On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver

interpreting signals in the context of other signals to create a semantic portrait. For instance, if you see an opponent breathing heavily in poker, that might mean a bluff from one player and a full house from another. On its own, the tell is not very meaningful, but in the context of other semantic information (the player is breathing heavily and avoiding eye contact) it might be. This part of the process, as ChatGPT says, is hidden from view. Exactly how the transformer makes these inferences is something of a mystery—this is the “bag of numbers” stage. But it just seems to work out somehow. In the famous Google paper on transformers, “Attention Is All You Need,” “attention” essentially refers to the importance of the relationships between different pairs of tokens. Once a transformer figures out these relationships, there isn’t a whole lot else it needs to do. For instance, the tokens “Alice” and “Bob” have an important relationship that the transformer will pay more attention to. However, some tokens are intrinsically more important than others. “Paris” plays a defining role, like the first violinist in the orchestra, whereas the musician with “well” got stuck playing the triangle. 3. Output Layer—Conductor-Led Performance and Audience Feedback. The conductor reenters to integrate these refined parts into a cohesive whole. The conductor’s role is to ensure that the collective interpretation aligns with the overall vision, similar to how the final layers of a transform...