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Neural networks are grown, not programmed

Neural networks are not directly programmed but grown. Researchers design architectures as scaffolds and set loss objectives as directional targets, but the resulting system is more like a biological organism whose internal workings must be studied rather than code that was written.

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Dario Amodei, Amanda Askell & Chris Olah on AI Development and Safety

Original excerpt

we don’t program, we don’t make them, we grow them. We have these neural network architectures that we design and we have these loss objectives that we create. And the neural network architecture, it’s kind of like a scaffold that the circuits grow on.
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