Nick Cammarata: LayerNorm, not superposition, caused early polysemanticity

nickcammarata · x · 2026-10-16

Responding to critique from livgorton, Goodfire researcher Nick Cammarata clarifies his claim that prior interpretability work wasn't all wrong—rather, the field (including himself) misdiagnosed why early neuron/circuit study broke. The cause was ordinary architectural issues like LayerNorm, not an ontology problem: without changing model size, interpretability can go from 0% on a 5B model to 99%.

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