Latent-space archaeology is a data fossil, not a window into a digital mind
gerardsans · x · 2026-11-07
Gerard Sans argues that navigating a model's latent space and reading final states is interesting but says nothing about how underlying distributions formed — pretraining and curriculum-based data curation are what shape patterns. He calls much of interpretability work "latent space archaeology": compression artifacts are not a window into a digital mind but an average that got probability mass — a bias, a data fossil of that model and training regime.
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