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You could have invented transformers from memory

50 points • by speckx • today at 7:01 PM • 6 comments • view on HN

Comments

sailfast • today at 9:44 PM

This is a really interesting article! While I can’t profess to understand all the math it is a great way to demonstrate it.

I recall awhile back hearing someone ask whether intelligence was actually the same or similar to “compression” or storing all of this knowledge in weights - IE the ability to create something from reason or weights or relationships / connections. This article makes it even more interesting!

craftkiller • today at 8:54 PM

This article does two things which make it unhelpful for me:

1. It uses math notation. This is a software development site, wouldn't this be much more clear to this audience written as psuedo code instead of a complex series of greek and latin letters?

2. It doesn't step through a concrete example. What is hollow R raised to the (M * d_v) ? Is it a number, a set, a list, a matrix?

To use an example I understand: RAG used to seem complicated to me when only math people were talking about it in math words. For example, let's take a line from wikipedia on embeddings:

> the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning

What made it clear was learning that generating an embedding is just a function(string) -> list[float], and RAG is just taking a list[float] for your prompt and finding other list[float] that are close to it in your dataset.

So what would make this article more clear, is step through a simplified example of putting a value into a memory store and querying that memory store, showing the actual data structures.

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