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Representation1.6Locked

Boss: place the vectors

You've watched the model place words. Could you place an unseen word where its meaning belongs?

The idea inside

Drag each mystery word onto the meaning map; the model reveals its true spot and scores how close you got.

After this lesson

You can place an unfamiliar word on a meaning map by reasoning from labelled axes and nearby words, and judge a placement by distance.

Where it leads

Words are vectors. Now: how does the model actually predict the next one?

Inside this lesson

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What this lesson shows

Drag each mystery word onto the meaning map; the model reveals its true spot and scores how close you got.

The question it opens with

You've watched the model place words. Could you place an unseen word where its meaning belongs?

The walkthrough, in the lesson's own words

  • Meaning is a position. You just placed words as vectors and scored by distance.
  • Here's where the model keeps it. Closer to the model's spot is a better placement.
  • Drag the mystery word to where its meaning sits, then lock it in.
  • A hand-drawn map in the model's style; real maps are learned, see 2.5.
  • Use the axes and the anchor words: where does its meaning fall?
  • Right on the money. Your sense of its meaning matches the model's position.
  • You placed each word by meaning, exactly what an embedding is.
  • Meaning is a position; near positions mean similar things. Placing the words and scoring by distance is the whole of Act 1: a word is a vector (1.1), an embedding is its coordinates (1.2), similarity is distance (1.3).
  • The anchors and labelled axes let you reason about an unseen word and place it, then distance scored how close you were. That is exactly how the model compares meanings: not by letters, but by how near two vectors sit. Every later idea, attention included, is built on this one.
  • Spotify drops a song you never searched for into your mix, right next to ones you love. What did it just do?
  • It placed the song by learned position. Your taste is a neighbourhood on a map like the one you just labeled, and recommendations are nearest-neighbour lookups in an embedding space.

Key takeaway

You placed words as vectors by meaning alone, reasoning from anchors and axes instead of letters.

What you can do after this lesson

You can place an unfamiliar word on a meaning map by reasoning from labelled axes and nearby words, and judge a placement by distance.

Where it leads: Words are vectors. Now: how does the model actually predict the next one?

This is the written summary. The lesson itself is interactive: you predict, drag and operate the mechanism above, and the reveal answers you.