At some point we always need some sort of model of the world, you don’t want to call it physics?, that’s fine, but you are still modeling the world
Interestingly though, physical models are usually expressed as mathematical equations. Which is an arbitrary way of modeling
A Neural Network could technically “discover” different models, just through optimizing predictions for whatever we want the model to do
We might not be able to distill the NN into nice compact equations, but they might still form a pretty good model of whatever phenomenon is fed to it through observational data
Note that just by picking the input data and the output expectations, we are already defining a model
Interestingly though, physical models are usually expressed as mathematical equations. Which is an arbitrary way of modeling
A Neural Network could technically “discover” different models, just through optimizing predictions for whatever we want the model to do
We might not be able to distill the NN into nice compact equations, but they might still form a pretty good model of whatever phenomenon is fed to it through observational data
Note that just by picking the input data and the output expectations, we are already defining a model