Circuit view may dissolve much of deep learning's mystery, argues researcher thread
willcb · x · 2026-10-16
In a thread, willcb argues that much of the supposed mystery of modern deep learning goes away if you embrace the circuit view.
He suspects the phenomenon is significantly more general than just copy circuits, suggesting pretraining facilitates subcircuit construction via hierarchical grokking more broadly. He also argues that despite theory work on circuit-theoretic limitations of transformers, solving reasoning likely requires strong circuit compositionality, even if the end architecture is some adaptive-depth mixture-of-layers design.
Related event: Researcher Argues Circuit View Dissolves Deep Learning Mysteries(4 posts)→
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