that was not towards getting real experiences— for example, you know, when I spent a bunch of time in elementary school and high school reading books, getting good habits, waking up early and, you know, taking a run, and I felt so productive— none of it mattered at all whatsoever. Like, it means zero if you're not actually, you know, doing something that matters at the same time.

Yeah.

Which is Nearly always work. Maybe it's something else for you. I mean, you need to explore this for yourself. But for me and for very many others who think alike, it's, you know, get your first job as fast as possible, which is very tough. It requires a lot of work, but that's where your eyes should be at.

70% of people are in permanent slight suffering because they are allergic to making any mentally tough decisions when there is also an option to do nothing.

Yeah, this is a very good post. This summarizes, I think, why, you know, if people read this post, understood it, and acted on it, I think like that the happiness level in the world would rise by like 20% or something.

Wow.

The work satisfaction you'd have, because I've realized that it's so easy for people to make bad decisions when it's emotionally tough. And people don't know when it's emotionally tough because your brain doesn't really like let you know this, right? So for example, if you're at a job and you don't really like it, what's your options? Well, your option is to reach out to a bunch of other jobs, compare them, and then, you know, you need to prepare for interviews— super tough. You need to do the interview— it's very emotionally suffering, and you might get rejected. That's very sad. And then you need to negotiate offers, which is a horrible experience. And then you need to tell your current employer, hello, I'm leaving, which is so mentally tough. So before your brain even like thinks about this step, it will just be like, oh yeah, I'm probably doing the best thing I'm doing right now. I'm probably learning the most I can do right now. Like, even if you're super ambitious and you wanna learn fast, you will like convince yourself that you're learning the most you possibly can wherever you are. Even if it's your first job, even if it's your first job and it's a completely random job out of all millions of jobs, you'll convince yourself you're learning the most, even if you've been there for like 3 years.

But what matters is what? Seeing the truth, being like honest with yourself.

Yeah, what matters is, you know, say what you want in life is a good salary. That's like the simplest thing you can want in life, right? A lot of people just want a good salary and work with good colleagues, and maybe they wanna work remotely. I don't know what they wanna do, but they want some combination of this, right? That's fairly standard. So one very, very clear example is I had a friend in Sweden. He was making a normal Swedish salary, which is extremely low seen to SF standards. From his standards, we're pretty good, right? He was living life. I mean, in Sweden he had like a, you know, probably like 50% higher than a normal salary. And I told him many times, I was like, dude, why do you not apply to San Francisco? I mean, you'll just like 10x your salary and work with better people and work on things that people use and like all these things. And, you know, he had all these reasons, you know, came up in his brain for why he shouldn't do this. And, you know, he constantly pushed it forward and he couldn't really, even if he trusted me as a person, you know, Your brain doesn't allow you to think about this as an opportunity because it's like so emotionally tough. And one day I just introduced him to a company and I was like, yeah, fuck it, let's just put these two together and make sure he starts interviews. And when you start interviews, that's way more simple because they will like try to pull you into the company, right?

So they will do it. There's momentum.

Yeah, there's momentum and they'll do all the annoying things for you. And then from out of nowhere, give you an offer, right? And you never had to think about it. And now when you have an offer, you just need to sign it. And emotionally, like the right thing would obviously be to apply to you know, a couple other companies and see, will these people give me a better offer? Are these people better to work with? Are these more fun people who believe in this company more and I want to stay at it longer? But the easy thing to do here, right, is just to accept it, right? Anyway, yeah, this friend just ended up 10x-ing his salary just like that. And, you know, he pushed this for like, I told him, maybe for a year or so. So if you 10x his salary, I mean, that's a lot of money.

Just by coming to America or getting a job with an American company.

That's like a full house in Sweden. He just got— people don't understand how much lose from this. He literally lost buying a house in Sweden if you just see it in like just currency, right? Yeah, he lost the house just because he didn't take him— he didn't do this very simple thing, which is applying in San Francisco. It's very simple.

What's your advice for people who want to come to San Francisco? Why should they come to San Francisco? Why should they come to America?

First of all, I mean, let's start simple. The talent density is much higher. You'll work with a very high concentration of talented people, and the salary will be much higher. Like, whatever you like want in life, you know, your life standard will always depend on your salary. So even in the scenario where you're just like, yeah, I just want a high life standard and I'm fine, you know, and I, you know, I'm fine moving to get permanent sun, which, you know, for some people is a very easy decision, for some people it's a harder decision. But like, if you— those 2 things, I mean, that's, you know, reasons enough. And then like the more ambitious you become, the more obvious and like the more objective the correct it is to move to San Francisco. You really don't have any other options if you like, if you're ready to like put your entire life in startups, your best bet is moving to San Francisco. The talent density here is extremely high. Capital is flowing super freely. Everyone is talking all the time. You know, you can hire extremely good people and it's just another momentum. Like if you've never been to San Francisco, everyone have like told you should go to San Francisco. Like the first week they're here, it's like always changes their Like, yeah, worldview, right? They're like, holy shit, I didn't know there were this many people caring about whatever I'm doing in the entire world. And I just met like more than I ever thought would exist in the same room at the same time, right? Which is like a really motivating experience. That's real motivation for you. That's no like person standing and talking about motivational speeches and they tell you all this like random slop that like doesn't make any sense, that just sounds good. This is like real motivation, right? You have people who think like you. They act like you, they work hard like you, they care like you, they don't work 40-hour weeks. It's just an incredible city to be in. And I mean, look at what has come out from Silicon Valley. I mean, nearly all innovation happens here. Like, it's, you know, so much, like, probably more than all of Europe combined happens in San Francisco. The amount of capital in only San Francisco is probably like magnitude higher than in all of Europe together, right? I mean, you have Apple, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, you have all these huge companies, they all have their headquarters here for a reason. Everything you care about in life, like life standard-wise, like what makes your life good? Well, you have Google Maps, right? Before you had like physical maps. Well, turns out Elon Musk built Maps, like Zip2, whatever it was called, like in San Francisco like 15 years ago. You have your iPhone, which is an incredible piece of technology.

