alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure it's possible to have intuition about systems that work in thousands of orthogonal dimensions. In fact I'm pretty sure most of the research is people trying fairly arbitrary things and testing them and then post rationalising implied understanding of what is really happening on top of good outcomes.
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I disagree. It's absolutely possible to develop an intuition about extremely complex mathematical ideas, including llms or high dimensional systems. Learning to build an llm is a great way to start building that intuition.
So computer science actually involves science now.
You may be right. Nonetheless, it's possible that the act of trying to get your brain to understand a system that works in more than a few orthogonal dimensions will help develop useful intuitions about how LLMs, and the many systems/products/robots that will be built on top of them, work.
It is sometimes the opposite - a large number of things makes the system easier to predict and reason about (statistics, behavior of gases etc).
I'd have to push back, though not on the part you'd expect. Your description of human researchers is roughly right: a lot of the field is try-things-and-narrativize-after.
But the load-bearing assumption is that intuition has to be human-shaped intuition. Humans can't intuit thousands of orthogonal directions because we project everything down into a 3D metaphor and hope it holds. That's a fact about our hardware, not about the systems.
And the reason why is the most interesting part: nothing requires the compression step. A model or an agent can operate over the actual objects, holding thousands of runs and ablations in context and noticing regularities in the native dimensionality, without translating them into a picture of a ball rolling down a hill. No bottleneck at "can you visualize it."
So the narrower claim: it's not that intuition here is impossible full-stop, it's that human intuition is unreliable. Your post-hoc rationalization point is evidence for that, not against it. The story exists because a person needs something to hold in their head. Drop that requirement and the failure mode goes with it.
I think it’s reasonable to have a shallow understanding of most parts and a deep understanding of a small number of parts. That’s how most engineers are.
Most software engineers do not have a deep understanding of CPU architectures. In fact they probably don’t even have a shallow understanding and get around just fine. How many of them are looking up the instruction set for the CPUs they deploy their CRUD app to in EC2?