Your first video is fantastic. As someone who thinks LLMs are pretty nifty but never had a professional need to learn how they actually work, that 10 minute video taught me more than several years of reading esoteric HN comments and fluffy mainstream media on the topic. Seeing a bazillion floating point numbers all stacked up ready to be calculated across also makes it much more intuitive why this tech devours GPUs, which never really occurred to me before. Thanks for sharing.
Nice job. Spreadsheets are a natural way to explain an LLM. I suspect that you can show training well too by calculating the derivatives for each parameter under each training example and showing it all explicitly mapped to the relevant parameter etc etc
Thank you. Validating to hear others feel spreadsheets are a natural and accessible way to explain LLMs. Someone asks “what’s do they mean by a parameter in a model” or “what is the attention matrix” and you can just pull it up graphically laid out. Then they can fiddle with it and get a visceral feel for things. It also becomes easier for non coders do things like logit lens which is just a few extra simple spreadsheet functions.
I actually plan to do what you describe after I do the embeddings video (but only for a “toy” neural net as a proof-of-concept introduction to gradient descent).
Thanks! Each one takes a surprisingly long time to make. Even figuring out how make the explanation accessible and compelling yet still accurate takes awhile and then there’s still the actual video to do.
https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/