Not even the people who write the software understand what patterns are being found. All they can do is point to the results that seem good at a glance. This

Not even the people who write the software understand what patterns are being found. All they can do is point to the results that seem good at a glance. This isn’t really true. For example, we can pass in an image to a convolutional net and see which filters are activated; this can give us a clear indication if it’s edge detectors that are activating or textures or specific shapes (eg a dog would activate edge detectors, textures that look like fur, and shapes that resemble a dogs face). We can also train models to disentangle its representations and make specific variables stand for specific things (eg for a net trained on handwriting,values in one variable can represent the slant of writing, another one the letter, another the thickness, etc.). There is also a ton of work being done in training causal models. We also have decent ways now of visualizing high dimensional loss surfaces. the field has come a long way since 2012, and the whole “it’s magic, we don’t understand why it works or what it learns” is no longer true.