[zwaps]

I think op means that a graph is not sufficient to describe a NN. If a layer is Y=XB, then you draw that as set of nodes Y and individual weight b_ij as edge-weights from X. Right.

But can you describe things like concat, max-pooling, attention etc. without changing the meaning of the edges? Or do you have to annotate edges to now mean "apply function here"? If so, op probably wants to say that you are describing more than a graph. There's a graph there, but you need more, you need elaborate descriptions of what edges do. In that case, op could be correct to say that technically, NN are not graphs.

Or, perhaps NN can generally be represented by vertices and edge lists. It certainly isn't the usual way to draw them, though.