Interpreting Deep Networks and LLMs
The hardest interpretability frontier is the models that matter most right now: deep neural networks and large language models, with billions of parameters and no obvious place to look for "the reason." The attribution methods that work on tabular models strain here, and a new field — mechanistic interpretability — is trying to reverse-engineer what these networks actually compute. This post covers how we peer inside deep models and LLMs, and why it's both crucial and genuinely unsolved.
The hardest frontier: deep nets and LLMs with billions of parameters and no obvious place to find 'the reason'. Saliency maps (fragile), attention (not explanation), probing, and mechanistic interpretability's attempt to reverse-engineer circuits — plus the honest truth that we largely cannot yet explain why frontier LLMs behave as they do.