The Math You Missed Behind Gradient Descent
Why gradient descent works
The single most important optimization algorithm in AI: gradient descent.
Even your state-of-the-art LLMs are trained with a beefed-up version of this ancient algorithm, generally described through a mountain-climbing analogy. Look around your current position in the loss landscape, find the direction of the steepest descent, then take a step toward it. Yet no one ever tells you what’s really happening behind the scenes.
Here’s the secret math behind gradient descent:
