Now if I only could find some time...
Meanwhile i learned the basics of machine learning and (mainly) neural networks from a book written in 1997[0] - which i read last year[1]. It barely had any code and that code was written in C, meaning it'd still more or less work (though i didn't had to try it since the book descriptions were fine on their own).
Now, Python was supposedly designed to look kinda like pseudocode, so using it for a book could be fine, but at least it should avoid relying on external libraries that do not come with the language itself - and preferably stick to stuff that have equivalent to other languages too.
[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/mlbook.html
[1] which is why i make this comment (and to address the apparent downvotes): even if i get the book now i might end up reading it in 3-4 years. Stuff not working will be a major obstacle. If the book is good, it might end up been recommended by people 2-3 years from now and some people may end up getting it and/or reading it even later in time. So it is important for the book to be self-contained, at least when it comes to books that try to teach the theory/ideas behind things.
Python is not popular in ML because it is a great language but because of the ecosystem: numpy, pandas, pytorch and everything built on those allows you to do the higher level ML coding without having to reinvent efficient matrix operations for a given hardware infrastructure.
Yeah i get why Python is currently used[0] and for a theory-focused book Python would still work to outline the algorithms - worst case you boot up an old version of Python in Docker or a VM, but it'd still require using only what is available out of the box in Python. And depending on how the book is written, it may not even be necessary.
That said there are other alternatives nowadays and when trying to learn the theory you may not need to use the most efficient stuff. Using C, C++, Go, Java, C# or whatever other language with a decent backwards compatibility track record (so that it can work in 5-10 years) should be possible and all of these should have some small (if not necessarily uberefficient) library for the calculations you may want to do that you can distribute alongside the book for those who want to try the code out.
[0] even if i wish people would stick on using it only for the testing/experimentation phase and move to something more robust and future proof for stuff meant to be used by others
No I meant C++.
2011 14882:2011[44] C++11
2014 14882:2014[45] C++14
2017 14882:2017[46] C++17
2020 14882:2020[47] C++20
2024 14882:2024[17] C++23
That is 4 major language changes in 10 years.
As a S/W manager in an enterprise context having to coordinate upgrades of multi-million LOC codebases for mandated security compliance, C++ is not the silver bullet in handling the version problem that exists in every eco system.
As said, the compilers/linkers allow you to run in compatibility mode so as long as you don't care about the new features (and the company you work for doesn't) then, yes, C/C++ is easier for managing legacy code.
Can you do that with a gcc version?
But, I think, current code editors can be viewed as same thing.
This just isn’t true. C ABIs has not seen any change with the updated standards and while C++ doesn’t have a stable ABI boundary you shouldn’t have any problem calling older binary interfaces from new code (or new binary interfaces from old code provided you’re not using some new types that just aren’t available). That’s because the standard library authors themselves do strive to guarantee ABI comparability (or at least libc++ and stdlibc++ - I’m not as confident about MSVC but I have to believe this is generally true there too). Indeed the last ABI breakage in c++ was on Linux in C++11 15 years ago because of changes to std::string.
Ecosystems don't poof into existence. There are reasons people chose to write those libraries, sometimes partly or wholly in other languages for python in the first place.
It's not like python was older than or a more prominent language than say C when those libraries began.
https://taonexus.com/mini-transformer-in-js.html
Even after training for a hundred epochs it really doesn't work very well (you can test it in the Inference tab after training it), but it doesn't use any libraries, so you can see the math itself in action in the source code.
> so long as vectors are roughly the same length, the dot product is an indication of how similar they are.
This potential length difference is the reason "Cosine Similarity" is used instead of dot products for concept comparisons. Cosine similarity is like a 'scale independent dot product', which represents a concept of similarity, independent of "signal strength".
However, if two vectors point in the same direction, but one is 'longer' (higher magnitude) than the other, then what that indicates "semantically" is that the longer vector is indeed a "stronger signal" of the same concept. So if "happy" has a vector direction then "very happy" should be longer vector but in the same direction.
Makes me wonder if there's a way to impose a "corrective" force upon model weights evolution during training so that words like "more" prefixed in front of a string can be guaranteed to encode as a vector multiple of said string? Not sure how that would work with back-propagation, but applying certain common sense knowledge about how the semantic space structures "must be" shaped could potentially be the next frontier of LLM development beyond transformers (and by transformers I really mean the attention heads specialization)
Once you realize this "Multi-headed Attention" is just kernel smoothing with more kernels and doing some linear transformation on the results of these (in practice: average or add)!
0. http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.ht...
> To resolve these issues, we introduce the Performer, a Transformer architecture with attention mechanisms that scale linearly, thus enabling faster training while allowing the model to process longer lengths, as required for certain image datasets such as ImageNet64 and text datasets such as PG-19. The Performer uses an efficient (linear) generalized attention framework, which allows a broad class of attention mechanisms based on different similarity measures (kernels). The framework is implemented by our novel Fast Attention Via Positive Orthogonal Random Features (FAVOR+) algorithm, which provides scalable low-variance and unbiased estimation of attention mechanisms that can be expressed by random feature map decompositions (in particular, regular softmax-attention). We obtain strong accuracy guarantees for this method while preserving linear space and time complexity, which can also be applied to standalone softmax operations.
