[jychang]

1. They are neurons, whether you like it or not. A binary tree may not have squirrels living in them, but it's still a tree, even though the word "tree" here is defined differently than from biology. Or are you going to say a binary tree is not a tree?

2. You are about 5 years behind in terms of the research. Look into hierarchical feature representation and how MLP neurons work. (Or even in older CNNs and RNNs etc). And I'm willingly using the word "neuron" instead of "feature" here because while I know "feature" is more correct in general, there are definitely small toy models where you can pinpoint an individual neuron to represent a feature such as a face.

[_heimdall]

What were you getting at with the MLP example? MLPs do a great job with perception abilities and I get that they use the term neuron frequently. I disagree with the use of the name there that's all, similarly I disagree that LLMs are AI but here we are.

Using the term neuron there and meaning it literally is like calling an airplane a bird. I get that the colloquial use exists, but no one thinks they are literal birds.

[jychang]

Do you also disagree with the use of the name “tree” in a computer science class?

Again, nobody thinks trees in computer science contains squirrels, nobody thinks airplanes are birds, and nobody thinks a neuron in a ML model contains axons and dendrites. This is a weird hill to die on.

Are you gonna complain that the word “photograph” is “light writing” but in reality nobody is writing anything so therefore the word is wrong?

[_heimdall]

I would disagree with anyone that wants to say they are the same as a natural tree, sure.

I don't believe the term photograph was repurposed when cameras were invented, that example doesn't fit.

More importantly, I argued that neuron has a very specific biological meaning and its a misuse to use the term for what is ultimately running on silicon.

Your claim was that they are neurons, period. You didn't expand on that further which reads as a pretty literal use of the term to me. We're online discussing in text, that reading of your comment could be completely wrong, that's fine. But I stand by my point that what is inside an LLM or a GPU is not a neuron.

[jychang]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron

[_heimdall]

What's your point with that link? I'm well aware that people use the term neuron in AI research and acknowledged it a few comments up. I disagree with the use of term, I'm not arguing that the term isn't used.