threepointone: mechanistic interpretability is all code — decades of software know-how applies
threepointone · x · 2026-10-17
In a thread on mechanistic interpretability, threepointone (Sunil Pai) shares his intuition that what happens inside models — reasoning, even "synthetic emotions" — is fundamentally code. If so, decades of software engineering knowledge and debugging strategies can be applied to understand and modify it. He also notes we can now "compile" back and forth between neural networks and code, admitting he's out of his depth but excited.
Related event: Developer threepointone speculates mech interp is fundamentally code(2 posts)→
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