Comment by raducu
2 months ago
> _fundamentally_ don’t understand how deep learning systems works.
It's like saying we don't understand how quantum chromodynamics works. Very few people do, and it's the kind of knowledge not easily distilled for the masses in an easily digestible in a popsci way.
Look into how older CNNs work -- we have very good visual/accesible/popsci materials on how they work.
I'm sure we'll have that for LLM but it's not worth it to the people who can produce that kind of material to produce it now when the field is moving so rapidly, those people's time is much better used in improving the LLMs.
The kind of progress being made leads me to believe there absolutely ARE people who absolutely know how the LLMs work and they're not just a bunch of monkeys randomly throwing things at GPUs and seeing what sticks.
As a person who has trained a number of computer vision deep networks, I can tell you that we have some cool-looking visualizations on how lower layers work but no idea how later layers work. The intuition is built over training numerous networks and trying different hyperparameters, data shuffling, activations, etc. it’s absolutely brutal over here. If the theory was there, people like Karpathy who have great teacher vibes would’ve explained it for the mortal grad students or enthusiast tinkerers.
> The kind of progress being made leads me to believe there absolutely ARE people who absolutely know how the LLMs work and they're not just a bunch of monkeys randomly throwing things at GPUs and seeing what sticks
I say this less as an authoritative voice but more as an amused insider: Spend a week with some ML grad students and you will get a chuckle whenever somebody says we’re not some monkeys throwing things at GPUs.
It may be as simple as this:
https://youtube.com/shorts/7GrecDNcfMc
Many many layers of that. It’s not a profound mechanism. We can understand how that works, but we’re dumbfounded how such a small mechanism is responsible for all this stuff going on inside a brain.
I don’t think we don’t understand, it’s a level beyond that. We can’t fathom the implications, that it could be that simple, just scaled up.
> Many many layers of that. It’s not a profound mechanism
Bad argument. Cavemen understood stone, but they could not build the aqueducts. Medieval people understood iron, water and fire but they could not make a steam engine
Finally we understand protons, electrons, and neutrons and the forces that government them but it does not mean we understand everything they could mossibly make
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> The kind of progress being made leads me to believe there absolutely ARE people who absolutely know how the LLMs work
Just like alchemists made enormous strides in chemistry, but their goal was to turn piss into gold.