Safety, Ethics & Governance · advanced · concept 174 of 176
Mechanistic Interpretability
Reverse engineering a network's internal computation into human-readable parts: features, the circuits that combine them, and how information moves between layers. Sparse autoencoders are the main tool for pulling interpretable features out of layers whose individual neurons each represent many unrelated things. It differs from feature-attribution methods, which say which inputs mattered without describing the mechanism that used them.
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Where you meet it in the real world
Safety auditing, debugging model behaviour, steering outputs, alignment research
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Anthropic · YouTube
Anthropic · YouTube
Guides and articles
Anthropic (Transformer Circuits)
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