lberglund comments on The Case for Radical Optimism about Interpretability

[lberglund]

I think many people here are already familiar with the circuits line of research at OpenAI. Though I think it’s now mostly been abandoned

I wasn’t aware that the circuits approached was abandoned. Do you know why they abandoned it?

[Tom Lieberum]

I can only speculate, but the main researchers are now working on other stuff, like e.g. Anthropic. As to why they switched, I don’t know. Maybe they were not making progress fast enough or Anthropic’s mission seemed more important?

However, at least Chris Olah believes this is still a tractable and important direction, see the recent RFP by him for Open Phil.