Episode
God Help Us, Let's Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques
Astral Codex Ten Podcast · Oct 28, 2026 · 36 min
The Story So Far Mechanistic interpretability is the science of "reading an AI's mind". Large language models are "grown, not built". Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how. But a neural network is just a set of simulated neurons on a computer. The person with the computer can see the neurons, the connections between…