Comment by famouswaffles

>And you know what, Qwen3's entire forward pass is just 50 lines of very simple code (mostly vector-matrix multiplications).

The code being simple doesn't mean much when all the complexity is encoded in billions of learned weights. The forward pass is just the execution mechanism. Conflating its brevity with simplicity of the underlying computation is a basic misunderstanding of what a forward pass actually is. What you've just said is the equivalent of saying blackbox.py is simple because 'python blackbox.py' only took 1 line. It's just silly reasoning.

>After the pass, you need to choose the sampling strategy: how to choose the next token from the list. And this is where you can easily make the whole model much dumber, more creative, more robotic, make it collapse entirely by just choosing different decoding strategies. So a large part of a model's perceived performance/feel is not even in the neurons, but in some hardcoded manually-written function.

So ? I can pick the least likely token every time. The result would be garbage but that doesn't say anything about the model. The popular strategy is to randomly pick from the top n choices. What do you is keeping thousands of tokens coherent and on point even with this strategy ? Why don't you try sampling without a large language model to back it and see how well that goes for you ?

>Then I also performed "surgery" on this model by removing/corrupting layers and seeing what happens. If you do this excercise, you can see that it's not intelligence. It's just a text transformation algorithm. Something like "semantic template matcher". It generates output by finding, matching and combining several prelearned semantic templates. A slight perturbation in one neuron can break the "finding part" and it collapases entirely: it can't find the correct template to match and the whole illusion of intelligence breaks. Its corrupted output is what you expect from corrupting a pure text manipulation algorithm, not a truly intelligent system.

What do you think happens when you remove or corrupt arbitrary regions of the human brain? People can lose language, vision, memory, or reasoning, sometimes catastrophically.