Coding with OpenAI o1

Visualizing Self-Attention Mechanism with Interactive Components

The author has always been fascinated by the concept of self-attention mechanism, which is a crucial component behind models like Chipt and GPT. When you give a sentence to a language model like Chach PT, it needs to understand the relationship between words, making it a sequence of words that requires modeling. The Transformer technology utilizes this self-attention mechanism to effectively process these sequences.

The author wanted to visualize this self-attention mechanism with interactive components, but lacked the skills to do so. This is where their new model O1 Preview comes into play. They typed in a command and observed how the model responds, demonstrating its ability to think before outputting an answer. Unlike previous models like GPT-4, which may miss instructions when given too many, this reasoning model can carefully go through each requirement in depth, reducing the chance of missing an instruction.

To visualize the self-attention mechanism, the author gave several requirements to the model, including using an example sentence (the quick brown fox) and visualizing the edges whose thicknesses are proportional to the attention score. The model was designed to respond accordingly, with thicker edges indicating more relevant words. This approach can help identify common failure modes of existing models, which often struggle with too many instructions.

The author proceeded to copy-paste the output code into a terminal using the D editor of 2024 (Vim HTML), and then opened it in a browser. When hovering over the visualization, it displayed arrows representing word relationships, with thicker edges indicating higher attention scores. Upon exiting the hover state, the visualization disappeared, demonstrating its correctness. Additionally, when clicking on the visualization, it showed tension scores as requested, with minor rendering issues.

This experience has been enlightening for the author, showcasing the potential of interactive visualizations in teaching and learning about self-attention mechanisms. The model's ability to think carefully and respond accurately suggests that it can be a valuable tool in developing various visualization tools for new teaching sessions.