The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (karpathy.github.io)
recommended by 1 user | 2015 | 913 points by benfrederickson | machine learning | original thread |
One user recommended this thread. What they said:
Kotlopou Jul 8, 2026 | on: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks… | context

I thought this is a cool premonition of the eventual success of language models. One can nicely see a microcosm of everything with generative AI (text generated in a domain you don't understand looks fine at first glance), already a mention of attention models, and there's even a reference to the model "hallucinating" some URL.

It's also all charmingly tiny. I was surprised at the quality of the LaTeX generated from a network trained on a single book -- it looks like a proof, has sequential lemmas, closes all brackets...

Also interesting to read the original discussion with a decade of hindsight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325