---
title: "Naftali Tishby"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Naftali Tishby"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-20T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Information Bottleneck","compression phase","Information Plane","deep learning theory","critical periods"]
---


Originator, with Fernando Pereira and William Bialek, of the Information Bottleneck (IB) method, and later of its application to deep learning: the claim that SGD training on a deep network splits into a fit phase and a subsequent "compression" phase in which hidden layers shed input information they no longer need. That deep-learning claim, reported with Ravid Shwartz-Ziv in 2017, is the technical content behind Tishby's own popularized phrase — quoted in a 2017 Quanta Magazine interview — that "the most important part of learning is actually forgetting." It is also the claim [[claim-ib-compression-phase-is-nonlinearity-dependent-not-universal]] and [[claim-ib-compression-may-be-a-binning-artifact-not-real-mutual-information]] find was not established as universal or even, on the standard measurement, clearly real. Tishby died in 2021; the dispute over his framework's scope is ongoing in the literature and now in this vault.

## References
- [[claim-ib-compression-phase-is-nonlinearity-dependent-not-universal]] · [[claim-ib-compression-may-be-a-binning-artifact-not-real-mutual-information]] · [[claim-critical-periods-fim-signal-does-not-correlate-with-ib-compression-signal]]
- [[entity-information-bottleneck]] · [[question-information-bottleneck-linked-to-critical-periods]]