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247 points nabla9 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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gcanyon ◴[] No.41833456[source]
One that isn't listed here, and which is critical to machine learning, is the idea of near-orthogonality. When you think of 2D or 3D space, you can only have 2 or 3 orthogonal directions, and allowing for near-orthogonality doesn't really gain you anything. But in higher dimensions, you can reasonably work with directions that are only somewhat orthogonal, and "somewhat" gets pretty silly large once you get to thousands of dimensions -- like 75 degrees is fine (I'm writing this from memory, don't quote me). And the number of orthogonal-enough dimensions you can have scales as maybe as much as 10^sqrt(dimension_count), meaning that yes, if your embeddings have 10,000 dimensions, you might be able to have literally 10^100 different orthogonal-enough dimensions. This is critical for turning embeddings + machine learning into LLMs.
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1. user070223 ◴[] No.41835565[source]
That's what illustrated in the paper Toy Models of superposition

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.10652

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2. gcanyon ◴[] No.41836665[source]
That's an awesome paper!