1: "Context Is The Next Frontier by Jacob Buckman, CEO of Manifest AI" (https://youtu.be/wJyl6kBCwmY?si=ruxMWdENjazu3rp6)
∑ᵢ yᵢ · K(xᵢ, xₒ) ⁄ (∑ⱼ K(xⱼ, xₒ))
Note that in Attention we use K(qᵢ, kₒ) where the q (query) and k (key) vectors are not the same.
Unless you define K(xᵢ, xₒ) = exp(<W_q xᵢ, W_k xₒ>) as you do in self-attention.
There are also some attention mechanisms that don't use the normalization term, (∑ⱼ K(xⱼ, xₒ)), but most do.
That clarifies things...
Reductions of one architecture to another are usually more enlightening from a theoretical perspective than a practical one.
1: "Context Is The Next Frontier by Jacob Buckman, CEO of Manifest AI" (https://youtu.be/wJyl6kBCwmY?si=ruxMWdENjazu3rp6)
Any arbitrarily complex system must be made of simpler components, recursively down to arbitrary levels of simplicity. If you zoom in enough everything is dumb.
Most everything in biology is a clumsy hack accidentally discovered via evolution, and then optimised to death over aeons.
We can sidestep all that mess and extract just the core algorithm that is actually required for intelligence.
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_ab498084-58c4-4345-9140-07b5...
Biological Neuron: Processes information through complex, nonlinear integration of thousands of excitatory and inhibitory inputs across dendritic trees, producing spiking outputs with rich temporal patterns. It adapts dynamically via synaptic plasticity, neuromodulation, and structural changes, operating in a probabilistic, energy-efficient manner within oscillatory networks.
Artificial Neuron: Performs simple, linear summation of weighted inputs, applies a static activation function, and produces a single scalar output. It lacks temporal dynamics, local plasticity, or neuromodulation, operating deterministically with high computational cost and fixed connectivity.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68219da9-1e78-8007-b083-8a81bfbea2...
"Dendrites can implement non‑linear sub‑units and even logic‑gate‑like behavior before the soma integrates them, whereas the standard artificial neuron uses a plain weighted sum."
"Neurotransmitter diversity (e.g., glutamate, GABA, dopamine) allows different semantics on each connection. An artificial edge conveys only a signed scalar."
Consciousness isn’t in the neurons themselves—it's in the invisible coordination and tension between them.
if intelligence is just reasonable manipulation of logic it's unsurprising that an LLM could be intelligent, what maybe is surprising is that we have ~intelligence without going up a few more orders of magnitude in size, what's possibly more surprising is that training it on the internet got it doing the things it's doing
> that's incredibly powerful
It's true - it's not credible at all that it's powerful.
> if intelligence is just reasonable manipulation of logic it's unsurprising that an LLM could be intelligent
This is a complete non-sequitur given the previous description of how LLMs work (symbol manipulation has absolutely nothing to do with lookup).
Well FWIW I have done an implementation of Llama LLM (3 8-70b to be specific) in non-python so I do sort of know what I'm talking about.
I'm not the originator of the hash table analogy. I got it from here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDulhoQ2pro
Hell, the vectors that are generated are called K/V, so. Yeah it's a hash table.
And the idea that first order logic and other facets of intelligence can just be cleverly arranged lookup tables comes from here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_An...
Seriously, though, differentiable hash tables is an awesome way to look at them, I wish I'd heard it before.
A next step could be to create a mind, with a piece that works similar to the paretial lobe to give it a sense of self or temporal existence.
Just because it is theoretically possible to scale your way through sheer brute force alone using a trillion times the compute doesn't mean that you can't come up with a better compute scaling architecture that uses less energy.
It's the same as having a turing machine with one tape vs multiple tapes. In theory it changes nothing, in practice having even the simplest algorithms be quadratic is a huge drag.
The problem with previous AI approaches is that humans wanted to make use of their domain expertise and ended up anthropomorphizing the ML models, which resulted in them being overtaken by people who invested little in domain expertise and more into compute scaling. The quintessential bitter lesson. With the advent of the bitter lesson, people who don't understand anything at all except the concept "bigger is better" arrived, and they think that they can wring out blood from a stone. The problem they run into is that they are trying to get something out of compute scaling that you can't get out of compute scaling.
What they want to do is satisfy a problem definition using an architecture that is designed to solve a completely different problem definition. The AGI compute scaling crowd wants something that is capable of responding and learning through experience, out of something that is inherently designed and punished to not learn through experience. The key aspect "continual learning" does not rely on domain knowledge. It is a compute scaling paradigm, but it's not the same compute scaling paradigm that static weights represent. You can't bet on donkeys in a horse race and expect to win, but since everyone is bringing donkeys to the race it sure looks like you can.
