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Comment by ants_everywhere

6 months ago

> It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/analytic/quantitative through Linear Algebra....I don't understand is what about linear algebra that makes it so special that it creates a fully functioning life or aspects of a life?

Not linear algebra. Artificial neural networks create arbitrarily non-linear functions. That's the point of non-linear activation functions and it's the subject of the universal approximation theorems I mentioned above.

4 comments

ants_everywhere

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cuttothechase  6 months ago

ANNs are just mathematical transformations, powered by linear algebra + non-linear functions. They simulate certain cognitive processes — but they are fundamentally math, not magic.

  • delusional  6 months ago

    I wouldn't say they "simulate cognitive processes". They do statistics. Advanced multivariadic statistics.

    An LLM thinks in the same way excel thinks when you ask it to fit a curve.

  • ants_everywhere  6 months ago

    I think the point of mine that you're missing (or perhaps disagreeing with implicitly) is that *everything* is fundamentally math. Or, if you like, everything is fundamentally physics, and physics is fundamentally math.

    So classes of functions (ANNs) that can approximate our desired function to arbitrary precision are what we should be expecting to be working with.