Interp researcher: mech interp must work far faster than 8.5 years, or CoT monitoring wins

ArthurConmy · x · 2026-09-07

Interpretability researcher ArthurConmy lays out his position in a mech interp debate: he wants mech interp to win, especially as new models improve on no-CoT time horizons, but doesn't consider it essential — CoT monitorability may scale well enough for a few more generations given short timelines. He acknowledges interp works in narrow settings, objects to arguments that methods 'don't work for a long time' as suffering from selection effects, and argues that if interp is to matter at all, it must work far faster than 8.5 years.

Related event: Researchers Debate the Value and Boundaries of Mechanistic Interpretability(10 posts)→

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