Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure if there is formal arXiv paper to be released other than this long form Goodfire AI blog post (love the animations!), but if what Nick demonstrated/observed were indeed true, this will resolve the Super intelligence alignment issues that p(doom)-ers have been crying aloud in the past few years.

The most iconic line was the last sentence:

   a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works

This feels like the watershed moment, again if Nick is proven right, as massive as the AlexNet victory in the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, exactly as Nick pointed out.

Also, I suspect what Nick hinted at, might be the discovery of earliest RSI work.

   with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different.

It's indeed a big advance for interpretability, but that alone doesn't solve alignment. It doesn't even solve interpretability, as there is still a large number of unexplained neurons, just fewer than with earlier approaches.

Once interpretability is solved and we have a fully human-readable accurate explanation of how a model produces its output, that still leaves the problem of spotting problems ahead of time. E.g. for the hummingbird misclassified as ice cream https://already-clean.goodfire.com/assets/september-revision... the method would have to flag that the texture of ice crystals and of feathers, and the shape of a spoon handle and a bird's beak are insufficiently separated. Purely based on the explanation, without having to rely on trial-and-error to find corner cases like this.

And even when it becomes possible to automatically spot issues, that doesn't mean they will all be solvable. Maybe there are tradeoffs where fixing one thing breaks another, and which choice is the better one depends on information you don't have.

Nick has posted some follow up to beware about over-claiming on this. You still need to interpret the circuits, as well.

Lots of work still to be done, this work just dissolves an early blocker (if it is substantiated).

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