An animal can do training and inference every day of its existence until the day of its death. A forward pass is all you need.
Usually, neural networks like LLMs use the forward-backward algorithm during training, and a forward pass during inference. In AI, LLMs do their training once with a lot of data. LLMs remember the things that they saw during training.
Once this is done, they are deemed ready for inference.
At this point when they are ready for inference in production, they no longer learn. They look like they remember memories from the past. But that's simply because they are given context of the past in an auto-regressive way. But they don't really learn during inference.
A true neural machine should do training and do inference, always. There is no difference between those activities. Both training and inference are about simulating the future.
In 2022, Prof. Geoffrey Hinton invented the forward-forward algorithm. In the forward-forward algorithm, there is no forward pass. But it's not time-efficient.
The work of Prof. Geoffrey Hinton is the starting point for Novigrad.
Novigrad is a system that compiles a neural network model (described in terms of ONNX forward operators) to neural instructions (described in terms of forward operators). A neural machine is simply a stream of neural instructions, like a amd64 program is a stream of amd64 instructions.
With Novigrad ("New Town"), a forward pass is all you need, for both training and inference.
There is no backward pass. A forward pass is all you need. To achieve the goal, the computing machinery required to compute the gradient is simply baked in the generated neural machine. A consequence of this is that resulting neural networks have the computing machinery for training and inference. Animal brains are probably like that.
There are many off-the-shelve neural network frameworks. The list includes PyTorch (Meta AI), Tensorflow (Google), tinygrad (Tiny Corp), candle (Hugging Face), Burn (Tracel AI), dfdx (Corey Lowman), and so on. As far I understand, I don't think that any framework in the list can learn using only a forward pass. They all do back-propagation using a forward-backward algorithm.
- Design a minimalist neural network framework
- Write it in Rust
- Design and implement a neural system framework that generates neural networks that can always train and infer. (most animals do that everyday)
- Implement from scratch in Rust the GPT-1 architecture (117 million parameters).
- Teach an AI to read and write by interacting with a user on a daily basis.
Rust
Python
C++
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU
- Lenovo Legion 7 Laptop
- AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS
- AMD Radeon 780M Graphics
see TODO.md
cargo run --releasecargo test --releaseMega_man.txt comes from Wikipedia . Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0
- A Simple Introduction to Broadcastinga-simple-introduction-to-broadcasting-db8e581368b3
- Mega man
- Prof. Geoffrey Hinton - "Will digital intelligence replace biological intelligence?" Romanes Lecture
- Training Hidden Units: The Generalized Delta Rule
- Attention Is All You Need
- GAUSSIAN ERROR LINEAR UNITS (GELUS)
- What is Cross-Entropy Loss: LLMs Explained
- Deriving categorical cross entropy and softmax