Issue 5, Jan 6, 2026

The Dead ReLU Trap

Senior ML Engineer interview at OpenAI, and the interviewer asks:

“How do you fix this?”

Why lowering the learning rate can't resurrect dead neurons - and how architectural gradient flow actually fixes it.

Share this trapShare on LinkedIn

The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.

Read it on Substack

Get the next one

Free on Substack. Unsubscribe in one click.

More traps set at OpenAI