Tracing a Qwen3 neuron with Claude: it fires on both Colorado and Tornado HTTP client code

RatOrthodox · x · 2026-10-16

Commenting on recent interpretability progress, the author notes that some canonical 'weird neuron' examples have robust human-native interpretations — the famous cat+car neuron is a V-shape detector, and the car+dogs superposition circuit is generalized pose neurons plus a visualization artifact. Still, this doesn't much change their model of how hard ambitious interpretability is. They then used Claude to trace a Qwen3 neuron that tracks Colorado-related content and found it also fires strongly on Tornado's Python HTTP client code — a polysemantic case they're curious to see explained.

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