Paul Graham posted that if he were 17 today he would learn to build large language models from scratch and then train them using whatever hardware he could obtain. Researcher Pasquale Minervini replied that the approach feels like dissecting animals rather than reading a biology textbook. The posts show Graham responding to a question about his path at that age and Minervini offering the direct analogy in reply. Graham is identified as the co-founder of Y Combinator. Minervini is identified as a lecturer in NLP and ML at the University of Edinburgh. The exchange addresses methods for gaining skills in constructing and training such models.