Mech Interp Veteran Rethinks Alignment, Misgeneralization, CoT Oversight
akbirthko · x · 2026-10-16
A long-form reflection from a returning mechanistic interpretability researcher on what happens at the tail end of joint human-model labor: capability-safety distinctions are often misleading; we may still conflate misalignment with misgeneralization because the latter has richer descriptive tools; interp has lifted from SAEs and circuits in toy models to CoT supervision in coding agents (with worries about folding it into serial-depth architectures). A quoted earlier post compares understanding superhuman agents to transaction costs — it need not be centralized in one frontier lab, just as no lab needs to absorb the whole economy.
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