If by popular fantasy you mean replicating the functional profiles of the visual and language cortex of the brain, then yes. These ideas in neuroscience are popular, but not fantasy. I encourage you to read up on functional organization in the brain, it's very fascinating.
> it’s not scientifically useful
Having structured weights in GPTs enables us to localize and control various concepts and study stuff like polysemanticity, superposition, etc. Other scientific directions include sparse inference (already proven to work) and better model editing. Turns out, topographic structure also helps these models better predict neural data, which is yet another direction we're exploring in computational neuroscience.
I love the paper - don't read into the negative comments. I find that a lot of online feedback (more so on Reddit and much less so on HN (usually)) tends to be opinionated and misinformed by quite a bit these days. Fantastic work and fantastic read.
I probably came in too hot on that (dealing with some personal stuff). Although I disagree with purported the impact of the paper, I don’t think this is fundamentally incorrect or bad science and I wish you the best on future research.
> it’s not scientifically useful
Having structured weights in GPTs enables us to localize and control various concepts and study stuff like polysemanticity, superposition, etc. Other scientific directions include sparse inference (already proven to work) and better model editing. Turns out, topographic structure also helps these models better predict neural data, which is yet another direction we're exploring in computational neuroscience.