The moment we stopped understanding AI [AlexNet]

An activation atlas is a glimpse into the high-dimensional space a model uses to organise the world, and AlexNet — eight pages, published in 2012 — was the first model to see that way. The paper’s second author, Ilya Sutskever, went on to co-found OpenAI and scale the same idea into ChatGPT. The title is the argument: this is where capability began outrunning explanation.