alt Hacker NewsWhoever chose this topic title perhaps did him a disservice in suggesting he said the problem was backprop itself, since in his blog post he immediately clarifies what he meant by it. It's a nice pithy way of stating the issue though.
Whoever chose this topic title perhaps did him a disservice in suggesting he said the problem was backprop itself, since in his blog post he immediately clarifies what he meant by it. It's a nice pithy way of stating the issue though.
Nah, Karpathy's title is "Yes you should understand backprop", and his first highlight is "The problem with Backpropagation is that it is a leaky abstraction." This is his choice as a communicator, not the poster to HN.
And his _examples_ are about gradients, but nowhere does he distinguish between backpropagation, a (part of) an algorithm for automatic differentiation and the gradients themselves. None of the issues are due to BP returning incorrect gradients (it totally could, for example, lose too much precision, but it doesn't).