My personal bet is that we will use self referential matrices and other meta learning strategies. The days of hand tuning learning rates to produce pre-baked weights should be over by the end of the decade.
When you look at a model architecture it is described as a series of operations that produces the result.
There is a lower level why, which, while being far from easy to show, describes why it is that these algorithms produce the required result. You can show why it's a good idea to use cosine similarity, why cross entropy was chosen to express the measurement. In Transformers you can show that the the Q and K matrices transform the embeddings into spaces that allows different things to be closer, and using that control over the proportion of closeness allows you to make distinctions. This form of why is the explanation usually given in papers. It is possible to methodically show you will get the benefits described from techniques proposed.
The greater Why is much much harder, Harder to identify and harder to prove. the First why can tell you that something works, but it can't really tell you why it works in a way that can inform other techniques.
In the Transformer, the intuition is that the 'Why' is something along the lines of The Q transforms embeddings into an encoding of what information is needed in the embedding to resolve confusion, and that the K transforms embeddings into information to impart. When there's a match between 'What I want to know about' and 'what I know about' the V can be used as 'the things I know' to accumulate the information where it needs to be.
It's easy to see why this is the hard form, Once you get into the higher semantic descriptions of what is happening, it is much harder to prove that this is actually what is happening, or that it gives the benefits you think it might. Maybe Transformers don't work like that. Sometimes semantic relationships appear to be in processes when there is an unobserved quirk of the mathematics that makes the result coincidentally the same.
In a way I think of the maths of it as picking up a many dimentional object in each hand and magically rotating and (linearly) squishing them differently until they look aligned enough to see the relationship I'm looking at and poking those bits towards each other. I can't really think about that and the semantic "what things want to know about" at the same time, even though they are conceptualisations of the same operation.
The advantage of the lower why is that you can show that it works. The advantage of the upper why is that it can enable you to consider other mechanisms that might do the same function. They may be mathematically different but achieve the goal.
To take a much simpler example in computer graphics. There are many ways to draw a circle with simple loops processing mathematically provable descriptions of a circle. The Bressenham Circle drawing algorithm does so with a why that shows why it makes a circle but the "Why do it that way" was informed by a greater understanding of what the task being performed was.
One of the biggest things people don't understand about machine learning is that there is a lot of information in the model that is only relevant to the training phase. It's similar to having test points for your probes on a production PCB or trace/debug logging that is disabled in production. This means that you could come up with an explanation that makes sense at training time, but is actually completely irrelevant at inference time.
For example, what you really want from attention is the pairing of all vectors in Q with all vectors in K. Why? Not necessarily because you need it for inference. It's so that you don't have to know or predict where the gradient will propagate in advance when designing your architecture. There are a lot of sparse attention variants that only really apply to inference time. They show you that transformers are doing a lot of redundant and unnecessary work, but you can only really know that after you're done training.
There is a pattern in LSTMs and Mamba models that is called gating [0], which in my opinion is a huge misnomer. Gating implies that the gate selectively stops the flow of information. What they really mean by it is element-wise multiplication.
If you look at this from the concept of model capacity, then what additional concepts and things does this multiplication allow you to represent? LSTMs are really good at modelling dynamical systems. Why is that the case? It's actually quite simple. Given a discretized linear dynamical system x_next = Ax + Bu, you run into a problem: You can only model linear systems.
So, assuming we only had matrix multiplications with activation functions, we would be limited to modeling linear dynamical systems. The key problem is that the matrices in the neural network can model A and B of the dynamical system, but they cannot have a time varying A and B. You could add additional parameters to x that contain the time varying parameters of A, but you will not be able to use these parameters to model non-linearity effectively.
Your linearization of a function f(x) might be written as g(x) = f(x_0) + f'(x_0)x = a_0 + a_1 * x. The problem is very apparent, while you can add an additional parameter to modify a_0, you can never modify a_1, since a_1 is baked into the matrix and multiplied with your x. What you want is a function like this h(x) = f(x_0) + f'(x_0)x = (a_0+m_0) + (a_1+m_1) * x, where m is a modifier value in x. In other words, we need the model to represent the multiplication m_1 * x and it turns out that this is exactly what the gating mechanism in LSTM models does.
This might look like a small victory, but it is actually enough of a victory to essentially model most non-linear behavior. You can now model the derivative in the hidden state, which also means you can model the derivative of the derivative, or the derivative of the derivative of the derivative. Of course it's still going to be an approximation, but a pretty good one if you ask me.
theyinwhy•18h ago
andrehacker•18h ago
I am personally not very interested in that as these details are likely to change rather quickly while the principles of LLMs and transformers will probably remain relevant for many years.
I have been looking for, but failed, to find a good resource that approaches it the way 3blue1brown [1] explains it but then go deeper from there.
The blog series from Giles seem to take the book and add the background to the details.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M