He bases this decision on all of the experience he has amassed, as a 61 year old man in the tech industry. An actual 17 year old, with 17 years of experience, would not think like this, nor should they.

Yes. And they almost certainly have a better understanding of their own situation that him. This is not a dig at Paul Graham, the closer anyone is in age, the better they understand what they have to deal with. I'm roughly in the middle between Paul G and the 17 year old, and even though I'm really quite fascinated with zoomer culture and probably come more in touch with it than most (due to relatives in the age range etc.) I realize I have very little idea what it's like to grow up in the world they grow up in.

Most. But, that isn't the point.

Either way, this isn't really advice for 17 year olds. Pg is thinking out loud about the pathways for founders.

What about a 19 year old?

>Whoa. I’m 19 and I trained a 100M language model from scratch. Did a v2 now with a new SFT experiment to see if I can get better results on same size.