RoPE: Rotary Position Embeddings Explained
Adding positional embeddings pollutes attention scores with cross terms. How RoPE encodes position as rotation instead, and how the rotation matrix is built.
Learnings so far.
Intuition-first deep dives into how AI actually works — neural networks, embeddings, attention, and LLMs explained with diagrams and worked examples, not jargon.
Adding positional embeddings pollutes attention scores with cross terms. How RoPE encodes position as rotation instead, and how the rotation matrix is built.
An intuition-first walk through self attention — queries, keys and values by analogy, then the implementation, multi-head attention, and transformers.
Token embeddings alone throw away word order. How position gets encoded into a sentence, and why the sinusoidal scheme is built the way it is.
How tokens turn into meaningful vectors: the core idea behind embeddings, how the training data is prepared, and a working implementation.
Building a neural network from the ground up — what the layers actually do, how training adjusts them, and a worked example end to end.
Why models break text into subwords, how Byte Pair Encoding builds a vocabulary from scratch, and what naive word splitting gets wrong.
A plain-language overview of how large language models actually work — the mental model worth having before going anywhere near the internals.