Concept explainer

after an ELI5 concept

CONCEPT EXPLAINER4 LEVELS · 1 NEURON

Neural Networks

Factory Workers

Passing little notes down the line

Imagine a room full of tiny workers holding strings. When a cat picture comes in, the first workers shout what they spot — pointy ears! whiskers! — and pass notes to the next row. The last row reads every note and yells the answer: cat! Each time they get it wrong, they swap a few strings around so the notes come out better next time.

It's a team game that gets sharper with every round.

INSIDE A SINGLE NEURON
One neuron: weighted inputs, sum, activation, outputw₁w₂w₃x₁x₂x₃Σ + bσ(z)NEURONŷOUTPUT

ŷ = σ(w₁x₁ + w₂x₂ + w₃x₃ + b)

TRAINING PROGRESSACCURACYLOSS
Accuracy rises and saturates while loss decays
E1E20E50E100E200
ARCHITECTURE EVOLUTION

Perceptron

1958

~1K PARAMS

CNN

1989

~1M PARAMS

LSTM

1997

~10M PARAMS

Transformer

2017

10⁸–10¹² PARAMS

PARAMETER BARS ARE LOG-SCALE — EACH STEP IS ROUGHLY 1,000×

LEVEL: AGE 5