The Convolutional Neural Network

The last few posts I've written about AI consciousness and infinite suffering have been fairly dire, so I decided to switch things up and write about something more practical: the convolutional neural network. While working on a research proposal about circuit stability during fine-tuning, I spent a few hours talking with Grok about what CNNs actually are. What I eventually realized is that CNNs, while conceptually different from typical feed-forward neural networks, are surprisingly intuitive and powerful in practice. This post breaks down what convolutional neural networks are in simple terms. In a later post, I'll walk through experiments that show just how efficient they can be.