Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…I love what you’ve written about the goal of MechInterp research as two goals, safety and beauty. So can you talk about the beauty side of things? Yeah. So there’s this funny thing where I think some people are kind of disappointed by neural networks, I think, where they’re like, “Ah, neural networks, it’s just these simple rules. Then you just do a bunch of engineering to scale it up and it works really well. And where’s the complex ideas? This isn’t a very nice, beautiful scientific result.” And I sometimes think when people say that, I picture them being like, “Evolution is so boring. It’s just a bunch of simple rules. And you run evolution for a long time and you get biology. What a sucky way for biology to have turned out. Where’s the complex rules?” But the beauty is that the simplicity generates complexity. Biology has these simple rules and it gives rise to all the life and ecosystems that we see around us. All the beauty of nature, that all just comes from evolution and from something very simple in evolution. And similarly, I think that neural networks build, create enormous complexity and beauty inside and structure inside themselves that people generally don’t look at and don’t try to understand because it’s hard to understand. But I think that there is an incredibly rich structure to be discovered inside neural networks, a lot of very deep beauty if we’re just willing to take the time to go and see it and understand it. Yeah, I love Mechinterp. The feeling like we are understanding or getting glimpses of understanding the magic that’s going on inside is really wonderful.…

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