Remix.run Logo
▲ TeMPOraL an hour ago

Weights are probably the wrong place to look. If there's a structure to be found, it's in the latent space itself.

Crude analogy: a Fourier transform of a photo looks like white noise with some abstract geometric patterns on top. You can't see the photo in it. But if you apply the same transform again, suddenly you get the photo back. If you try altering the DFT image, you can affect the photo's appearance everywhere, all at once, but it's hard to fundamentally change what it shows. You quickly discover that all pixels of an image contribute to every pixel of the DFT, and vice versa. There's a well-defined connection between the two, and it allows for some useful engineering, but in sense of understanding what's on the image, it's about the maximally unhelpful representation there is.

Point being, there obviously is some kind of structure in the way LLMs represent their training data, so if all we see is noise, perhaps we're looking at a bad representation of it.