04 · Inside a neural network

Broad intuition · Study map 13 of 85

Neurons, layers, and representations

Suggested preparation: Evaluation: the scoreboard shapes the system

Picture it

A layer mixes signals, then bends the result with a nonlinear function. Stacking layers lets simple transformations compose into complicated behavior. The weights are learned settings; activations are the changing signals for this input.

What to understand

  • Weights, biases, activations, and nonlinearities
  • Forward pass, loss, residual connections, and normalization

Follow the references

  1. 1 · Video series

    Andrej Karpathy · Neural Networks: Zero to Hero ↗

    Start with micrograd. Draw a small computation graph before following the Python implementation.

You understand it when…

Why would stacking only linear layers still be equivalent to one linear transformation?

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