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Animated AI

animatedai.github.io

301 points by frozenseven 7 days ago · 27 comments

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jerpint 2 days ago

Nice! I made my own version of this many years ago, with a very basic manim animation

https://www.jerpint.io/blog/2021-03-18-cnn-cheatsheet/

throwaway2027 2 days ago

I don't think these are useful at all. If you implement a simple network that approximates 1D functions like sin or learn how image blurring works with kernels and then move into ML/AI that gave me a much better understanding.

  • nobodywillobsrv 2 days ago

    Thank you for saying this. I often find this "glib" explains of ML stuff very frustrating as a human coming from an Applied Math background. It just makes me feel a bit crazy and alone to see what appears to be a certain kind of person saying "gosh" at various "explanations" when I just don't get it.

    Obviously this is beautiful as art but it would also be useful to understand how exactly these visualizations are useful to people who think they are. Useful to me means you gain a new ability to extrapolate in task space (aka "understanding").

  • noduerme 2 days ago

    Idk, it's fun. 20 years ago I made a cubic neural model in Flash that actually lit up cubes depending on how much they were being accessed. This was a case of binding logic way too tightly to display code, but it was a cool experiment.

  • barrenko 2 days ago

    Yup, I'd say you learn more by doing math by hand (shouldn't be that surprising).

    • nosianu 2 days ago

      So... I remember math including doing quite a bit of geometry by hand and with real tools, at least initially. "Math" is not just the symbol stuff written with a pencil, or with a keyboard.

      The mechanical analog computers of old (e.g. https://youtu.be/IgF3OX8nT0w, or https://youtu.be/s1i-dnAH9Y4) are examples too that math is more than symbol manipulation.

  • socalgal2 2 days ago

    Agree. They didn't seem to convey any info what-so-ever, pretty as they were

  • patresh 2 days ago

    They're likely of limited use for someone looking for introductory material to ML, but for someone having done some computer vision and used various types convolution layers, it can be useful to see a summary with visualizations.

  • amelius 2 days ago

    Yes, especially if you ask someone why one is better than the other in a certain configuration.

  • j45 2 days ago

    Learning first principles of something are always useful for beginners.

    Everyone is a beginner at something.

jaredwilber 2 days ago

Years back I worked on some animated ML articles, my favorites being: https://mlu-explain.github.io/neural-networks/ and https://mlu-explain.github.io/decision-tree/

sujayk_33 2 days ago

I worked on something similar but specifically for transformer architecture: https://transformer.sujayk.me/

mnkv 2 days ago

Nice work. A while back, I learned convolutions using similar animations by Vincent Dumoulin and Francesco Visin's gifs

https://github.com/vdumoulin/conv_arithmetic

amkharg26 2 days ago

This is a fantastic educational resource! Visual animations like these make understanding complex ML concepts so much more intuitive than just reading equations.

The neural network visualization is particularly well done - seeing the forward and backward passes in action helps build the right mental model. Would be great to see more visualizations covering transformer architectures and attention mechanisms, which are often harder to grasp.

For anyone building educational tools or internal documentation for ML teams, this approach of animated explanations is really effective for knowledge transfer.

mg 2 days ago

Is there an error in the first video at 00:25?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMXuk97NeSI&t=25

It says the input has 3 dimensions, two spatial dimensions and one feature dimension. So it would be a 2D grid of numbers. Like a grayscale photo. But at 00:38 it shows the numbers and it looks like each of the blocks positioned in 3D space holds a floating-point value. Which would make it a 4-dimensional input.

wwarner 2 days ago

I feel like these are helpful, and I think the calculus oriented visualizations of convex surfaces and gradient descent help a lot as well.

jlebar 2 days ago

Shameless plug for my writeup about convolutions: https://jlebar.com/2023/9/11/convolutions.html

diginova 2 days ago

here is the github link for anyone wanting to star the repo https://github.com/animatedai/animatedai

kristopolous 2 days ago

also look at https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/

  • johnnyfived 2 days ago

    Now this one actually looks usable

    • kristopolous a day ago

      I've been wanting to build a really small transformer based system but for some reason I only remember that I want to do that at like 3am and my brain has turned off.

krackers 2 days ago

You should add dilated conv and conv_transpose to the list.

fuzzy_lumpkins 2 days ago

amazing resource!

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