Linear Digressions
Linear Digressions
Katie Malone
Mechanistic Interpretability: How Researchers Try To See Inside Models
29 minutes Posted Oct 5, 2026 at 1:50 am.
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As AI systems grow more powerful, they grow harder to understand — and that tradeoff has never mattered more. Most interpretability tricks give us approximations from the outside, but mechanistic interpretability takes a different approach: cracking open the model itself to trace *why* it behaves the way it does. This episode digs into what makes mechanistic interpretability fundamentally different from other explainability methods, and why it might be the most promising path toward actually understanding what's happening inside modern LLMs.