Interpretability

topic on 5 shows · 14 statements across 12 episodes

the Y Combinator Startup Podcast Latent Space No Priors WTF is with Nikhil Kamath the MAD Podcast

14 statements about Interpretability, every show

LATENT SPACE Assertion Supported
Becker: METR Uses Black-Box Methods Over Interpretability for AI Monitoring
“Usually this is black box, not, not white box in, in, in my understanding in, in current work. So, so not using interpretability, but you can imagine in principle doing, doing, doing something more white box.”
Joel Becker Feb 27, 2026 ▶ 1:00:33 Measuring Exponential Trends Rising (in AI) — Joel Becker, METR
WTF Assertion Supported
Amodei: Interpretability research has identified concept neurons and rhyming circuits in LLMs
“We've been able to find, you know, neurons that correspond to very specific concepts, neural circuits that correspond to, you know, keep track of how to do rhymes in poetry, and so we're starting to understand what these models Do, right?”
Dario Amodei Feb 24, 2026 ▶ 20:39 The AI Tsunami is Here & Society Isn't Ready | Dario Amodei x Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF · Nikhil Kamath
LATENT SPACE Prediction Not checkable as stated
Deng: Interpretability Will Unlock the Next Frontier of AI Models
“We really believe that interpretability will unlock the new generation, next frontier of safe and powerful AI models.”
Myra Deng Feb 5, 2026 ▶ 1:11 Goodfire AI’s Bet: Interpretability as the Next Frontier of Model Design — Myra Deng & Mark Bissell
Deng: Computational Neuroscientists Are Moving to AI Interpretability for Unfettered Experimental Access
“When we talk to a lot of computational neuroscientists, they Moved to enter because they were like, look, we have unfettered access to this artificial, intelligent mind. It's so much, you have access to everything. You can run as many ablations and experiments…”
Myra Deng Feb 5, 2026 ▶ 1:00:14 Goodfire AI’s Bet: Interpretability as the Next Frontier of Model Design — Myra Deng & Mark Bissell
Bissell: Mechanistic interpretability provides power-user tools for manipulating AI models
“Interpretability gives you a set of, I think of it almost as like power user tools for accessing models and doing things with them that you might not have realized you could.”
Mark Bissell Dec 31, 2025 ▶ 3:26 [State of MechInterp] SAEs in Production, Circuit Tracing, AI4Science, "Pragmatic" Interp — Goodfire
Rumbelow: Interpretability turns neural networks into scientific discovery tools
“If you've got really good interp, you can start to reframe neural networks, not as just a tool for automating things that we already know how to do, but as a tool for discovery, as like a lens through which you can see patterns in data that would otherwise Be …”
Jessica Rumbelow Nov 2, 2025 ▶ 2:29 ⚡️Automating Scientific Discovery - Jessica Rumbelow, Leap Labs
MAD Insight
Using chain-of-thought as an RL reward destroys model interpretability
“If you're not careful with RL, you can make interpretability harder. For example, one Common thing with modern models is they do reasoning with the chain of thought. You could look at the chain of thoughts to, you know, see what are the model internal thoughts…”
Julian Schrittwieser Oct 23, 2025 ▶ 58:25 Are We Misreading the AI Exponential? Julian Schrittwieser on Move 37 & Scaling RL (Anthropic)
NO PRIORS Insight
Krishnan: Undetectable Backdoors in Coding Assistants Threaten Critical Infrastructure
“Interpretability is still a nascent field and you could very easily see ways where You plug a model into a cursor or windsurf and you generate a piece of code. And then two years down the road, it turns out that code had a little if statement saying, if I'm ru…”
Sriram Krishnan Jul 31, 2025 ▶ 18:42 No Priors Ep. 125 | With Senior White House Policy Advisor on AI Sriram Krishnan
Kaplan: Interpretability is like neuroscience but with complete observability
“I would say that interpretability is a lot more like biology. It's a lot more like neuroscience. So I think those are kind of the tools. There is some more, more, more mathematics there, but I think it's more like trying to understand the features of the brain…”
Jared Kaplan Jul 29, 2025 ▶ 29:16 Scaling and the Road to Human-Level AI | Anthropic Co-founder Jared Kaplan · Y Combinator
LATENT SPACE Assertion Supported
Ameisen: Anthropic's Open Tool Traces Internal States in Gemma 2 2B
“And then the release this week sort of lets anyone do it for a set of open source models. So notably maybe the most easy one here is like Gemma two to be. So you can sort of like think of some prompt and you kind of like can explain any like token that the mod…”
Emmanuel Ameisen Jun 6, 2025 ▶ 1:35 The Utility of Interpretability — Emmanuel Amiesen
LATENT SPACE Disclosure
Ameisen: Anthropic publishes interpretability research to recruit more researchers
“The reason for publishing this is that we think interpretably is important. We think it's tractable, and we think more people should work on it. And so publishing it helps us like accomplish with these goals all these goals, which we think are just like crucia…”
Emmanuel Ameisen Jun 6, 2025 ▶ 1:40:51 The Utility of Interpretability — Emmanuel Amiesen
Bach: AI Model Interpretability Requires Automated Reverse-Engineering Systems
“In a way these models are implemented in operator language in which they are performing certain things. But the operator language itself is so complex that it's no longer readable in a way. It goes beyond what you could engineer by hand or what you can reverse…”
Joscha Bach Apr 27, 2024 ▶ 1:35:04 This World Does Not Exist — Joscha Bach, Karan Malhotra, Rob Haisfield (WorldSim, WebSim, Liquid AI)
NO PRIORS Insight
Uszkoreit: Interpretable theories for complex deep learning systems exceed human cognitive limits
“There are people trying, and I think it's worth trying. I, I'm not super optimistic about that. I think it'll work for some cases, right, where it's simple enough that we can get it. I think there are many cases where it just isn't, right? Like, say, climate a…”
Jakob Uszkoreit Aug 24, 2023 ▶ 27:15 No Priors Ep. 29 | With Inceptive CEO Jakob Uszkoreit
NO PRIORS Insight
Koller: AI requires synthesizing deep learning with causal and interpretable models
“What I think we're starting to see right now is a the pendulum starting to swing back in the sense that there is a greater understanding that you really need a bit of both. You need that hugely powerful pattern recognition that we get from deep learning, but y…”
Daphne Koller May 19, 2023 ▶ 2:28 No Priors Ep. 6 | With Daphne Koller from Insitro

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