Liv Gorton pushes back on the 'V-shape neuron' claim as basic checks contradict it
livgorton · x · 2026-10-30
Anthropic researcher Liv Gorton responded to the viral claim that a famous "cat and car neuron" is actually a V-shape detector. She argues readers were reasonable to interpret the essay literally given its specificity, but basic checks contradict the claim, and her understanding is that Nick no longer stands by it as written. She adds she doesn't intrinsically care what the neuron does and that wording sometimes fails to communicate intent.
More from Research
- Fine-tuning survives up to 30% label noise across all 3 benchmarks tested — Reasonable_Royal_621 · 2026-10-30
- WorldMemBench from Zhejiang, Fudan and Ant tests memory across 9 video world models — jiqizhixin · 2026-10-30
- Stanford CS312 quiz: can rescaling LR or weight decay rescue an 8x batch size increase? — 2C_ornot2C · 2026-10-30
- Graham Neubig's EMNLP 2026 keynote: open models create economic value, plus four rules for good research — May_F1_ · 2026-10-30
- Specification gaming: the classic DeepMind survey behind the reward-hacking debate — HanchungLee · 2026-10-30
- SAPO from Xiamen University and NTU ditches the separate critic in PPO-style agentic RL — heghbalz · 2026-10-30