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phyzome • today at 4:36 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

16,000 words into the essay: "What I mean by clean"

...and it still doesn't answer it. What is this actually about?


Replies

emtel • today at 5:18 PM

It means that NNs don't (as previously thought) smoosh unrelated concepts together into the same neurons, which would have made interpretability very difficult.

For instance, if you had a single neuron that fires for "puppies" and "murder", it would be much more difficult to tell if the model is thinking something nice or something not so nice.

lucrbvi • today at 4:37 PM

It means that modern neural networks are way more interpretable than older ones. We can understand how they work way more easily than earlier ones.

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wmf • today at 4:52 PM

I think "clean" means something like each neuron encodes exactly one concept and it's possible to discover what the concept is.

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amelius • today at 5:26 PM

Clean means no alchemy.