All of Am8ryllis's Comments + Replies

I've been working on pure combinational logic LLMs for the past few years, and have a (fairly small) byte level pure combinational logic FSM RNN language model quantized to And Inverter Gate form. I'm currently building the tooling to simplify the logic DAG and analyze it.

Are you, or others, interested in talking with me about it?

Current NN matrices are dense and continuous weighted. A significant part of the difficulty of interpretability is that they have all to all connections; it is difficult to verify that one activation does or does not affect another activation.

However we can quantize the weights to 3 bit and then we can probably melt the whole thing into pure combinational logic. While I am not entirely confident that this form is strictly better from an interpretability perspective, it is differently difficult.

"Giant inscrutable matrices" are probably not the final form of... (read more)

I agree that reducing superposition is probably valuable even if it requires a significantly larger network. I still don't understand why the transition from float to binary would cause a dramatic reduction in superposition capacity. But if it does prevent superposition, great! I'll just give it more parameters as needed. But if we still get superposition, I will need to apply other techniques to make it stop.

(I have not yet finished my closer re-read of Toy Models of Superposition after my initial skimming. Perhaps once I do I will understand better.)

Hope... (read more)

I'm glad we agree that RNNs are nice.

So if I understand correctly, you are saying:

• A trinary weighted LLM with accuracy comparable to Chinchilla (70B weights) would need significantly more (dense) trits, let's say >140B?
• An LLM with significantly more trit weights is less interpretable than an LLM with a less quantity of float weights?
• Do you disagree regarding harm if successful?

Consider that most of the trits will be 0 and thus removable, and that we will be replacing the activations with boolean logic and applying logic simplification transformations to... (read more)

I am hopeful that we can get interpretability and easy training. But you may well be right.

After skimming some of your progress reports, I am very excited about your sparse nets work!

Discretized weights/activation are very much not amenable to the usual gradient descent. :) Hence the usual practice is to train in floating point, and then quantize afterwords. Doing this naively tends to cause a big drop in accuracy, but there are tricks involving gradually quantizing during training, or quantizing layer by layer.