Neural nets are a way you can model a system, sure, but if you take a step back, squint, and tilt your head, they can also be called… software? Not in the sense that they’re written in code, but in the sense that the neural net itself operates under the same set of general requirements as does software that a human would write. Namely, neural nets take inputs and create outputs from them according to a set of rules, but the thing about the inside of the neural net black box is that it’s written by a computer, whereas the software we’re more familiar with is written by a human. Neural net researcher and Tesla director of AI Andrej Karpathy has taken to calling neural nets “Software 2.0” as a result, and the implications from this connection are really cool. We’ll talk about it this week.
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