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Ben Kuhn x.com
"Mechanistic interpretability never does anything useful" they said "It'll never beat a standard baseline" they said "Talk to me when you ship something" they said Ahem:
ahemmechanisticinterpretability
The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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Their words
Even more recently, we’ve begun to use mechanistic interpretability techniques to improve our safeguards and to conduct “audits” of new models before we release them, looking for evidence of deception, scheming, power-seeking, or a propensity to behave differently when being evaluated.
23 December 2025
24 November 2025
19 August 2025
From one piece MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).
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Their words
I'm more agnostic about the best techniques, things like sparse autoencoders are a useful tool, but easy to waste effort using when a simpler method is sufficient or better - start by doing the obvious thing!
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