Anthropic Cofounder Tom Brown on Spending Three Months Relearning Machine Learning
ditzikow · x · 2026-09-17
Anthropic cofounder Tom Brown shared his experience at South Park Commons: he joined, blocked off three months, and made a plan to teach himself machine learning from scratch.
He describes how hard it is to start down a new path, and how SPC gave him an environment where he felt comfortable putting aside his "armor of expertise" and being a novice again. The post references SPC's article "The Case for Talent Density in -1 to 0," quoting Richard Hamming: "In research, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it." The article argues groups are more likely than solo actors to find something worth building in the -1-to-0 phase.
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