How Critical Are Outliers in Transformer Models? A Live Experiment - Phase 1

Introduction Many assume that large language models (LLMs, Transformers) simply “memorize data” due to their scale. In reality, some part of their "intelligence" and creative capacity is packed into outlier values, extremely large or small numbers in their weight matrices and activation tensors. In this post, we’ll zero out these outliers and directly observe how this disrupts the model’s output…