Circuit Discovery

How can we use the language of causality to understand and edit the internal mechanisms of AI models? Atticus Geiger (Goodfire) gives a guest lecture on applying frameworks and tools from causal modeling to understand LLMs and other neural networks in Surya Ganguli's Stanford course APPPHYS 293. 00:00 - Intro 01:51 - Activation steering (e.g. Golden Gate Claude) 10:23 - Causal mediation analysis (understanding the contribution of an intermediate component) 21:42 - Causal abstraction methods (explaining a complex causal system with a simple one) 26:11 - Interchange interventions 40:46 - Distributed Alignment Search 54:54 - Lookback mechanisms: a case study in designing counterfactuals Read more about our research: https://www.goodfire.ai/research Follow us on X: https://x.com/GoodfireAI