Pragmatic Interpretability

Creator
Creator
Seonglae ChoSeonglae Cho
Created
Created
2025 Dec 2 1:40
Editor
Edited
Edited
2026 Jan 9 16:11
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Ambitious Mechanistic Interpretability from
Leo Gao

Short-term, outcome-focused pragmatic interpretability risks optimizing for superficial signals, making it hard to understand why failures occur in the long run and leaving systems fragile. The strength of AMI lies in achieving debugger-level internal understanding that clearly distinguishes between hypotheses and offers knowledge that may generalize even to radically different future AGI systems. Recent research has successfully identified much simpler and more interpretable circuits than in the past (e.g., IOI) by leveraging circuit sparsity.
An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability — LessWrong
The goal of ambitious mechanistic interpretability (AMI) is to fully understand how neural networks work. While some have pivoted towards more pragma…
An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability — LessWrong
 
 

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