It is.

Built in San Francisco. You have satellite internet, you have You have people, you know, that go from being paralyzed to, you know, being able to walk again. You have like diseases that are cured. Like, this is all, like, nearly all of this is from the US and specifically San Francisco. There's like a million people living here. It's like same size of Stockholm, right?

Yeah. It's crazy, but there's a network effect and talent density here.

Yeah.

Yeah. So what's your advice if someone wants to come to San Francisco or move here?

First of all, be highly skilled. I mean, be good at something. That's the first thing. And that will come easy, right? If you're ambitious and you want to do things, you just start working with real companies and you will become good, right? So when you have this, the second step is find the company that's ready to sponsor you. And this is where you need to be good, right? Because you need to be really good because this company will want to only hire— they need to go through a visa process, which is you know, some overhead for them. And, you know, they obviously like rather just take someone from the US if they could, right? It's way more, it's way less overhead. But turns out there is very few extremely good software engineers in the world. And there's a huge need of good software engineers in the US or like everywhere in the world basically needs really good software engineers. You know, we can never get enough. Like we could double the amount of software engineers that are really good in the US, we would still have Not enough.

Yeah.

And that's why you have like a really big chance to just move to the US if you're from another country.

And you can do it over the internet.

You can do it over the internet. The moment you can prove to a company that you provide huge value, people in San Francisco are very happy to sponsor you. And especially now, like the paths to O-1 become easier and easier. Definitely so.

That's what I'm doing. I've had a blast talking with you. I mean, your tweets are really funny. I think your takes are very valuable. And for someone who's thought for himself this whole time, ever since like high school and even earlier, like it's really awesome for you to be able to distill all of that and then share it here. So yeah, I really appreciate your time.

Always very happy to share hot takes and, you know, help others, other people who think like me to get there faster, right? I could have been here. 4 years faster if someone just told me what I'm trying to tell people. But then obviously that's from my perspective. Like I have my own wants and, you know, if someone happens to feel like, oh yeah, this applies to me as well, right? Then it can be hugely valuable.

Yeah. I hope this episode captures some of that. I mean, you are basically telling the advice to your younger self.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'm going to really try and like distill it into something Really nice, and that's what I also want to do. I want to just like help people like you who are from the middle of nowhere around the world inspire them with like real anecdotes. Like you did not go to high school, or you did go to high school, but you dropped out of high school, and you're still able to land probably one of the most like sought-after jobs at the best AI company in the world. And you did it mostly on yourself, mostly through your own ingenuity, mostly using. the internet and like pretty much anyone from anywhere, as long as they have the internet, they have ChatGPT, they can—

Yeah.

They can do the same. And, you know, I, I, the goal of kind of this is to, I wanna share more anecdotes and like origin stories of like extraordinary people like you and also just help a lot of these people. 'Cause I, I mean, similar to you, I also went through the process of like leaving high school to come to San Francisco.

And I was like, oh shit, I wanted to stay here.

And I was very stubborn. I just, I had to be here. And I kept like coming in and out on tourist visas. I had the option to go to college. I actually got into like one of the best, like, you know, most selective programs in the world. But I just was like, San Francisco is like clearly the place to be where all the innovation are, where all the brilliant people. And I just need to figure out like how to get a visa, how to get like an O-1 visa and stay. And certainly by like learning, you know, learning on my own, learning using AI, like I taught myself how to code with AI working on my first engineering job that led me to get my— someone to sponsor me, as you said, and then actually be able to move here. And yeah, I feel like this episode we can make it so that. A lot of people, you know, their lives are completely different in better ways because they listened to you. So.

Yeah, I hope so. That'd be epic. That would be pretty epic. Like one more thing that I thought about, which was a huge blocker for me when I was back in Sweden and I wanted to do all these things. And I think a lot of people who were thinking similarly as I did are feeling this as well. And that's that they think they're not very smart. I remember I thought I was an idiot growing up, or not an idiot. I was like, yeah, okay, I'm really good at math compared to like the people in elementary school.

Yeah.

Compared to people in elementary school where I lived. But, you know, you saw people, you know, people building rocket ships and people are doing all these humongous things and I was like, damn, like how can I ever do any of these things? There's just no way. But I think it's like really easy to underestimate how much you can do. It's super easy to underestimate. And like probably people that are even just listening to this are in the top like 1 percentile people.

Yeah.

Just from listening to this. Like most people wouldn't have agency to like, oh, I wanna do something and then spend an hour listening on something to do that thing. You're already top 1%, and top 1%, that's like, You know, they already have like that top, you know, the top 500 startups in the world or even fewer, like maybe top 200 startups in the world. That's like the top 1% of people, right? So, you know, only that should make you connect the dots. Like, okay, if I just continue down this path, this is where I'll end up.

Yeah, you can come out to San Francisco, work at a top company or start a top company and—

Yeah, so much things to be done.

Yeah. Well, this has been great, Gabriel. Thank you so much for your time. I mean—

Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

Holy shit. I think you're one of the best people at learning in the world with AI, and more people should know about that.

Yeah, I'm trying. And I hope some people get, you know, much better than I do so I can learn from them as well.