> Why does one just add the token-value and token-position embedding vectors together? I don’t think there’s any particular science to this. It’s just that various different things have been tried, and this is one that seems to work. And it’s part of the lore of neural nets that—in some sense—so long as the setup one has is “roughly right” it’s usually possible to home in on details just by doing sufficient training, without ever really needing to “understand at an engineering level” quite how the neural net has ended up configuring itself.
It's the lack of "understand[ing] at an engineering level" that irks me- that this emergent behavior is discovered, rather than designed.
I'm curious why that irks you? I think it's amazing that we can get something so fantastic out of emergent behaviour.
We were not designed, we emerged from the trivial rules of replicator dynamics.