Weights' relationships, not substrate, hold LLM intelligence, researcher argues
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-09-26
Researcher teortaxesTex argues people overindex on the substrate of neural networks: weights are mere numbers, but the relationships between weights are the real information, containing functions of unclear expressivity bounds.
Responding to the claim that LLMs are "gigantic memory and retrieval systems that can't invent solutions to new problems," he counters that von Neumann was likewise a memory-and-retrieval system—yet that's often the mark of creative genius in humans. His core intuition: LLMs are shapes, not code or mechanics; weights describe the shape of the model's representation space, and respecting that is the basic prerequisite for understanding LLMs.
Related event: Debate Erupts Over LeCun's Claim That LLMs Are Mere Memory Retrieval(3 posts)→
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