Are neural nets already clean? New claim revives hope for mechanistic interpretability

burny_tech · x · 2026-10-16

A widely shared piece argues that a network's own mechanisms are its legible building blocks: the canonical evidence for polysemanticity and superposition was misread, and the apparent arbitrary concept packing is mostly a motif called "recursive generalization." If true, we can study networks directly without untangling them first — a major positive update for mechanistic interpretability, as commentator Andrew Curran notes he had long given up on real interpretability before superintelligence.

Related event: Goodfire co-founder Nick Cammarata argues neural networks are already clean, igniting interpretability debate(41 posts)→

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